( UK ) Prime Minister sets out blueprint to turbocharge AI
gov.uk
gov.uk
This sounds like desperation more than anything else. I think a rush to use AI in public services without thorough planning and a critical mindset will inevitability lead to another Post Office or Robodebt scandal [2].
[1] https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Post-Office-Horizon-s... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-66130105
Maybe they should fix the economy to attract more AI companies and researchers instead, while they are at it they can fix the police force as well to give confidence to said companies and researchers.
The lack of data centers is not the reason I'm not researching AI at the moment, I can buy the hardware or rent a US data center, the reason is that the UK economy is dead, borrowing is insanely expensive and taxes are so high that most of the profits would go to the government, which would be fine if it would spend it on things that matter, but it's not doing that, it's just buying votes.
> NB: this review has not considered the requirements of non-AI high-performance computing, for which there is already a well-established case, including the need to deliver an exascale capability. Government should seek to resolve this as soon as possible, noting that these systems will play a crucial role in supporting AI science and research.
What an interesting addendum to add to that. The government, or at least who ever is writing this report, seems to imagine "AI" as a uniform and distinct process, where you turn on the AI machine, electricity goes in and AI comes out. "Can't use a non-AI machine. It doesn't make AI." The government should already be investing in computational resources for a huge number of government projects and services. The N.B. makes a good point.
The fact someone needed to add this note, and it made it into the final public document, written in that tone, seems like this isn't really a plan, more so just a vibes-based promise for innovation from 1 team in the government.
This is how a large chunk of the general public think of "AI" as well. They're just waiting for someone to flip the AI switch or add a bunch of `from ai import magically_do_everything` to products and services they use.
To be fair, that description lines up with a lot of what I hear from other AI startups.
From what I see, governments are massively shifting to Azure and AWS (moreso the former).
Cloud shines for dynamic loads, global resilience etc - but if you just want to run a lot of computational jobs for a long time, then running your own kit is likely to be much much cheaper.
The other advantage of your own kit is you can guarantee it will be available when you want it, and you can optimise the stack for your own applications.
There is a reason something like 3/4 of Amazons profits come from AWS and not selling books et al.
The cynic in me suspects that some government consultant (I used to be one) is making a lot of money from peddling AWS/Azure.
Note the same logic as above applies for centralised services whether it be British Compute or AWS versus having your own - any central service is going to have overheads around managing the shared resources - virtualisation, scheduling, availability, security, billing etc.
As in the real world - sometimes a renting model sense, but you pay a premium for the convenience.
Overhead from running your own datacentres is a factor, but (taking this report at face-value) it seems like there will be some modicum of government owned computer resources built. I feel like the cost difference between standing up a small datacentre capable of what they are pitching, versus standing up an over-allocated datacentre is mostly centred on initial 1-time cost. Once things are running, the ongoing cost may not be much different. Even if the government was the only client at a small datacentre, they would still have to have support, maintenance, and management. If they were instead selling over-allocated resources back to the private sector, there would be sales staff, but otherwise the other expenditures would remain nearly the same. They wouldn't even have to be that competitive on anything other than price, functioning much like a utility. Fancy PaaS features can be fully the responsibility of the private sector to develop on top of the true-blue british metal + electrons the government is offering up.
This already exists in the private sector ( but without the dedicated nuclear reactors ).
My point is there's something there I think! This report buries the lede with AI keyword drivel, but there's an opportunity beyond just hype in there.
Disclaimer - I work at Bristol on Isambard-AI
This example only makes sense if we're in a position where all the potholes we know about are fixed, and all of the pothole fixing masterworkers are sitting idle, waiting to leap into action at the next report.
But the reality is there are many, many potholes that are known about, but we can't/won't fix them due to things like budgets and staffing constraints.
As you've pointed out, I might let it slide if issues were actually being addressed, but they aren't. There are potholes that have been sitting in major city roads where I live for years, and nearly all the street markings around the whole city have completely eroded - junctions are becoming scarier as nobody knows what lane to be in. But I'm sure throwing money at AI can solve these problems.
The issue is, as you say, the council doesn't have the budget to actually fix the reported problems.
