There is no doubting the ambition of the PM’s launch of more growth in and through AI. He urges public and private sectors to greatly expand their computing capacities, and to  use the extra for a wide range of new applications. He sets out a vision of many more datacentres. He expects AI to  improve healthcare diagnosis, tighten up on tax avoidance and boost GDP.
The paper the officials wrote is long on enthusiasm and on how important much more computing is. It is short on practical policies to bring it about. Here are some thoughts on what the government will need to ask itself to make some of this reality.
The paper envisages a bigger role for the public sector, with government putting in more of the investment and adopting more of the benefits. There is no mention of how much extra money will be available for this. They revive the  idea of supercomputers after cancelling the Bristol one the previous government backed. Where will the hew one be and how much will it cost?
When it comes to the private  sector they will find the US giants of AI and the digital world are central to success. Why not take our corporation tax rate down to Ireland’s to tempt more of the US digital investment in future here? Ireland gas attracted so much with a tax rate half ours.
The strategy needs plenty of datacentres  which need plenty of cheap electricity. Will the government adopt some of the ideas around for more and cheaper energy?
January 15, 2025
The idea of applying AI to find better solutions to problems is both good and obvious. But it depends on access to data, data centres, abundant energy and human intelligence to frame the questions in a way that enables relevant data searches to be made and relevant answers to be provided to secure the desired insights. Are these all readily available to departments of government? Based on experience
to date I am wary of Starmer word salads delivered without the substance of a coherent plan of action and the cash to fund it.
January 15, 2025
His first job should be to remove Milibrain. Data centres require an abundance of cheap, reliable energy. Exactly the opposite of where we’re heading. SMRs could be a solution but no doubt the government would rather import them than use local talent.
A speech from 2TK is cheap. Actions are required.
Cancelling the Edinburgh Super Computer doesn’t bode well.
January 15, 2025
Ian,
Absolutely without energy security national AI is not going to happen
January 15, 2025
AI data centres require huge electrical power, so in the UK you will only be able to use it when the wind is blowing – hard enough.
January 15, 2025
Indeed cheap, reliable, on demand energy is vital for AI but Ed Miliband is doing his best to kill any hopes of this. Sensible tax levels too to encourage investment but Hunt and now Reeves is doing he best to kill this. “Growth is the number on mission of this Labour Government” Reeves said yesterday. So what policy does she have to encourage growth or investment – not a singe one.
But we have people dying due to long waits for ambulances, then waits in ambulances, then in A&E and then in corridors often dying before they even get proper medical treatment perhaps correct these appalling failures first. They should certainly kill the policy to switch to electric ambulances (and even fire engines etc.) this is a vast waste of money which will make them system even less efficient.
Google the “German Fire Station destroyed by fire caused by an EV battery fire”.
Politicians trying to save money is very expensive thing.
It’s like putting them in charge of combatting a pandemic, changing the weather, running a health service, state monopoly schools or running anything at all.
January 15, 2025
Or putting them in charge of regulating water or vaccines or almost anything.
See the excellent Clare Craig substack for all the covid vaccine disasters and stats. Has Sunak corrected his (dishonest?) statement to the house yet?
January 15, 2025
Let us all beware of papers “… long on enthusiasm …. short on practical policies” for treating them with seriousness is often folly.
The notion that there should be “.. a bigger role for the public sector, with government putting in more of the investment…” indicates nothing worthwhile has been learnt from Health Secretary Hancock’s immense folly of trusting IT people demanding tremendous sums to deliver a tracking system as novel as it was huge.
As a Starmer initiative, let us perhaps ignore it for a while (AI is of course a ridiculously overblown, over-hyped phenomenon), rather await the re-set when it might be more refined, although only a bit.
January 15, 2025
Second para. prescient warning on Government investment in …well, anything, but the Test and Trace fiasco was ludicrous.
The one thing we do expect from AI is that all the paper shuffling jobs in both public and private sectors should be eliminated. Now, how is Labour going to handle those unemployables? Perhaps AI can figure out how to redeploy those unnecessary CO2 emitters…..
Be careful what you wish for..
January 15, 2025
I’m glad you pointed out that ‘more AI’ will need more data centres and therefore much more electricity. This simple fact doesn’t seem to have percolated into the might brains residing in Whitehall.
