Matt Clifford: the power broker behind the UK's Al agenda

No 10's unofficial machine learning tsar is seeking to bake the technology into the UK's economic future, writes Patricia Clarke

- Patricia Clarke

In the summer of 2022, the US billionaire investor Reid Hoffman and the UK venture capitalist Matt Clifford were wrapping up a board meeting for Clifford's investment company, Entrepreneurs First (EF). As the other executives trickled out of the room, Hoffman turned to Clifford and asked: "Do you wanna see something cool?"

Then Hoffman, who at the time was a board member at chatbot maker OpenAI, opened his laptop and revealed a demo of ChatGPT. Clifford asked the AI chatbot to write him a dialogue between God and the pope about the implications of AI for the Roman Catholic church. The response - a coherent script, rendered instantly - astounded him.

It was an experience that would in some way be mirrored by millions of people across the globe a few months later, in November 2022, when ChatGPT was released to the public.

Clifford, who had just been appointed chair of the government's Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria) and wrote a weekly newsletter about the geopolitics of AI, sensed that the world was about to be transformed by this technology. His first thought was to text his wife, with whom he has two young children: "What are our kids going to do?" His second thought was to ask Hoffman if he'd shown this tool to any governments. He hadn't - yet.

Through his contacts at Aria, Clifford brokered a meeting between soon-to-be prime minister Rishi Sunak and Sam Altman, OpenAI's co-founder. Despite being impressed by the early demo, Sunak did not immediately understand the implications of the technology that he had just witnessed, according to several sources, and was caught off-guard when ChatGPT kickstarted a global conversation about the power of AI to transform economies.

In the scramble to understand how the UK could make its mark in AI, the government leaned on Clifford - a confident and eloquent ex-McKinsey consultant with degrees from Cambridge and MIT and deep ties to Silicon Valley.