What now for our AI future?

The US-UK tech prosperity deal carries promise but also peril for the public, argues Simon Thorne, of Cardiff Metropolitan University

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THE UK Government hailed the recent US state visit as a landmark for the economy. A record £150bn of inward investment was announced, including £31bn targeted at artificial intelligence (AI) development.

That encompasses work on large language models (LLMs), the technology behind AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and other generative AI models. It will also cover the supercomputing infrastructure needed to deliver innovations.

Microsoft alone pledged US$30bn (about £22bn) over four years, half on capital expenditure such as new data centres, the rest on operations, research and sales. Tech company Nvidia has also promised £11bn, with plans to deploy 120,000 of its Blackwell graphics-processing units (to speed up computer graphics, for example in games, and process digital images) in UK projects. The US AI cloud computing company Core-Weave is building a £1.5bn AI data centre in Scotland.

The political narrative is that the UK is becoming a global hub for AI. Yet behind the rhetoric lies a harder question: what kind of AI future do we want? Is it one where prosperity is broadly shared among the public, or one where private firms and foreign interests hold the levers of power, while the technology itself stagnates and spreads misinformation?

LLMs, the technology powering generative AI models such as Chat-GPT or Gemini, appear to be reaching their technical limits. The underlying hardware that LLMs are built on are called “transformer architectures”. They excel at producing fluent text but have persistent problems with reasoning and fact. Since Chat-GPT3.5 arrived in 2022, AI developers have scaled up models with more data and computing power, but gains have slowed and costs have soared.