The UK Government announced today that they are investing £100M into a new foundation model AI taskforce to help the national economy. [1]

In summary

• UK Government Investing £100M in foundation model AI taskforce

• UK to build national AI capabilities

The UK’s Department of Science, Innovation, and Technology has invested £100 million to form a specialised task force dedicated to creating and deploying the next generation of reliable AI. Artificial intelligence systems trained on large datasets are called “foundation models,” and they can be used in many different sectors.

To kick off the rollout of the government’s significant aims for the United Kingdom’s competence in secure and dependable foundation models, the Prime Minister and the Technology Secretary have pledged an investment of £100 million. If these systems were broadly adopted, national productivity growth rates might be multiplied by a factor of three. The United Kingdom plans to become a global leader in developing artificial intelligence (AI) foundation models and their economic applications by investing in the growth of its “sovereign” national capabilities.

Key thinking and insights

Large pre-trained language models will serve as future AI applications’ foundations. These models are trained on vast volumes of text data and profoundly understand language meaning. They can be fine-tuned for specific tasks like text classification, question answering, or language translation to attain cutting-edge performance with minimal extra training. They are designed to be adaptable and flexible, making them a powerful tool for AI development. By investing in the latest foundation models can be extremely useful as they can be applied to many business sectors.

Bottom line

There are a few key points to note:

• There is an enormous thirst for foundation models like GPT-4, ChatGPT
• UK government getting serious about investing in foundation models can open doors to wider opportunities
• Keep an eye out for further UK AI investment

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Reference read more

Thank you to these excellent references for inspiring our thinking:

[1] Government press release – https://www.gov.uk/government/news/initial-100-million-for-expert-taskforce-to-help-uk-build-and-adopt-next-generation-of-safe-ai