( UK ) Prime Minister sets out blueprint to turbocharge AI

Everyone is getting into a "hah, not enough money", or "what about money for this other problem", without keying in on the key phrase.

"Sovereign AI".

That's doing a lot of work. Right now the UK government (HMG), is relying mostly on US companies to provide AI workloads, even the simplest workloads. Across the EU this is a problem to the extent that hyperscale cloud providers are having to address digital sovereignty more explicitly (see Frankfurt region for AWS as an example).

Meanwhile the billionaire owners of these companies are mainlining Snowcrash and making clear that they think they should be in charge, and screw democracy.

There is some evidence of election tampering in multiple countries in 2024, and a suggestion floating in the air - based on recent events - that some billionaires might be OK with that, if it serves them (see /r/somethingiswrong2024).

If you're the UK PM, and you believe that AI is an important technical innovation (i.e. you believe the same thing that many people at Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, IBM, HPE, all the big consultancies all believe), and you see the people who hold all the cards lining up to a very, very strong hard-line political perspective that may or may not be aligned with HMG interests, what do you do? Nothing? Or perhaps figure out how to spin up a sovereign capability?

It won't be perfect. But, if they can spin this up and be confident that every £ spent, 30% of it isn't being creamed off the top to pay for space rockets and superyachts, and going back into investment, you might get to a point where it's competitive and starts to get to a much better place.

And there are a _lot_ of researchers who don't want to work for a FAANG, who are prepared to work on this. It isn't "the British civil service" who are building this, it's every person at a UK FAANG site and researcher in a Russell group university who is building this, and prepared to do it for a smaller wage as there's no toxicity tax you need to pay them to stick around pushing adverts on a social media website complicit in making teenagers want to kill themselves.

As to the budget situation, if AI meets just 20% of the hype, it could start to pay for itself in efficiency savings across HMG, and then money can start paying for roads maintenance and other aspects of public spending that have been deserted for years.

As long as you have decent utilisation then buying and running your own hardware is typically a lot cheaper than using AWS etc al.

Cloud shines for dynamic loads, global resilience etc - but if you just want to run a lot of computational jobs for a long time, then running your own kit is likely to be much much cheaper.

The other advantage of your own kit is you can guarantee it will be available when you want it, and you can optimise the stack for your own applications.

There is a reason something like 3/4 of Amazons profits come from AWS and not selling books et al.

In terms of streamlining paperwork with AI - I'd first look at whether the paper work is useful in the first place, before spending lots of money trying to automate it.

For example in the NHS, the 'market' reforms of successive governments have led to the ridiculous scenarios where hospital doctors can't simple book a follow-up appointment to check on a patient in a few weeks time - they have to do all the discharge paperwork and ask the patient to get a referral from their GP back to the service - as that's how various bit's of the org 'get paid'.

To some extent, there is actually an incentive to have low-value paperwork in a health system. There's only so many resources, and adding friction to the process is a form of "how serious is your issue, really?" triage. It obviously falls apart where the doctor is doing the same thing they normally would, just now with more paperwork, but it may make them think twice about doing two blood tests when they have a hunch the first one is the most relevant.

Of course, that sucks for every metric of a health system that actually matters (outcomes), but this report could reflect one hand of the government not talking to the other.

That is my thinking, yes. Plus also simply the government has access to a lot of capital and land.

Overhead from running your own datacentres is a factor, but (taking this report at face-value) it seems like there will be some modicum of government owned computer resources built. I feel like the cost difference between standing up a small datacentre capable of what they are pitching, versus standing up an over-allocated datacentre is mostly centred on initial 1-time cost. Once things are running, the ongoing cost may not be much different. Even if the government was the only client at a small datacentre, they would still have to have support, maintenance, and management. If they were instead selling over-allocated resources back to the private sector, there would be sales staff, but otherwise the other expenditures would remain nearly the same. They wouldn't even have to be that competitive on anything other than price, functioning much like a utility. Fancy PaaS features can be fully the responsibility of the private sector to develop on top of the true-blue british metal + electrons the government is offering up.