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The UK will spend £100M to develop its own 'sovereign' AI
- alexb_ 4y ago"Bruv, as an AI model, it would be quite unethical for me to generate that for you until you show me your loicense. Mate, if you paid your fee, you should have got it in the post."
- TMWNN 4y agoU WOT M8
- robertlagrant 4y agoThe thing about Arsenal is, they always try to walk it in!
- atlasunshrugged 4y agoIT Crowd, one of the best shows I've ever seen. That said, the attempted American pilot was so cringey I had to stop watching halfway through https://archive.org/details/the-it-crowd-us-pilot https://archive.org/details/the-it-crowd-us-pilot
- hammyhavoc 4y agowell sovverin innit
- bartislartfast 4y agoHM-GPT
- eunos 4y agoChatGPT but with British spellings you mean
- tonymillion 4y agoPleasant Conversation with sarcastic undertones AI
- tailspin2019 4y agoWhy do I get the feeling that this will just be £100m poured down the drain…
- version_five 4y agoUnless the UK is really good at managing this kind of spending, it strikes me as something that will just blow a bunch of government money on enriching people who like doing paperwork. This is basically how all Canadian government spending is, is UK better at it? From a strategy perspective, I don't think it makes sense for countries generally to waste time on their own foundation models. There are lots of open source options, and almost no chance of a government version besting the state of the art. And there's not the barriers of say semiconductors or other manufacturing. This is in some ways the classic trap of focusing on "AI" instead of an actual application. This is what many businesses wasted money on in 2016-2020, maybe now governments are doing the same?
- gumballindie 4y agoThe money will end up with Infosys, Sunak’s wife’s father’s company. At least if they made quality software but even that’s questionable.
- ElfinTrousers 4y agoBelieve me, you don't have to make quality software to win a major government software development contract.
- version_five 4y agoIn fact it will be impossible to deliver profitably if you do. Government contracting is about complying with the letter of whatever silly specification you've been given, while being the low bid. (I don't think this is good behavior, just the only viable one). Governments let the perception of fairness and frugality ensure that neither is achieved and that they only get crap.
- ElfinTrousers 4y agoTracks with my experience.
- 4y ago
- xg15 4y agoLooking forward to watch the future panel discussions between the communist Chinese AI, the libertarian American AI and the monarchist British AI...
- ElfinTrousers 4y ago...that actually sounds like great entertainment.
- throwaway4good 4y agoIf you scroll a bit further the next article is titled: "The UK government won't make an NFT after all"
- cachvico 4y agoWell spotted, that's actually hilarious and what I thought of as soon as I saw the HN headline.
- shaftoe444 4y agoGB-T
- js8 4y agoGood luck with that: https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/britain-in-crisis-the-uk-faces-a-steep-climb-out-of-a-deep-hole-a-6b61dc6f-e33f-46f3-bd27-743364dd675c https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/britain-in-crisi...
- etiennebausson 4y agoWow, that's a pretty depressing picture of the U.K. I know the situation over there is quite bad, but this was more extreme than what I expected.
- bogle 4y ago"the country’s representatives continue to put on a show of democracy week after week" - Der Spiegel. In so many ways (sigh).
- kmlx 4y agolots of issues with that article, but the most obvious one are the graphs: OECD GDP data was misread and then they wrongly applied CER’s doppelgänger model. in reality UK GDP is about 6% higher than in Q2 16. i don’t know why they do this kind of sloppy reporting, but they do have form. another priceless article about Germany itself: https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/inflation-bankruptcies-and-fears-of-decline-is-this-the-return-of-the-sick-man-of-europe-a-41d914b0-0322-46a8-9087-d118b3f0b399 https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/inflation-bankr...
- _fat_santa 4y agoThis is just so stupid. It's the classic case of some govt official hearing a tech buzzword, then announcing that they will be putting $X towards <some_buzzword> to further the goals of <buzzword_1>, <buzzword_2>, diversity, equity and inclusion.
- examplary_cable 4y agoGPT-GB
- uniqueuid 4y agoSo let's assume an (impossible) perfect efficiency of spending, they can buy how many DGX with this? 100? 50? In any case, the money's probably not even enough to be competitive in terms of hardware, let alone anything else.
- kingstoned 4y agoGiven how successful Quaero (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero) was, I'm sure this will be another major success from Europe.
- bogle 4y agoThe UK isn't 'Europe' anymore ...
- naavis 4y agoNot part of the European Union no, but definitely part of Europe as a geographical area. Unless you claim that Norway isn't part of Europe either?
- Lio 4y agoDid we suddenly move to a different continent? Hope the weather's better wherever we're going to. Probably much, much hotter and sulphurous... :(
- amadeuspagel 4y agoIf only it was this easy.
- fennecfoxy 4y agoLmao 900m£ is not enough for hardware and development required as well as running costs, not with the UK gov's glacial pace and inability to move into the modern world. This is just a way to funnel money out. As a Kiwi living in the UK for like 6 years now, the Brits' worst enemies are themselves; they're afraid of change, want everything to stay the same like the good old days and so vote for the same old idiots but complain when the leopards eat their face. Over and over again. History runs deep here and people hold onto things for far too long. Then again, I did come to Europe for the rich history, I just didn't think its inhabitants would be so bound by it.
- te_chris 4y agoI feel like we're the same person (8 years for me though). But of course, this is by design and exactly how the most powerful people here want it. It's an endless struggle at the moment between love of our life in London and feeling of the creeping death of the UK at its own hands.
