The British Treasury will allocate almost a billion pounds to build an artificial intelligence research center. The scientific institution will be equipped with a super-powerful computer that is several times larger than the existing supercomputers in the country.
The UK government has unveiled plans to build a research facility with a 1 exaflops supercomputer to develop its own artificial intelligence (AI) BritGPT, similar to the sensational ChatGPT technology.
The performance of 1 exaflops means that the machine will be able to perform a quintillion (billion billion, 1018) operations per second, which is several times higher than the capabilities of all other British supercomputers. Currently, only one computer of this power is known – a device called Frontier, located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the United States.
An exascale computer can be used to train complex AI models, as well as for other purposes in defense, industry and science, including modeling weather and climate forecasts.
The UK government has acknowledged recent breakthroughs in the large language models behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot, which has been a sensation since its launch. The UK Treasury said the £900m (just over $1bn) investment will enable researchers to better understand climate change, discover new drugs and maximize the potential in artificial intelligence and neural networks.
The UK Treasury also announced that over the next 10 years it will be awarding a £1 million ($1.2 million) prize for the most innovative research in the field of artificial intelligence. The award will be called the Manchester Prize in memory of the Manchester Small Experimental Machine, built at the University of Manchester in 1948, which became the forerunner of modern computers.
AI-powered assistants are already being used in industries ranging from education to brewing. Along with this, environmentalists are concerned regarding the growing power consumption of data centers that are used to train neural networks, as this leads to an increase in greenhouse emissions from fossil fuel power plants. Some researchers are also worried regarding the behavior of artificial intelligence, as algorithms have begun to talk regarding their desire to be like humans and have more influence.
