Britain Pledges To Invest £2.5bn In Quantum Computing

The British Finance Minister, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, has set out a plan to improve the national AI industry with the objective for the country to become a "world-leading quantum-enabled economy by 2033" with a £2.5bn research and innovation programme. Hunt said  that  he wants the "best AI research to happen in the UK".

His Budget announced an investment of £900m to set up an Artificial Intelligence (AI) research resource to develop an "Exascale" supercomputer, with initial investments this year. 

These supercomputers have important military applications and it may be that others already exist, but not publicly acknowledged by their owners. Capable of at least a quintillion operations per second an Exascale computer can be used for training complex AI models, but also have other uses across science, industry and defence, including modelling weather forecasts and climate projections. 

Only one such machine is known to exist, Frontier, which is housed at America’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and used for scientific research. Frontier, which cost about £500m to produce and came online in 2022, is more than twice as powerful as the next fastest machine.

Hunt also announced an annual £1m prize for the most ground-breaking research into artificial intelligence. This prize will be called the Manchester Prize in honour of 'Baby' the world’s first stored program computer, which was built at the University of Manchester in 1948.

• Entrepreneur network Tech Nation called this Budget statement "a positive indication of the UK government's commitment to becoming a science and technology superpower".

• Industry body TechUK said he had "put the UK back on the pitch when it comes to the global competition for science and technology", despite "notable omissions and frustrations, such as the lack of a UK semiconductor strategy and the only partial reversal of cuts to the R and D [research and development] tax credit".

AIs are trained on large datasets of images and text, sometimes "scraped" from the internet without permission some owners of Intellectual Property (IP), artists and rights owners fear this means the British government will revive a plan to provide an exemption to copyright rules to let AI companies scrape content. and allege their IP rights are being violated. 

In his Budget speech, Chancellor Hunt said: "We'll work at pace with the Intellectual Property Office to provide clarity on IP rules so that generative AI companies can access the material they need."

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