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UK Home Office launches £75M 'PoliceAI' to capitalise on artificial intelligence
- lifeisstillgood 4mo agoI think this is going to lead towards companies and governments starting to build their own data centres for this kind of thing (reviewing millions of emails to find the smoking gun is what the cops will want to do as will both sides in a civil case). The thing is no-one (probably not OpenAI) wants to send kidnapping footage to data centre in Texas for a Manchester case. The thing we are all finding now (software devs) is that AI is great but boy is it pricey if we want anything useful … And walking through millions of pages of digital evidence is going to cost, and I think governments would rather buy a rack of H100s and spread the cost. So is the national AI drive one to be able to build frontier models, or one to just build data centre or one to build a chips capability a few years behind ?
- alephnerd 4mo agoThese already exist and have existed for decades. They're called fusion centers.
- uberex 4mo agoInteresting, tell me more please! (Google search brings up nuclear fusion or as a brand name)
- A_D_E_P_T 4mo ago> The thing we are all finding now (software devs) is that AI is great but boy is it pricey if we want anything useful … What? A $200/month subscription to Claude, $100/month at OpenAI, and $25/month with Gemini should get you more than you could possibly use? Unless you really want to take a hands-off approach, in which case DeepSeek is pennies on the dollar... It's still very cheap, is what I'm saying. Am I missing something?
- lionkor 4mo agoYour opinion on code quality doesn't match ours (people who agree)
- A_D_E_P_T 4mo agoBut how does spending more get you better code? Whether you pay API prices or $100-200/month prices, the output seems comparable? Besides, quality has a lot to do with the person using it & reviewing/editing the code.
- dgellow 4mo agoCorporation are supposed to pay API prices
- lifeisstillgood 4mo agoI think the recent study was that 200 Claude subscription burnt through on average 8000 worth of datacenter and GPU. There is a reason OpenAPI and all are losing a fortune - they are chucking H100s at anyone who types in a query or subscribed to GitHub. It’s a totally unsustainable business model - price things at cost and we will find value in these services - but I won’t pay a fortune for a search result. Even a better search result. In this case - let the market decide
- varispeed 4mo agoQuestion whether PoliceAI is going to be deployed to investigate corruption in government and civil service? Thought so...
- Tinkeringz 4mo agoWhat corruption is there in the civil service?
- varispeed 4mo agoTenders don't write themselves.
- ThrowawayTestr 4mo agoWatch Yes, Prime Minister
- xdennis 4mo agoThe biggest scandal is probably how authorities ignored rape gang activities out of fear of being perceived as bigoted. See https://rapeganginquiry.co.uk/ https://rapeganginquiry.co.uk/ .
- markdown 4mo agoNobody answered your question yet. Did you get an answer from someone else? Are they in the room with you right now? The answer is: police investigate crimes. So if you go to them with a complaint about corruption, they will investigate it with whatever tools they are legally able to use and can afford.
- dgellow 4mo ago> Another case saw half a million e-books of data translated instantly, leading to the arrest of a serious organised crime gang Does someone have details on this? I don’t see how ebooks translation relates to arresting organized crime gang
- decremental 4mo ago[dead]
- varispeed 4mo agoPerhaps the AI hallucinated it.
- unethical_ban 4mo agoA few members of a private forum exchanging ebooks = organized, pirating ebooks = crime, boom. Organized crime gang. To the police, anyway.
- Retr0id 4mo agoI wonder if they mean literal e-books, or if "1 e-book" is a journalistic unit of data (maybe 1MB or so...)
- dgellow 4mo agoI’m wondering if the article was written by an AI and something was lost in translation (pun intended) somewhere in the process
- Jtarii 4mo agoI believe it means evidence stored as digital data that was translated with AI, which then led to arrests. I don't think the crime gang was translating e-books illegally.
- dgellow 4mo agoThey are saying the police translated ebooks using AI, so it’s definitely not the gang. Using ebooks to say digital data is really strange if that’s what they meant
- p0w3n3d 4mo agoWow UK you went full 1984 + usual suspect + minority report
- amelius 4mo agoWhere is copyright when you need it?
- Jtarii 4mo agoLiterally every police force in the world will be using AI to help solve crimes.
- VladVladikoff 4mo agoAt this point I’m basically shocked when people tell me they don’t use AI to assist them in some part of their job, regardless of career.
- uberex 4mo agoThat is true. Police will have to use AI (criminals will!) but we need protect socieity from any bias, miscarriage of justice, police harrassment etc. There needs to be strict governance over the tool use. A cop in the UK was recently suspended (I think suspended) for allegedly using AI unofficially to fabricate evidence.
