UK needs its own ‘BritGPT’ or will face an uncertain future, MPs hear

theguardian.com:

The UK needs to support the creation of a British version of ChatGPT, MPs were told on Wednesday, or the country would further lose the ability to determine its own fate.

Speaking to the Commons science and technology committee, Adrian Joseph, BT’s chief data and artificial intelligence officer, said the government needed to have a national investment in “large language models”, the AI that underpins services such as ChatGPT, Bing Chat and Google’s Bard.

Without such technology, the nation would struggle to compete internationally in future, he said.

“We think there’s a risk that we in the UK, lose out to the the large tech companies, and possibly China, and get left behind … in areas of cybersecurity, of healthcare, and so on. It is a massive arms race that has been around for some time, but the heat has certainly been turned up most recently.”

Dame Wendy Hall, who co-chaired the UK government’s AI review in 2017, concurred with the need to develop a BritGPT. “If we don’t do it, we just become a service industry country,” she told MPs. “But in the UK, we can harness the technology, use that to drive the economy and grow jobs.”

The computing power required to perform cutting-edge AI work is expensive, MPs were told, which prevents the UK’s leading researchers in the field from competing directly with large, well-funded US companies.

“University researchers are at risk of being left behind,” said Nigel Shadbolt, the chair of the Open Data Institute, “because their access to the kinds of [computing power] you need is not organised terribly systematically. We’ve got to think about we can sustainably guarantee our access to that.”

Training GPT-3, the language model on which ChatGPT is based, took about $10m-worth of computing power