Even when they do bother to fix the pothole, they seem to just dump a bit of cold lay asphalt in the worst bit and hand tamp it down rather than properly preparing the surface and levelling the repaired section. As soon as another lorry goes over it, it just breaks up again.
[0] https://www.boredpanda.com/pothole-measure-50mm-darren-twitt...
A pothole I reported last October was "fixed" in December, and has already opened up again after the ineffective repair failed to take.
The problem doesn't lie in detection - the problem lies in poor road maintenance - which is presumably driven by various effects of cost cutting - including outsourcing to the lowest cost providers who have an interest in repeat business rather than a job well done.
At least for AI regulation, the EU is the last place I'd want the UK to learn from.
The challenge for the UK is actually building this stuff to a non-zero level of competence. The usual suspects in the IT consulting industry must be collectively having seizures over the prospect of being paid another 7 figure sum to deliver absolute slop several years behind schedule. Sunak beating himself up over the missed opportunity to inject another billion in cash to InfoSys.
There has to be a balance between a complete free for all and potentially snuffing out Europe's ability to compete.
I note that they've announced "work starting on a brand new supercomputer", so this is potentially backtracking on a very poor decision made last August to cancel a new exascale supercomputer at the University of Edinburgh. (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cyx5x44vnyeo)
For example in the NHS, the 'market' reforms of successive governments have led to the ridiculous scenarios where hospital doctors can't simple book a follow-up appointment to check on a patient in a few weeks time - they have to do all the discharge paperwork and ask the patient to get a referral from their GP back to the service - as that's how various bit's of the org 'get paid'.
Of course, that sucks for every metric of a health system that actually matters (outcomes), but this report could reflect one hand of the government not talking to the other.
They don't need a paperwork hurdle to decide whether a blood test is needed.
Another reform that causes endless problems is the idea of patient choice/patient voice - which means vocal patients who are good at playing the system, and who are prepared to complain, suck up a disproportionate amounts of the budget - as it's easier to spend unnecessary time than it is dealing with the complaint paperwork.
Note the common theme of the above two pathologies - a systemic lack of trust in professionals ( in this case doctors ) in being able to do a good job - by people who aren't said professionals....
Not saying it's a good thing! Just that one team has been told the forms are important by another team, so they pitch automating the filling of the form, rather than the obvious solution of: no form.
The patient choice aspect is interesting. These processes becoming a game played by people wanting to take advantage of the system is another aspect where this form-heavy process fails, but a bureaucrat could argue that it still (however badly) discourages overconsumption of the system from patients.
Edit, I should mention: I am Canadian, though we have similar issues with our provincial health systems. If there is a specific British/NHS aspect to this I am missing, that will be why.
The problem of politicians without a small amount of knowledge enough to be dangerous being led astray by consultants with whiteboard/napkin level simplistic visions I suspect also crosses national boundaries.
"Today’s plan mainlines AI into the veins of this enterprising nation – revolutionising our public services and putting more money in people’s back pockets."
Is a heroin analogy really what they are going for, and then straight into some imaginary cost savings?
I know it is fashionable to wonder if something was written by AI. I don't think this is, but some human went to great lengths to sound borderline unhinged.
We seem to lack people to fix pot holes, not report them. We need carers to support old people. AI seems to be mostly good at writing meeting minutes, reports and generating slightly incorrect content/code.
Happy to be proven wrong though.
I find this really hard to believe. My brother, who is a practising ward doctor by trade with almost zero software experience, recently did a sabbatical related to cleaning patient notes data for use in training. He said it was a hopeless mess and they had absolutely nothing. The work he did went nowhere. I appreciate the hospital trusts are different and isolated in some respects, but the idea they're doing anything with AI is a joke when they can't even do the basics (as anyone who's used NHS digital services will testify to).
Does anyone have any experience that actually agrees with this press release?
I can't see any mention of direct costs to the UK taxpayer, except for needing to include AI in the NHS and civil services in various vague ways.
There are no details on what laws or regulations they plan to change in exchange for that investment, though guessing from the public questionnaire a few weeks ago, they will likely relax copyright on private artworks so it can be used with AI generation by default. Tax breaks are a given but it’s not clear how much or if it applies to anyone working in the sector.
