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British Prime Minister Keir Starmer gives an interview to the media while attending the 79th United Nations General Assembly at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, the United States on September 25, 2024.
Leon Neal | Via Reuters
LONDON — The United Kingdom is looking to build a home-grown challenger to OpenAI and dramatically increase the national computing infrastructure as Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government sets its sights on becoming a global leader in artificial intelligence.
Starmer is due to visit Bristol, England on Monday to announce the pledge, which follows work done by British tech investor Matt Clifford to establish an “AI Opportunities Action Plan”. The plan aims to help the UK take advantage of the potential of AI.
The government is primarily looking to expand data center capacity across the UK to empower powerful AI model developers who rely on high-performance computing equipment hosted in remote locations to train and manage their systems .
A target has been set to increase ‘sovereign’, or public sector, computing capacity in the UK by twenty times by 2030. As part of this commitment, the government will begin to open access to the Resource of AI Research, an initiative aimed at strengthening the UK’s IT infrastructure.
The Starmer administration last year canceled £1.3 billion of taxpayer-funded spending commitments towards two significant IT initiatives to prioritize other tax plans. The projects, an AI research resource and a next-generation “exascale” supercomputer, were promised to have been carried out under Starmer’s predecessor, Rishi Sunak.
Sovereign AI has become a hot topic for policymakersespecially in Europe. The term refers to the idea that technologies critical to economic growth and national security should be built and developed in the countries where people use them.
To further strengthen Britain’s IT infrastructure, the government has also committed to creating several AI ‘growth zones’, where rules on planning permission will be relaxed in some areas to allow the creation of new centers of data.
Meanwhile, an “AI Energy Council” made up of industry leaders from both energy and AI will be established to explore the role of renewable and low-carbon energy sources, such as nuclear
Build a challenge to OpenAI
The last big initiative the British government proposed was to create home-grown AI “champions.” a similar scale to the American tech giants responsible for the foundational AI models that power today’s generative AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Britain plans to use AI growth zones and a newly established National Data Library to connect public institutions – such as universities – to boost the country’s ability to create “sovereign” AI models ” which are not dependent on Silicon Valley.
It is worth highlighting that the UK faces serious challenges in its bid to create an effective OpenAI alternative. For one, many entrepreneurs in the country have lamented funding challenges that make it difficult for startups in the country to raise the kind of money available for AI breakthroughs.
Many UK founders and venture capitalists have called on the country’s pension funds to allocate a larger share of their portfolios towards riskier, growth-focused startups – a reform that the government has . committed to pushing first.
“In the UK, there’s $7 trillion in this pocket,” Magnus Grimeland, CEO and founder of venture capital firm Antler, told CNBC in an interview last year. “Imagine if you take just 5% of that and allocate it to innovation – solve the problem.”
UK tech leaders have however generally praised the government’s AI action plan. Zahra Bahrololoumi, the head of Salesforce in the UK, told CNBC that the plan is a “forward-looking strategy”, adding that she is encouraged by the government’s “bold vision for AI and the focus on transparency, security and collaboration”.
Chintan Patel, Cisco’s UK Chief Technology Officer, said he was “encouraged” by the action plan. “Having a clearly defined roadmap is critical for the UK to achieve its ambition to become an AI superpower and a leading destination for AI investment,” he said.
Britain does not yet have formal regulation for AI. The Starmer government has said it before plans to draft legislation for AI – but the details remain thin.
Last month, the government announced a consultation measures to regulate the use of copyrighted content to train AI models.
More generally, the UK presents a differentiated regulatory regime from the EU post-Brexit as a positive factor, meaning it may introduce regulatory oversight for AI, but in a less stringent manner than the EU, which took one Tough approach to regulating technology with its AI Act.