- ErroneousBosh 4mo agoWhy would you think that? This is never going to work. It's going to get handed to SSS/NEC/Capita/whatever the fuck they're called this week, they'll get billions of pounds of government money, they won't be able to launch, and it'll quietly get buried. What this is for is much simpler - it's for funnelling billions of pounds of the public purse into wealthy Conservatives. We've had nearly 50 years of Tory misrule and fraud. This is just Businesss As Usual for them.
- Xophmeister 4mo ago
- Havoc 4mo agoI don't even want to fkin know. Literally everything the UK gov has announced on online anything lately has been dystopian misguided bullshit.
- zbiggistardust 4mo agodemise
- firebaze 4mo agoThe UK genuinely has become the most scary country of all western democracies to me. I can't comprehend how this happened, and is still happening. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_sexual_abuse_cases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_sexual_abuse_cases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Savile_sexual_abuse_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Savile_sexual_abuse_scan... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploitation_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit... (This link list is just the tip of an iceberg) And now they changed lanes to fully protect themselves against people who may uncover such cases.
- dgroshev 4mo agoI don't see what's "scary" about this link. It's talking about pretty much standard data processing, Palantir is doing that in the US for many years now.
- Accacin 4mo agoYes, the UK is famously unique in having sexual assault against children.
- firebaze 4mo agoIt's the world leader in disguising it, yes, just after Belgium. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Dutroux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Dutroux Almost no-one talks about that anymore. It's still mostly unsolved. Children matter, right?
- radium3d 4mo agoDidn't know that the trip we took there a few years ago was one of the last to see UK just chillin' Now we have democracy manipulation spearheaded by AI bot manipulation of their very own citizenry. Not limited to UK, USA is deep in it too.
- Accacin 4mo agoI'm pretty disappointed to see all this nonsense about the UK on Hacker News. Like the UK being the most scary country of all Western democracies? Have you not see what's happening in the USA? The US, Europe, and UK are all trying to implement basically the same ideas. Now, I completely disagree with the current government in pretty much anything related to "protect the children", but the hyperbole is insane. Finally, have you seen the UK's track record with IT projects? This is never going anywhere. £75 is nothing in the grand scheme of things.
- sph 4mo agoI’ve heard ‘the hyperbole is insane’ since 9/11 and this is what the world looks like today. Don’t try to sane wash yet another attempt at expanding the extent of mass surveillance, despite how silly it might seem on paper.
- cynicalsecurity 4mo ago£75m could only be the beginning. Next spending might be £750m if the results are going to please the stakeholders. Tomorrow digital Stasi might be knocking at your door.
- dofm 4mo agoAnd on Monday we might have cake at lunch _and_ for tea.
- rimeice 4mo ago[dead]
- dofm 4mo agoI think as soon as you understand that Americans in general at best pity and at worst hate us based on a rather old-fashioned concept of how we live and are governed, you understand that it doesn't matter how far the USA falls from their ideals, they will always project worse onto us, because us being worse is a core plank of the USA's founding mythology. It comes out in many ways, and the more you see it the harder it is to ignore it. But it has recently become text again in a way that it hasn't been since Joe Kennedy's days: Trump, Vance and Hegseth have just openly sneered at and defamed us, and because we favour the political, diplomatic approach, we've taken a lot of shit that it turns out Giorgia Meloni won't take (more to that story, I am sure). FWIW this is mutual. I think Americans are increasingly going to be shocked to find that Brits are no longer bothering to convince themselves that the average American is not like the average Trump administration official. We no longer waste time saying "OK their government is a bunch of nuts and bigots, and their gun laws insane, but Americans are pretty cool". We no longer forgive them their government; we now average out Americans. The presumption of coolness in Americans who travel, always pretty damn well-earned in my own experience, is gone. In short we're going to treat them much more like the French do. It will get worse and worse but we're not alone. And actually I hope people in the UK finally grasp this, especially people on the political right. Closer ties with the USA was the through-line of Brexit. But it's a fucking insane idea. We are less like them than we are like most of Europe.
- sph 4mo agoIs Priti Patel still running the Home Office? I honestly couldn’t tell the difference in policies between BoJo and Starmer. What do you prefer, authoritarianism in red, authoritarianism in blue, or a Nigel the Trump bootlicker? At this point I’d rather have the monarchy back, at least you knew where is the class system you’re supposed to fit, and whose boot to lick.