This all means nothing if the AI bubble pops, forcing those companies to collapse, laying off thousands and wasting everyone's time (and rights).
'Mainlined into UK's veins': Labour announces public rollout of AI
"Sovereign AI".
That's doing a lot of work. Right now the UK government (HMG), is relying mostly on US companies to provide AI workloads, even the simplest workloads. Across the EU this is a problem to the extent that hyperscale cloud providers are having to address digital sovereignty more explicitly (see Frankfurt region for AWS as an example).
Meanwhile the billionaire owners of these companies are mainlining Snowcrash and making clear that they think they should be in charge, and screw democracy.
There is some evidence of election tampering in multiple countries in 2024, and a suggestion floating in the air - based on recent events - that some billionaires might be OK with that, if it serves them (see /r/somethingiswrong2024).
If you're the UK PM, and you believe that AI is an important technical innovation (i.e. you believe the same thing that many people at Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, IBM, HPE, all the big consultancies all believe), and you see the people who hold all the cards lining up to a very, very strong hard-line political perspective that may or may not be aligned with HMG interests, what do you do? Nothing? Or perhaps figure out how to spin up a sovereign capability?
It won't be perfect. But, if they can spin this up and be confident that every £ spent, 30% of it isn't being creamed off the top to pay for space rockets and superyachts, and going back into investment, you might get to a point where it's competitive and starts to get to a much better place.
And there are a _lot_ of researchers who don't want to work for a FAANG, who are prepared to work on this. It isn't "the British civil service" who are building this, it's every person at a UK FAANG site and researcher in a Russell group university who is building this, and prepared to do it for a smaller wage as there's no toxicity tax you need to pay them to stick around pushing adverts on a social media website complicit in making teenagers want to kill themselves.
As to the budget situation, if AI meets just 20% of the hype, it could start to pay for itself in efficiency savings across HMG, and then money can start paying for roads maintenance and other aspects of public spending that have been deserted for years.
50% gets spent on hard assets like AI super computers, buildings, infrastructure: £528,302
You lose 50% to operating overheads: £264,151
Each employed person averaging £60k a year gives you 13,250 people employed for 4.4 years.
What's left at the end of 4.4 years? A 4.4 year old super computer that is twice as slow as the best and costs twice as much to run, 13,250 people scrambling for funding/work, a few nice papers, a tonne of failed start-ups with questionable IP and very little value to the tax payer.
Maybe this is where the £22 billion black hole comes from [1]? Maybe freezing 10 millions pensioners helped pay for it [2]? In the background, bare in mind that the UK government is currently paying 4.8% interest to borrow [3], which is a massive problem because it means the UK is borrowing more than the predicted growth is expected to yield.
> But the AI industry needs a government that is on their side, one that won’t sit back and let opportunities slip through its fingers.
They recognise that an industry needs to move fast...
> The plan puts an end to that by introducing new measures that will create dedicated AI Growth Zones that speed up planning permission and give them the energy connections they need to power up AI.
Then immediately come up with arbitrary regulation as to what zones investment should be spent in. If you want something to move fast, cut the strings. How much of this money will be spent on bureaucracy? How many of the 13k jobs will be government based?
> First – laying the foundations for AI to flourish in the UK.
Zones are a terrible idea, just cut the strings.
> Second – boosting adoption across public and private sectors
> A new digital centre of government is being set up within DSIT. This will revolutionise how AI is used in the public sector to improve citizens lives and make government more efficient.
Prediction: Government becomes larger, and therefore less efficient. Large amounts of the pledged money simply gets eaten by government overhead and taxes.
> Third – keeping us ahead of the pack
The UK does not have the resources to compete like this, we cannot outspend those with deeper pockets. The UK has historically done well by using the resources it does have more effectively, then completely losing control over what they invent to the likes of the US. There was a document published a few months back (cannot find it now) with the EU complaining about how tonnes of their Unicorn start-ups end up going to the US. There's probably a lesson to be learned there, but who reads these documents anyway?
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2e12j4gz0o
They used AI to write this lol
Promising investors widespread deregulation to allow energy hungry data centers be built with less oversight is not what I would call "socialist".