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Britain Unveils £100M Funding for Taskforce to Help Build AI
Great Britain through its Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan have unveiled the creation of an expert taskforce to help build Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions for the country. According to a press release shared by the UK Government, the taskforce has been bootstrapped with the sum of £100 million (approximately $124.5 million) to commence work.
As the announcement noted, the allocated sum will be in addition to the £900 million that has been earmarked for compute technology within the annual budget. The expert taskforce will be focusing on the creation of Foundation Models including Large Language Models (LLMs) that are powering applications like the very popular ChatGPT.
The initiative is hinged on positioning the United Kingdom as a technology superpower by the year 2030 and the Foundation Model created will be focused on what can be easily adopted and integrated to help power the economy as a whole.
“Harnessing the potential of AI provides enormous opportunities to grow our economy, create better-paid jobs, and build a better future through advances in healthcare and security,” Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said in a statement, adding that “By investing in emerging technologies through our new expert taskforce, we can continue to lead the way in developing safe and trustworthy AI as part of shaping a more innovative UK economy.”
Specifically, the AI technology being developed will have a focus on healthcare and education. As detailed, the technology being pushed can help improve the rate of diagnoses in healthcare while helping to improve drug discovery and development.
In education, the UK Government believes AI technology can relieve some of the redundancies that teachers are facing on a daily basis. By relieving them of these stresses, they can focus on delivering excellent teaching to the students.
Britain AI Taskforce: Boom for the Economy
The AI taskforce has the mandate to improve the economy of Great Britain through state-of-the-art and in-demand technology. While the mandates are not similar, the government believes the AI team will build on the broad success of the COVID-19 taskforce that was set up by the Boris Johnson administration to help curtail the spread of the coronavirus.
While patiently anticipating the end product, the technology under development is billed to be ready for public testing within the next 6 months. The taskforce will enjoin broad and inclusive representation from every aspect of the economy including experts from both the government and the industry.
“Developed responsibly, cutting-edge AI can have a transformative impact in nearly every industry. It can revolutionize the way we develop new medical treatments, tackle climate change, and improve our public services, all while growing and future-proofing our economy,” Michelle Donelan said, “We need to act now to seize the opportunities AI can offer us in the future. We’re backing our expert taskforce with the funding to make our ambitions for an AI-enabled country a reality and keep the UK at the front of the pack in this emerging technology.”
Britain Unveils £100M Funding for Taskforce to Help Build AI
