UK government to launch AI research lab to support ‘bold, high-risk’ innovation
The UK government has announced plans to launch an artificial intelligence research lab to foster “transformational breakthroughs” in areas such as healthcare, transport, science and everyday technology.
The government said that the facility, which has been named the Fundamental AI Research Lab, would “lay the foundations for AI that supports earlier medical diagnoses, more resilient infrastructure, faster scientific discovery and better day-to-day tools for people and public services”.
It added that the lab would “rethink how AI tools are built, rather than simply scaling up existing systems and training them on more data, opening the door to new capabilities that don’t exist yet”.
Kanishka Narayan, the UK’s AI minister, stressed the role the lab would play in making the UK a global leader in AI-powered technologies.
“AI is already doing things we could never have imagined just a few years ago, like helping to diagnose cancer,” he said. “It can and will do even more – but if we want this technology to be a force for good, we need to make sure the next big AI breakthroughs are made in Britain.”
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Overcoming AI’s challenges – and the lab’s funding
The government acknowledged that AI presents persistent challenges, such as its tendency to “hallucinate”, and demonstrate “unreliable memory” and “unpredictable reasoning”.
It said that the lab would be tasked to develop “new approaches that could make future AI systems far more accurate, transparent and trustworthy, [and that] could make it possible for AI to do even more”.
The lab is backed by up to £40m (US$53.4m) in government funding over six years, and the lab will benefit from access to the AI Research Resource’s compute capacity, which the government said was worth “tens of millions of pounds”.
The funding call is open for applications, and the government said its goal is to attract the “boldest and most ambitious proposals” from AI experts across the country.
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The applications will be assessed by a peer review panel chaired by Raia Hadsell, an AI ambassador from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. Hadsell has worked for Google DeepMind since 2014 and currently leads the company’s frontier AI efforts as vice president of research.
Hadsell said AI had the ability to “solve humanity’s most complex problems” and that “fundamental research” was needed to reach its full potential.
“The UK has the world-class talent and academic ecosystem to drive transformational research, and I am excited to see the proposals that emerge from this call,” she said.
The lab is an “early first step” towards the delivery of UK Research and Innovation’s AI strategy, which was revealed last month. The strategy is designed to embed AI into the UK’s science and research efforts and is backed by £1.6bn (US$2.1bn) in funding over the next four years.
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About Jack Aldane
Jack is a British journalist, cartoonist and podcaster. He graduated from Heythrop College London in 2009 with a BA in philosophy, before living and working in China for three years as a freelance reporter. After training in financial journalism at City University from 2013 to 2014, Jack worked at Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters before moving into editing magazines on global trade and development finance. Shortly after editing opinion writing for UnHerd, he joined the independent think tank ResPublica, where he led a media campaign to change the health and safety requirements around asbestos in UK public buildings. As host and producer of The Booking Club podcast – a conversation series featuring prominent authors and commentators at their favourite restaurants – Jack continues to engage today’s most distinguished thinkers on the biggest problems pertaining to ideology and power in the 21st century. He joined Global Government Forum as its Senior Staff Writer and Community Co-ordinator in 2021.
