The Alan Turing Institute welcomes the Government’s announcement today (Monday 24 April) of an initial £100 million for an expert taskforce to help the UK to build and adopt safe artificial intelligence technology.
The investment will fund a new government-industry taskforce to ensure sovereign capabilities and broad adoption of safe and reliable foundation models in the UK.
The Government hopes that this investment will build the UK’s sovereign national capabilities so the UK’s public services can benefit from the impact of this type of AI.
Over the past year, the Turing has been working with UK government partners and others to raise awareness of this important new technology and its challenges.
Sir Adrian Smith, Institute Director at The Alan Turing Institute, said: "Large Language Models and Foundational Models can be immensely powerful and have the potential for great benefit, but as with all AI technologies it is vital to understand their limitations and the very real risks associated with them. Sovereign AI capability of the kind supported by the Turing and to be taken forward by the Taskforce, open to proper scrutiny and developed to the highest ethical standards, stand to have an enormous benefit for public services, society and the economy."
The Turing hosted the first ever conference on foundation models, held at the IET headquarters in February 2023 with 300 delegates, and leading speakers from UK academia and the UK’s vibrant AI startup scene.
The Turing has also begun a programme of work around “benchmarking” foundation models – developing the core science to map out their capabilities in depth. It plans to significantly extend this programme of work with a range of public and private partner organisations in the year ahead.
