British Prime Minister Keir Starmer gives an interview to the media during the 79th United Nations General Assembly at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, September 25, 2024.
Leon Neal | Via Reuters
LONDON — Britain plans to build a homegrown competitor to OpenAI and dramatically expand the country's computing infrastructure as Prime Minister Keir Starmer's government aims to become a world leader in artificial intelligence.
Starmer will travel to Bristol, England, on Monday to announce the commitment, which follows work by British tech investor Matt Clifford to establish an “Artificial Intelligence Capabilities Roadmap.” The plan aims to help the UK realize the potential of artificial intelligence.
The government is primarily aiming to increase the capacity of UK data centers to support creators of powerful artificial intelligence models, which rely on high-performance computing hardware hosted in remote locations to train and run their systems.
It has set a goal of increasing the computing power of the UK's “sovereign” public sector twentyfold by 2030. As part of this pledge, the government will begin opening up access to AI research resources, an initiative aimed at strengthening the UK's computing infrastructure.
Starmer's administration last year canceled £1.3 billion of taxpayer-funded spending commitments towards two significant IT initiatives to prioritize other budget plans. The projects, AI research resources and a next-generation “exascale” supercomputer, were put together 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 implement them.
To further strengthen the UK's computing infrastructure, the government has also pledged to create a number of 'AI development zones', where planning permission rules will be relaxed in some places to enable the creation of new data centres.
Meanwhile, an “AI Energy Council” of energy and artificial intelligence industry leaders will be established to examine the role of renewable and low-carbon energy sources such as nuclear power.
Building a challenger to OpenAI
The last major initiative proposed by the UK government was the creation of home-grown AI 'champions' AND a scale similar to the US tech giants responsible for the core AI models that power today's generative AI tools such as OpenAI's ChatGPT.
The UK plans to use AI development zones and the newly created National Data Library to connect public institutions – such as universities – to increase the country's ability to create “sovereign” AI models that are not dependent on Silicon Valley.
It is worth emphasizing that the UK faces serious challenges in trying to create an effective alternative to OpenAI. First, several entrepreneurs in the country have lamented the funding challenges that make it difficult for startups in the country to raise the cash available for AI successes.
Many founders and venture capitalists in the UK have called on the country's pension funds to allocate more of their portfolios to riskier growth-oriented startups – a reform led by the government he had previously committed to pushing.
“There's $7 trillion in this pocket in the UK,” Magnus Grimeland, CEO and founder of venture capital firm Antler, told CNBC last year. “Imagine if you take only 5% of it and spend it on innovation – you will solve the problem.”
Nevertheless, UK tech leaders have generally praised the government's AI roadmap. Zahra Bahrololoumi, head of Salesforce in the UK, told CNBC the plan was a “forward-thinking strategy,” adding that she was encouraged by the government's “bold vision for artificial intelligence and emphasis on transparency, security and collaboration.”
Chintan Patel, Cisco's UK chief technology officer, said he was “encouraged” by the roadmap. “Having a clearly defined roadmap is key to helping the UK achieve its ambition to become an AI superpower and a leading destination for AI investment,” he said.
The UK does not yet have formal AI legislation. The Starmer government has already stated this plans to develop regulations on artificial intelligence — but the details remain irrelevant.
Last month, the government announced consultations on measures to regulate the use of copyrighted content for training artificial intelligence models.
More generally, the UK sees a different post-Brexit regulatory regime from the EU as a positive – meaning it could introduce regulatory oversight of artificial intelligence, but in a less stringent way than the EU, which has adopted a stricter approach a tough approach to regulating technology through the Artificial Intelligence Act.