Moreover, I wonder why the current government, allegedly socialists, are so proud of pushing Net Zero at all costs. Have they never heard of Lenin’s saying, that ‘communism is Soviet power (nowadays ‘community groups’) plus electrification of the whole country’? And here they are hard at word to un-electrify our country …
January 15, 2025
I have mentioned that point before(and that famous quote of Lenin’s!).An inconvenient truth for those who maintain the government/establishment is somehow socialist.
January 15, 2025
Quite disastrous. If we think this eastern bloc-style government is going to help us adopt AI efficiently we are mistaken. To paraphrase Elon Musk, while East Germany built the Trabant car, West Germany built the Porsche.
January 15, 2025
+1
January 15, 2025
Your wish list is the very antithisis of what this lumbering about government has done to date.
They cannot think beyond the introduction of 1984 rules to pub discussion. The latest YOUGOV poll suggest they are fast losing the support of those who voted them in. Next comes the internal fighting leading to implosion.
People with human intelligence will move out with their wealth and means of creating further. Under current government the UK has no future.
January 15, 2025
“ Will the government adopt some of the ideas around for more and cheaper energy?”
No, unfortunately it’s just more wishful thinking from our current clown government, who can be guaranteed to blunder into another Fujitsu type situation. Indeed probably worse in terms of the cost to taxpayers.
January 15, 2025
AI is akin to importing immigrants.
Better to train our own and insist that they work and don’t sit at home on benefits.
January 15, 2025
As so often happens with labour policies they lack a certain amount of reality to get them pushed through and functional. Labour have always been keen on fancy technology to solve problems mostly of their making.
They want investment and many more datacentres but therein lies the bug.
Companies are unlikely to invest in high grade technology when the economic prospects are so gloomy. Why should people risk their own money when HMG gets it all so wrong economically. Simply ‘wishing’ for more investment will get us nowhere.
The other issue is that the servers that would run AI use a lot of power. Most datacentres use more electricity than small towns. So with the country constantly on the brink of blackouts, just where would the energy come from to power all of these small-town datacentres?
January 15, 2025
Good morning.
Political rhetoric and theatre. The new ‘White heat of technology’ nonsense. He is saying something without actually having to do something.
But it does provide a platform for this government to waste more money.
January 15, 2025
Two-Tier’s droning speech setting out the Government’s AI “ambitions” reminded me of another Socialist, Harold Wilson, and his “white heat of technology” speech back in the early ’60s.
That didn’t work out too well for Labour and this “ambition” will fail even more spectacularly. Wilson was, whether you supported him or not, at least a good political operator and we had the skills and the energy sources essential to develop technologically .
Starmer has the political nous of a gnat, we have insufficient people with the required skills with many leaving the country thanks to his punitive tax regime, and he is doing his level best to destroy the essential energy sources it will require.
So it was just hot air and an attempt to shift the media narrative about his failing administration. Which has also failed.
January 15, 2025
The Government’s AI ambition is in direct opposition to its energy policy of producing the most expensive and least reliable electricity on the planet. Supercomputer AI centres will be built overseas and the Brits will have to pay the charges without making the profits, as with all other manufacturing.
January 15, 2025
The current government hasn’t cancelled the Bristol supercomputer. The one announced in 2023 is now up and running (it went live back in April/May) and has replaced an older system (which has been retired). What was cancelled was an investment to be based in Edinburgh which, I have seen it reported, was an unfunded spending commitment by the previous government.
January 15, 2025
AI is in the first instance driven by energy, electrical energy. Once you have the hardware all costs relate to energy pricing. In the UK our electricity prices are at least 100% dearer than the UK’s Industrial Competitors. It leaves the prolific spending public sector, as they don’t have to find the money, as the only one in a position to use the technology.
AI hardware requires GPU type processors to function. The UK’s World Leading manufacturer of these processors was allowed to be sold to the Chinese by the UK Government – meaning the Chinese now have a head start on the use of the technology and infinity cheaper energy prices to run it
January 15, 2025
“When it comes to the private sector they will find the US giants of AI and the digital world are central to success” The same company above supplied the technology to Apple for their AI drive. Now its in the hands of the PM’s favourite nation China.
January 15, 2025
“There is no doubting the ambition of the PM’s launch of more growth in and through AI.”
Really ? Did he set any measurable targets so we can monitor the success of his strategy ?
