The News
The UK government unveiled details of a far-reaching plan to boost artificial intelligence adoption on Monday, including a multibillion-pound investment in computing capacity and the creation of zones across the country with expedited planning approvals to facilitate the buildout of data centers.
It also announced plans to build a National Data Library of public sector data assets for the purpose of training AI models.
“AI has the potential to change all of our lives, but for too long, we have been curious and often cautious bystanders to the change unfolding around us. With this plan, we become agents of that change,” Secretary of State for Science, Innovation, and Technology Peter Kyle said.
SIGNALS
Details of National Data Library remain thin
The Labour Party outlined plans for a National Data Library in its election-winning manifesto, but details of what precisely such an initiative would entail — such as who would have access to the data or how it would be structured — have been scant, James O’Malley noted in his Odds and Ends of History Substack in October. The government didn’t specify in its new announcement what data will be available to private companies, The Guardian reported, and Prime Minister Keir Starmer avoided a reporter’s questions on the issue at a press conference. Performing arts trade union, Equity, has already voiced concerns over the government’s opt-out approach to data mining, and called for protections against the use of artists’ data to train GenAI models.
Government’s AI ambitions may be unrealistic
Experts have cast doubt on the UK’s ambition to train tens of thousands of AI professionals by 2030: British universities are already struggling to attract and retain students, partly owing to stricter visa rules, and training PhD-level talent in the next five years is “almost impossible” given a PhD typically takes around four years, a computer science professor said. And while the government wants to use AI to “supercharge” economic growth through investment, questions remain about how realistic that vision is amid high borrowing costs and the pound recently falling to its lowest value since Nov. 2023, the BBC noted: “That’s a tough sell for ministers already faced with making large amounts of savings,” an expert at software company Dataiku told Computer Weekly.