Downing Street intervenes in British AI building project
It’s been about a year since ChatGPT first exploded into the public consciousness. Since then, everyone from the biggest global tech firms to the smallest local organisations have been racing to catch up with a technology that’s already changing the world. And the British government is no exception.
According to the Daily Telegraph, the UK has dropped a cool £100m on procuring GPUs – or “AI chips” in the parlance of the traditional press – from companies such as Intel, AMD and Nvidia. And it is with the latter that the government has reportedly already moved to acquire 5,000 GPU units.
It’s all part of the plan, which was first announced back in March, to build a “National AI Resource” – a supercomputer that will help British scientists and researchers go toe-to-toe with the big tech firms in Silicon Valley.
This plan follows a report recommending that the Resource “should provide significant accelerator capacity of at least 3,000 top-spec AI accelerators, sufficient to support exploratory compute for every UK AI researcher as well as large-scale training runs, and provide access to a wide range of key datasets and skilled staff to support its use”.
In other words, it needs a heck of a lot of computational power to crunch through data and train AI models. (Though critics are quick to point out that the supercomputer that trained GPT-4, the model behind ChatGPT, used 25,000 GPUs.)
“We are committed to supporting a thriving compute environment which maintains the UK’s position as a leader across science, innovation and technology,” a spokesperson for the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology told PC Pro.
Shortage of hardware
There is something striking about the purchase, which will be managed through the UK Research & Innovation Agency, and that is that the GPUs are being bought en masse – with what appears to be the government’s direct involvement – instead of in smaller quantities or by organisations further down the public sector food chain.
The reason the government is so closely involved allegedly goes far beyond just haggling for a bulk discount. “The reason for trying to secure the GPUs at that level is because there’s actually quite a shortage [of hardware],” said Vasilis Kapsalis, UK Public Sector Lead at VAST, an AI data platform.
“There’s so much dem
