For conference-goers London Tech Week kicked off on Monday morning with a double act of UK prime minister Keir Starmer and Nvidia chief Jensen Huang — but the duo had been warming up since the day before as the British premier hosted a cabal of techies at an invite-only party.
On Sunday, DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis, ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Revolut chief Nik Storonsky and a number of other tech founders including Huang joined Starmer and government ministers for a tour of his country residence, Chequers.
It was the PM’s latest tech love-in as he looks to woo AI leaders from across the globe. For Huang, at least, it seems to have worked.
“You hosted a terrific event at Chequers yesterday,” he said, sitting next to Starmer on stage on Monday morning. He lavished praise on the UK as the “envy of the world” when it comes to AI researchers.
But the Nvidia chief also criticised the UK as the largest AI ecosystem in the world without its own infrastructure — echoing the concerns of many of the country’s tech leaders about its lack of sovereign AI capabilities.
A roster of announcements to mark the beginning of the biggest week of tech evangelising in the UK calendar sought to remedy that.
Homegrown AI data centre startup Nscale said it would deploy 10k advanced Nvidia chips. The Netherlands’ Nebius said it would do the same, but didn’t specify a number. Nvidia said it would open an AI training centre in Bristol to help train developers building models.
Starmer’s big announcement was that the government would invest £1bn by 2030 to increase the UK’s compute for its AI Research Resource — a network of the UK’s most powerful supercomputers that were built to bolster scientific research — twentyfold.
It was the first time the government had put a figure on its commitment to bolster the country’s sovereign AI capabilities laid out in its grand AI plan in January.
Starmer said he wanted the UK to become an “AI maker, not taker”.
But many in the tech sector are sceptical that government plans for compute will move the dial for UK AI companies — with some pointing out that it was reinstating funding it scrapped last August.
There’s also a big question over whether the UK plans to beef up sovereign compute, even for non-commercial uses, will be fit for purpose in the years to come.
Between 2019 and 2024, the amount of compute needed to train frontier AI models grew 4-5x each year — totalling 1,000-3,000x over the entire period, according to research institute Epoch AI.
Other tech leaders were unimpressed by the amount of capital involved. “Is this it?” asked one VC I spoke to. Another called it “weak”, adding that it wouldn’t be enough to supercharge the country’s AI hopes.
The bigger problem for the country’s startups, according to one founder, is access to funding, which they told me the UK government isn’t addressing.
“What startups who are trying to create innovative high-compute technology really, really need are sources of investment that can keep up with their funding needs,” they said. “Europe really doesn’t have this capability at the moment. The UK government knows the problem, and has failed to address it for several years.”
All of this comes as the UK’s big AI rival in Europe, France, gears up for Vivatech, its own national tech conference kicking off on Wednesday.
In a world where Paris is increasingly challenging — and in the mind of some overtaking — London’s AI dominance in Europe, France will be looking to one up the UK.
If the gulf between the two countries’ AI infrastructure commitments in January — when the UK’s £14bn paled in comparison to the more than €100bn announced across the Channel — is anything to go by, Paris might just do it.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/keir-starmer-woos-global-tech-leaders/
