Artifical intelligence applications are all the rage these days with big tech firms investing millions of dollars in the space. We recently learned that the PaLM 2-powered Google Bard is getting better at solving coding and mathematical questions, while both Bing Chat and ChatGPT continue to showcase stellar performance across a variety of use-cases. However, with the increasing prevalence of AI systems, it’s important to be cautious about their applications too. The UK government is now looking to take steps in this direction with early access to some popular AI models.
In the ongoing London Tech Week 2023 event, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has noted that his government will get “early or priority access” to models developed by OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic. This is a bid from the UK government to further study the models closely for research purposes and to assess their safety, presumably prior to general rollout.
Sunak has emphasized that safety in AI is a priority for his government, which is why the UK will also be hosting the first Summit on global AI Safety later this year. Apart from exercising caution when it comes to this domain, the UK has also committed to investing £900 million ($1.1 billion) in compute technology and another £2.5 billion ($3.1 billion) in quantum computing to become a leader in these fields. Additionally, it has pledged £100 million ($125.1 million) towards its “expert taskforce” that will be responsible for managing the safety of AI applications.
Sunak further noted in his keynote that:
And we’re harnessing AI to transform our public services from saving teachers hundreds of hours of time spent lesson planning to helping NHS patients get quicker diagnoses and more accurate tests. AI can help us achieve the holy grail of public service reform: better, more efficient services.
So this is our strategy for safe AI:
To lead at home; to lead overseas; and to lead change in our public services. All part of how we meet our goal of making this the best country in the world for tech.
Although artificial intelligence has demonstrated impressive capabilities in a variety of use-cases such as generative AI (GAI), its potential ramifications to the tech industry and other sectors are currently being studied, and it will likely be a while before we fully understand the disruption that this technology will cause across the globe.