This has been a superb week for investment in the UK – a huge vote of confidence in our plan.
Today CoreWeave – a US AI start up valued at $19 billion – announced a $1 billion investment in data centres in the UK.
On Tuesday the biggest investment in a UK AI start-up in history was announced.
Over $1 billion into autonomous vehicle start-up Wayve.
On top of that CoreWeave is also establishing its European headquarters in London.
And earlier this week top US company Scale AI announced it was doing the same.
They are not the only ones.
Microsoft recently announced their AI hub in London.
OpenAI, Anthropic, Palantir and Cohere have all chosen to locate their European headquarters here.
We will keep building on this success.
This Government is unashamedly optimistic about the power of technology.
The UK is at the cutting edge of applying AI to drive exciting scientific advances.
Work is already underway on an AI model that looks at a single picture of your eyes to predict heart disease, strokes or Parkinson's.
When the pioneers say AI could cure cancer, we believe them.
Too often regulation can stifle those innovators.
We cannot let that happen.
Not with potentially the most transformative technology of our time.
That’s why we don’t support calls for a blanket ban or pause in AI.
It’s why we are not legislating.
It’s also why we are pro-open source.
Open source drives innovation.
It creates start-ups.
It creates communities.
There must be a very high bar for any restrictions on open source.
But that doesn’t mean we are blind to risks.
We are building the capability to empirically assess the most powerful AI models.
Our groundbreaking AI Safety Institute is attracting top talent from the best AI companies and universities in the world.
While talent is the key ingredient for an AI ecosystem, access to powerful computers necessary to train and experiment with AI is a close second.
That’s why we’re investing £1.5bn into compute.
Our first cluster of 5,000 of Nvidia’s latest AI superchips will go live this summer in Bristol, alongside the new Dawn computer in Cambridge.
We will soon set out how start-ups and academia will access these powerful new supercomputers.
All of this progress is part of our plan to grow the economy. The sector is already worth more than £3.7 billion every year and employs over 50,000 people.
We know open source is a recipe for innovation.
That’s why the AI Safety Institute is today open sourcing what it has built.
The code for its Inspect project – a framework for building AI safety evaluations – is now available to anyone to use.
The AI Safety institute will also soon announce plans for an Open Source Open Day bringing together experts to explore how open source tools can improve safety.
This government’s approach is pro innovation, pro AI, pro open source and pro empiricism.
And it’s working.
