Britain Seeks to Build a Homegrown OpenAI Rival, Become a World Leader in AI (cnbc.com) 16
"The U.K is looking to build a homegrown challenger to OpenAI and drastically increase national computing infrastructure," reports CNBC, "as Prime Minister Keir Starmer's government sets its sights on becoming a global leader in artificial intelligence."
The government is primarily seeking to expand data center capacity across the U.K. to boost developers of powerful AI models which rely on high-performance computing equipment hosted in remote locations to train and run their systems. A target of increasing "sovereign," or public sector, compute capacity in the U.K. by twentyfold by 2030 has been set...
To further bolster Britain's computing infrastructure, the government also committed to setting up several AI "growth zones," where rules on planning permission will be relaxed in certain places to allow for the creation of new data centers. Meanwhile, an "AI Energy Council" formed of industry leaders from both energy and AI will be set up to explore the role of renewable and low-carbon sources of energy, like nuclear...
Britain plans to use the AI growth zones and a newly established National Data Library to connect public institutions — such as universities — to enhance the country's ability to create "sovereign" AI models which aren't reliant on Silicon Valley... Last month, the government announced a consultation on measures to regulate the use of copyrighted content to train AI models.
Britain plans to use the AI growth zones and a newly established National Data Library to connect public institutions — such as universities — to enhance the country's ability to create "sovereign" AI models which aren't reliant on Silicon Valley... Last month, the government announced a consultation on measures to regulate the use of copyrighted content to train AI models.
Good luck (Score:2)
Read 'homegroom' (Score:2)
must be all the other news about Brittain.
This is getting weird (Score:5, Interesting)
Somebody is advising governments that being the first to develop a really useful AI is worth the government's attention and taxpayer's money. Building and training these models is going to be chewing through significant amounts of energy.
Yet despite all this, we still don't have a theory of mind to tell us why the AI we can create today doesn't even have the intelligence of a small insect brain. And if we did, and could make AI as intelligent (or moreso) than we are, we have plenty of people who have rational reasons for thinking that's a bad idea.
So why are we all rushing headlong towards a goal we don't yet know how to attain, at significant expense, and with massive potential downsides (like destroying our economies overnight once AI can replace everybody and we don't have a backup economic system available)?
Re:This is getting weird (Score:4, Insightful)
It's free taxpayer money for influential people who will pay it back with donations to Labour.
The UK is a joke. It periodically announces that it is going to become world leader in something, and then doesn't do even a tiny fraction of what is necessary to make that happen.
We have the ambition of China, but no ability.
Re: (Score:2)
So why are we all rushing headlong towards a goal we don't yet know how to attain, at significant expense, and with massive potential downsides (like destroying our economies overnight once AI can replace everybody and we don't have a backup economic system available)?
Because all the important nations have an AI. If the UK doesn't get an AI, it'll stop getting invited to the best parties.
With what tech base? (Score:4, Interesting)
When I pull up a list of international tech companies by market cap, the only one in the top fifty that's UK-based is ARM. Granted, market-cap is not the only indicator of performance, but it's not exactly helping when there aren't a lot of massive companies with significant R&D labs with large budgets that can contribute to the effort.
A pretty common trajectory for tech companies is to grow to the point that they feel the need to consolidate their various R&D projects to specific college-like campuses, to get several years or even decades of research contributing to new products, then for venture capitalists to get in and complain about the costs to run these incubators on account of the short-term costs while ignoring that nearly all of the company's products from the last decade came from those efforts, leading to closures.
Right now the UK doesn't seem to have large firms in this R&D-park model. The UK has colleges that are strong in their respective computing disciplines, but without the money from companies with long-term R&D in mind, I just don't see them managing to develop even to the standard of what's coming out of other parts of the world, let alone to exceed it, and with Brexit it may be difficult to attract foreign talent as well.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't have mod points but that is an incredible statistic.
The resources of private industry to develop AI dwarf even that of the US government (I don't mean procuring GPUs, I mean luring the best and brightest by paying thousands of people $500K+ each), which in turn dwarf that of the UK government. That's before we even start talking about regulation such as GDPR. I hate to say it
Re: (Score:2)
Headquartered in UK, A Japanese investment company owns it and it's traded on the Nasdaq.
Not much of it is UK based.
Mixed signals (Score:2)
So Britain wants to encourage domestic AI while removing the fair-use copyright exemption.
What are they thinking? Why would any company train their AI models in Britain, when they can do it in places with no restrictions on training data (America, Dubai, Singapore, Japan, ...)
Remote services that you're trying to localize? (Score:2)
Why do you care where the data centers are? The results shouldn't differ THAT much, with good network design and capacity.
This should be an economics based decision, not a political one. Are they really that stupid, and believe that doing IT in data centers is going to benefit them or their citizens?
How can the government afford it? (Score:2)
The UK government can't keep its pensioners warm. How can it afford the voracious appetite of an LLM?
Ahahahahahaha (Score:2)
Some former empire thinks thy can just _decide_ to become a market leader in something. That is not how it works. That is how abject stupidity and lack of education works, though.
Deepmind was in London (Score:2)