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British Prime Minister Keir Starmer gives a media interview while attending the 79th United Nations General Assembly at United Nations Headquarters in New York, USA, on September 25, 2024.
Leon Neal | Via Reuters
LONDON – The United Kingdom is looking to build a local rival 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 will visit Bristol, England, on Monday to announce the commitment, which follows work by British tech investor Matt Clifford to establish an “AI Opportunities Action Plan.” The plan aims to help the UK realize the potential of AI.
The government is primarily looking to expand data center capacity across the UK to power developers of powerful AI models who rely on high-performance computing equipment housed in remote locations to train and run their systems.
It has set a goal to increase “sovereign” or public sector computing capacity in the UK twenty-fold by 2030. As part of that commitment, the government will begin opening access to the AI Research Resource, an initiative aimed at strengthening UK IT infrastructure.
The Starmer administration last year. canceled £1.3bn of taxpayer-funded spending commitments towards two important IT initiatives to prioritize other fiscal plans. The projects, an artificial intelligence research resource and a next-generation “exascale” supercomputer, were promises made by Starmer’s predecessor, Rishi Sunak.
Sovereign AI has become a hot topic for policymakersparticularly 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 adopt them.
To further bolster Britain’s IT infrastructure, the government has also pledged to establish several AI “growth zones”, where planning permission rules will be relaxed in certain locations to allow the creation of new data centres.
Meanwhile, an “AI Energy Council” made up of industry leaders from both energy and AI will be created to explore the role of renewable and low-carbon energy sources, such as nuclear.
Building a challenger to OpenAI
The last major initiative the UK government proposed was to create local AI “champions” in to similar scale to the American tech giants responsible for the fundamental AI models that power today’s generative AI tools, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Britain plans to use AI growth zones and a newly created National Data Library to connect public institutions (such as universities) to improve the country’s ability to create “sovereign” AI models that do not depend on Silicon Valley.
It is worth highlighting that the UK faces serious challenges in its attempt to create an effective alternative to OpenAI. On the one hand, several entrepreneurs in the country have lamented the funding challenges that make it difficult for the country’s startups to raise the kind of cash available to AI success stories.
Many UK founders and venture capitalists have called on the country’s pension funds to allocate a larger portion of their portfolios to riskier, growth-focused startups, a reform the government has committed to promoting previously.
“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 took just 5% of that and allocated it to innovation: you solve the problem.”
However, UK tech leaders have generally praised the government’s AI action plan. Zahra Bahrololoumi, head of Salesforce in the United Kingdom, told CNBC that the plan is a “forward-looking strategy,” adding that she is encouraged by the “bold vision for AI and the emphasis on transparency, security and collaboration” of the government.
Chintan Patel, Cisco’s UK chief technology officer, said he is “encouraged” by the action plan. “Having a clearly defined roadmap is critical for the UK to achieve its ambition of becoming an AI superpower and a leading destination for AI investment,” he said.
Britain still has no formal regulations for AI. The Starmer government has said as much before plans to draft legislation for AI – but details remain scarce.
Last month, the government announced a consultation on measures to regulate the use of copyrighted content to train AI models.
More generally, the UK is presenting a differentiated regulatory regime from the EU post-Brexit as a positive factor: that is, it can introduce regulatory oversight for AI, but in a less strict way than the EU, which has adopted a stricter stance. Hardline approach to regulating technology with its AI Law.
