Should the UK spend hundreds of billions on AI?
This week the European Union (EU) announced a €200bn InvestAI fund, to build out sovereign artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. This follows on from the Trump administration’s $500bn Project Stargate AI initiative.
For comparison, a month ago, the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) announced that an average of £200m in private sector investment had been funnelled into the UK’s AI sector a day since the new government took office last summer, supporting Labour’s Plan for Change to fix the foundations of the economy.
According to DSIT, £14bn pounds worth of investment has been ploughed into the UK and thousands of new jobs have been confirmed in just 48 hours since the AI Opportunities Action Plan was published on January 13th. There has also been £25bn worth of new investment into UK datacentre infrastructure, which was announced at the Global Investment Summit earlier at the start of the year.
What this means is that over the last six months, the total funding of AI projects in the UK is around the £39bn mark, significantly lower than the EU’s and US’ AI investment commitments.
Earlier this month, the House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee published its second report on the challenges the UK’s digital economy faces. Expert witnesses quoted in the The AI and creative technology scaleup report, warn that the UK as one of the worst places in the G7 to scale-up businesses.
AI on a smartphone
Oxford Science Enterprises, which submitted written evidence to the committee, argued that, without urgent action, “the future cascade of value from the unicorns we are building will continue to benefit other countries.”
One of the companies in its portfolio, Oxford Semantic Technologies was recently in the spotlights at the launch of the latest flagship Samsung smartphone. Co-founder, Ian Horrocks, presented at the Samsung Galaxy Unpacked event in January, and spoke abut the S25’s AI features powered by the company’s RDFox technology. Samsung was so impressed by this technology, which enables embedded AI on a smartphone, that it acquired Oxford Semantic Technologies last July. That the world’s leading smartphone maker is using cutting edge AI tech developed in Britain, is testimony to the UK’s ability to invent clever things. But all too often, these startups are being acquired by foreign firms.
The UK government has yet to demonstrate it has an appetite to match the hundreds of billions needed for an AI programme to rival the EU and the US. We know that growing home-grown talent can help us get there, and this may end up being far cheaper. But we need an investment community that enables startups to scale-up.
Listen to the podcast with Ian Horrocks , co-founder of Oxford Semantic Technologies >>