The problem is that almost all of the apparent cost benefits of AI are in replacing people for all or part of their roles and so it cannot be targeted at the public sector where Labour’s union chums will resist it very strongly. Best for the government not to interfere and to simply step back and create a business environment where AI developments can flourish – that can’t be the UK under Labour of course, or indeed in the EU which is even worse.
January 15, 2025
“The strategy needs plenty of datacentres which need plenty of cheap electricity.” – Exactly. The same electricity that is needed to power AI hardware. The same electricity for the BoE’s dream of Crypto Currency, crypto is created by mining (just a phrase) in reality its an electricity thing, the cheaper the electricity supplied the more availability to create crypto – at 100% penalty that not going to happen.
You can run the same conversation on electric cars (Norway has more(EV’s) as its power is supplied at around half of what is available in the UK), then you have the electricity guzzling air sourced heat pumps – the same answer.
The UK needs an energy policy a cheap energy policy. It can then start funding the machine(the Country) so it can grow, create wealth – fund a future to cope with what ever is thrown at it.
But the UK in recent years has had Parliaments that have sort to destroy the UK’s future, topped of now with personal religious ideology.
January 15, 2025
Mark Zuckerberg is preparing to sack thousands of low performers at Meta as part of a productivity drive that “celebrates aggression”. The US billionaire has unveiled plans to cut and replace 5pc of the company’s lowest performers – equivalent to around 3,600 staff – in the coming months.
In a memo to staff on Tuesday, first reported by Bloomberg, Mr Zuckerberg said: “I’ve decided to raise the bar on performance management and move out low-performers faster.
“We typically manage out people who aren’t meeting expectations over the course of a year, but now we’re going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle.”
Will AI offer more efficient and solution based strategies than lower performing staff?
January 15, 2025
AI is not a universal panacea it will be useful for medical use to spot abnormalities in scans much quicker than a human, but the public section will use it as a “Gate Keeper” – “Computer Says No” i.e. to replace the current “noreply” emails that we see too often from the public sector.
I already see it as the way that our GP’s use a pseudo-AI called Amina it to distance themselves from their potential patients.
And Elon Musk can’t even control the adaptive/dynamic headlights on his Tesla’s such that they don’t blind on coming traffic.
January 15, 2025
I hate the misuse of language for political gain
Prove to me that AI is ‘real’ and not just really clever computer code/programmimg
January 15, 2025
Lets be negative and celebrate No 10’s latest BooBoo. Like bowel movements they happen every day.
On a technicality, as to whether it was a minister or secretary of state who signed the order to incarcerate Jerry Adams during the troubles, he will be entitled to compensation. That which applies to the godfather of terrorism will of course apply to other IRA terrorists.
Forget about what is owed to postmasters, contaminated blood recipients, female pensioners, and possibly any thalidomide survivors, the legal lizard will bow to terrorism.
I wonder what he has in mind for tomorrow.
January 15, 2025
INEOS closes last remaining synthetic ethanol plant in the UK with the loss of several hundred jobs.
https://www.ineos.com/news/ineos-group/chemicals-coming-to-an-end-in-the-uk/
Long Live Artificial intelligence (AI)
January 15, 2025
Does AI have the potential to work from home like all the other Public Sector employees, or does it have to work from an office?
Just curious.
Also, if we are to believe the hype surrounding AI, one of the key benefits is the ability to make better more economic decisions because it can look at all the data before advising what to do.
With that being the case, where does the additional GDP come from?
Surely if a more efficient computer working 24/7 rather than a three day week can make better decisions at lower cost than currently employed office workers, won’t the effect of that be a reduction of office workers and a lowering of cost and a lowering GDP?
January 15, 2025
So the Government is talking about AI again… Just like they did in the 1960s (remember Cybernetics) and then again in the 1980s (Remember the Alvey report) – and for all I know in the 2000s. There is nothing like an Exponential scalable problem to keep the next generation of Arts Graduate SPADs excited…
A little technical detail: As I see AI, the core issue is the exponential increase in the ‘dimensionality’ of the problem when you move it out of the ‘toy’ laboratory situation . In its time the ‘Eliza’ interactive conversational programme convinced quite a few with what we now consider meagre computing power. So, since then, we have moved up in computing power by, say, a factor of 1000 – but will the AI programme be 1000 times more capable? – more likely by a factor of 3 to 10. I reckon this will be true for both ‘programmed’ AI programmes using labels (eg LISP) as well as Neural Network connectionist type AI programmes.