British Prime Minister Keir Starmer wants the UK to be a trailblazer for artificial intelligence (AI). This makes sense in theory for a place that gave the world computing icons like Alan Turing, Ada Lovelace and Tim Berners-Lee — but a lot of his plan does not.
One of the UK’s greatest strengths is its role as a fast, thoughtful regulator on technology, often striking a sensible middle ground between the US’ regulatory vacuum and the EU’s stifling bureaucracy. Starmer says the UK should be more than that, touting AI this week as a springboard for growth that could lift the UK’s productivity by 1.5 percent and add £47 billion (US$57.4 billion) to the economy. However, the lengthy plans he sketched out for that number are vague and do not account for the fact that financial benefits of tech revolutions often take years to manifest. An intervention of this kind, which would cost £14 billion, also looks unwise as the UK faces serious public spending pressures.
Take the government’s move to follow an entire 50-point action plan that was drawn up by UK venture capitalist Matt Clifford. As everyone knows, the longer your to-do list (and 50 is a lot) the less likely you would get to everything. The probability decreases when those plans lack features such as timelines or metrics for success.
One action point, for instance, is to create a “UK Sovereign AI Unit” to invest in AI companies, but it lacks details on a budget, investment criteria or roughly when it might be set up. There is also no timeline for the establishment of “AI growth zones.” A pledge on mandatory AI adoption across government departments also lacked targets, timelines or how the success of their initiatives would be measured.
One good feature of the AI plan is to expand the UK’s compute capacity 20-fold by the year 2030. Starmer, not surprisingly, hyped that increase a little too much.
“That’s like upgrading from my dad’s old Ford Cortina to a Formula 1 McLaren in one,” he said in a speech on Monday.
Not really. A more accurate analogy might be upscaling to a Nissan Qashqai. The proposal to increase the UK’s ownership of graphics processing units (GPUs) for AI training to 100,000 is a fraction of what the largest technology companies are hoarding. That is still a noble and important attempt at countering the imbalance of computing power Big Tech holds now. They have a stranglehold on academia because computer science academics need access to vast amounts of GPUs for cutting-edge studies. That has incentivized many people to conduct research in the interests of tech firms (figuring out how to make systems bigger, for instance, instead of safer or fairer).
However, the UK has not provided technical specifications on the GPUs it is acquiring. Are they gold-standard Nvidia H100s or a cheaper, slower variant? Nor has it given a budget for the new supercomputer it plans to build. Strangely, soon after Starmer took power in summer last year, he shut down a planned £800 million supercomputer being built at Edinburgh University as part of an initial raft of spending cuts. It would have made more sense to keep that project.
Starmer’s U-turn suggests an erratic, hype-fueled approach to AI that involves throwing lots of spaghetti on a wall and praying it all sticks. Perhaps he was charmed by Clifford, the venture capitalist who designed the ambitious plan, described in a 2023 Politico profile as good at “winning over” politicians.
A better approach would have been to focus on a few key objectives, such as the growth of computing power, or to mandate use of AI in government divisions, and provide greater specificity. Starmer would also do well to play up the UK’s leading role as a safety regulator, which benefits from the concentrated AI expertise in London, where Google DeepMind is based. Some 150 people work for the government’s leading AI Safety Institute, more than those working on these issues at the European Commission in Brussels.
In his speech, Starmer said AI safety should not be the “limit of what the state should do.” Yet his interventionist plans go too far the other way. He can enjoy a public-relations win for now, but he would pay the price when UK universities, start-ups and tech firms begin to seek more policy specifics.
Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is author of Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017