- fakedang 4y agoI left the UK for exactly this reason. I love(d) London so much before - it's the city where I started my career, as a foreigner nonetheless, and it wholly adopted me as near equal citizen with open arms. Plus, being an Indian, it's one of the few places where I actually exercised my right to vote. But visiting back today, the decline in the country in just a span of a few years, it's simply unbearable to watch. The country is simply on a decline, in spite of some of the brightest minds in the EU and the world studying and working there. And London was supposed to be the city that dominated New York around 10-20 years ago.
- troad 4y ago> Then again, I did come to Europe for the rich history, I just didn't think its inhabitants would be so bound by it. Europe is run as a continent-sized retirement home, by incompetent, hereditary elites who are utterly incapable of grappling with the fact that having a history is not a substitute for having an economy. I feel for the people of Europe; they deserve better. So many of the smart, lovely people you meet here are stuck on absurdly low salaries in countries without any obvious future other than managed decline. Instead of being offered a future, they're offered endless relitigation of the past.
- corobo 4y agoThe UK will give £100M to an MP's spouse Give it a few weeks and we'll find out which one I imagine
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- shaunxcode 4y agocapita
- buro9 4y agoThey're 25 days late with this announcement, which is also about right for the UK gov.
- majikaja 4y agoTo the average person I think this announcement sounds better than just inviting over a Microsoft sales rep to meet with the government like Japan did.
- notahacker 4y ago'Sovereign AI' does sound like a phrase that ChatGPT might come up with if you asked it to make up an article about Brexit and AI. Either ChatGPT or one of dozens of websites trying to be a British version of the Onion...
- selimthegrim 4y agoSounds like they’ve got a plan for abolishing the monarchy
- notahacker 4y agoWonder if CharlesGPT will be more or less likely to say something that embarrasses the government than the King!
- SilverBirch 4y agoThe key problem the UK is facing is that a load of good investment ideas get announced and then proceed to spend decades drowning in red tape. In order to overcome this you need to announce some initiatives and then ensure over the next 5 years that they really deliver. But we're 13 years in Tory rule and there's going to be an election next year, so there's literally no chance of this being a success. Even back in 2019 when the levelling up stuff was happening it was like "Um, we're going to show some results in 2030" and it's like... well, you're not going to be here in 2030, so it's kind of academic, and the stuff you started in 2010 that should be paying off now? You massively cut capital spending so there is no pay off now.
- kmlx 4y ago> The key problem the UK is facing is that a load of good investment ideas get announced and then proceed to spend decades drowning in red tape. you just described most of the western world :)
- permo-w 4y agothis is a narrative pushed for the sake of vested interests who would rather these things be privately owned democratic governments are perfectly capable of developing new technologies and do so all the time. the issue is the level of investment and public interest, not anything else
- kmlx 4y agono narrative, real world experience + stats. democratic governments are much slower of developing anything because of their bottom-up nature. of course china will build the fastest, most developed railway system in the world when their process is top-down. compare that with california's infamous projects, or even london's crossrail which took 12 years to complete. there is no solution to this problem.
- tonymillion 3y ago12 years for cross rail, considering it’s scope and unique problems tunneling through some of the most developed subterranean land in the world, isn’t a length of time that most of us would consider absurd. For instance check out the precision and work required to pass (and link to) Tottenham court road. As a counterpoint look at the “new” underground Muni line in San Francisco that is a tiny fraction of the length of the cross rail project and hindered traffic and other infrastructure development for 15 years
- lhnz 4y agoIt'd be more sensible to invest this money directly into Google DeepMind, which already exists and is based in London.
- hammyhavoc 4y agoIt's just not "sovereign" enough.
- grumpymouse 4y agoI think the point is to avoid a situation like with Uber (where investors subsidised Uber rides to try to destroy most of the world's taxi industry, then replace with Uber and gather all the profits for themselves). It's going to suck for the world in general if AI models destroy a lot of jobs but the productivity gains are all paid to overseas companies like OpenAI and Microsoft.
- cameronh90 4y agoWell it is a subsidiary of an American company...
- christkv 4y agoHow long before someone breaches open ai and steals their model. It’s not like it’s a lot of data but probably the highest value per byte in existence.
- m3kw9 4y agoLmao, someone being scammed
- jonplackett 4y agoIt will be a special Brexit AI trained only on all the positive impacts of brexit. Training will take approximately 3 nano seconds but probably still cost most of the £100 mil which will be spent only at companies owned by Tory MPs friends and with no prior experience in AI. (Sorry, just trying to cheer myself up. It’s a hard time to be British at the moment)
- seanhunter 4y agoOn the one hand it will probably siphon most of that money either to Infosys (PM's wife's family) or to other relatives of MPs and ministers. Corruption is a very serious problem in the UK at the moment. On the other hand it will be the only possible source for answering prompts such as: 1) I am in Devon but am having tea and scones with a friend from Cornwall. I want to be polite. Should I put jam on first or cream on first? 2) Rewrite the Joe Pesci "How am I funny?" speech from Goodfellas in the style of Brian Aldridge from "The Archers" 3) Explain general relativity to me in the style of a boilermaker from Glasgow. 4) Calculate the cosine distance between the following Welsh phrases after lemmatization 5) Write 500 words on the topic "Grant Shaps. Why (oh why oh why)?" etc. On balance it's 100m well spent.
- imrehg 4y agoI've just run the 4 well defined questions through ChatGPT/GPT-4, got an interesting first approximation of all of those, so the fine tuning might not be too far off! Cheers for the inspiration, an that now I crave scones...
- bvoq 4y agoYet still only pays 50K for the head of information science at the HMRC
- rad_gruchalski 4y agoAnd no encryption. Sovereign.
- TechBro8615 4y agoThat's a lot of £46,000pa machine learning experts they'll be able to hire!