DeepMind’s Hassabis Urges UK To Expand AI Ambitions

The UK should strive to be at the “forefront” of artificial intelligence technologies and influence how they are developed and used, said Demis Hassabis, the co-founder of Google-owned DeepMind, at a Google Cloud event in London.

Hassabis, who co-founded AI-focused DeepMind in London in 2010 before its sale to Google four years later, said the UK’s top universities and high-ranking tech talent put it at the cutting edge of the AI industry.

“It’s more important than ever that we are at the forefront of these technologies as a country, both economically but also geopolitically to influence how these technologies end up getting deployed and used around the world,” he said.

AI edge

He stressed the importance of recent AI summits in the UK and France as ways of maintaining European influence on the technology.

A study last November from Stanford University listed the UK third in AI development after the US and China, ranking high in research and development, as well as educational infrastructure with high-level computer science universities providing a skilled AI workforce.

It noted that Hassabis and DeepMind director John Jumper were recently co-awarded a Nobel Prize.

In January the UK government announced a plan to make the country an AI “superpower” with a pro-innovation approach to regulation, as well as making public data available to researchers and creating growth zones for the development of infrastructure projects such as large data centres.

The government will also aim to use AI to boost the delivery of public services, using it to support the NHS and to spot potholes.

Hassabis also called for international standards to be developed on the use of copyrighted material in developing AI models.

“The complication is that these models are kind of global, they’re used everywhere,” he said.

“We need to set an international standard for this,” he added.

‘Productivity challenge’

AI companies such as OpenAI have been sued by multiple parties over their alleged use of copyrighted materials including news and fiction to train their models. OpenAI says it abides by fair-use principles.

Mark Read, chief executive of advertising giant WPP, speaking at the same event said the UK had a “productivity challenge” and argued AI would “be a big unlocker of that challenge”.

They spoke at a Google Cloud event at which the company announced expanded UK data residency for Google Agentspace, an AI agent platform.

The company also said it would add its Chirp 3 audio generation model, which uses voices with human-like qualities, to the Vertex AI platform on Google Cloud starting next week.