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tomwphillips 7 hours ago

This kind of science/tech investment is and has been catnip for UK government, regardless of political party, for years. They're out of ideas to stimulate growth, and AI is their hail Mary. No one involved seems to be able to explain why it will work.

testdelacc1 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Ok let’s assume that AI will be a game changer. How does hosting it in the UK change anything? Just feels like something to brag about, but doesn’t have any impact.

The UK is suffering from persistently expensive electricity (https://grid.iamkate.com/, see All-Time). How does hosting AI data centres help with that?

hmottestad 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

In Norway I've noticed that stringent requirements for privacy make it much easier to run things in the cloud if the physical location of said cloud is actually in Norway.

So if OpenAI is hosting their services within the borders of the UK, then they would also be beholden to UK law. Makes it easier for the financial sector, government and healthcare to use their AI models than if they would have to send their data to a datacenter in the US.

tempodox 4 hours ago | parent [-]

But as a US company it’s also under US jurisdiction. So the alphabet agencies still get their data handed on a silver platter.

physicsguy 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Well, they're aiming to do the power via SMR reactors, and they have a large government supported company (Rolls) making those. I think there's a bit of a hail mary that that will be a successful export story.

testdelacc1 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah it’ll be great when it happens. But work on the SMRs was only approved in June this year. It will take 10+ years of development and construction according to their current estimates. Every nuclear project usually takes twice as long and thrice as costly. So we could see those SMRs start to come online in like 2040.

The chips in these data centres would have been EOL-d by then.

t0lo 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I love small modular reactor reactors

simianwords 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't know much about this but do these prices reflect electricity costs for a datacenter? Maybe the infra is different than for general public use.. maybe the last mile problems don't exist for data centers.

testdelacc1 7 hours ago | parent [-]

This is true. Data centres usually sign deals with power plants. But for the country as a whole, it does exacerbate the problem with a lack of energy.

And I’m perfectly happy to spend the energy as well! It’s just unclear what the benefit is to hosting within the UK.

ycombigators 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Royal Dutch Shell for the win!

oncallthrow 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes, all the usual suspects (politicians and political pundits of all stripes) have moved seamlessly from “the green revolution” to AI.

It’s all irrelevant to the fundamental economic problems the country is facing, which do not have an easy solution.

derektank 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>They're out of ideas to stimulate growth

You've gotta help us doc. We've tried nothing and we're all out ideas

FirmwareBurner 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Maybe they think it's like Peter Pan, if enough people believe in it, it will work.

Dilettante_ 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Everytime somebody denies the AI revolution, a Bored Ape loses its value

torginus 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

From what I gather the UKians have a real chip on their shoulders from being left out of every tech revolution of the recent decades (chips, EVs and assorted green energy tech, rockets and now AI)

00deadbeef 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Green energy like the world’s largest offshore windfarms which are in the UK? Or the SMRs Rolls-Royce are developing?

Chips like those designed by Arm that can be found in almost everything these days?

AI like DeepMind?

torginus 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I might've misspoken, I didn't mean to imply the UK didn't contribute significantly to these fields, it's that they didn't manage to establish themselves as major players.

I assure you I've heard these sentiments from real Brits.

While I'm not going to question the contributions of UK people and companies to these fields, but with the exception of RR, none of these companies are actually still in the hands of Britons, DeepMind is Google, ARM has been brought out by SoftBank (and Imagination that used to do the GPUs for the iPhone has been kind of sidelined).

The UK is not percieved as a mover and shaker in the rocketry industry like the USA is with SpaceX and the like, and not even to the extent other players like Russia/China are.

Sota AI is made today by US and Chinese firms, while the UK might have an extensively built out green infrastructure, it's made out of foreign-made equipment, no UK company makes EVs like the way Tesla or VW does etc.

xorcist 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Well, there's something to be said about the inability to capitalize long term.

Britain has managed to be at the forefront of all those revolutionary technologies, but when the real break out happens somehow the Americans swoop in and buy the winners. That's shaky ground for future ingenuity.

ARM seems to have been very important to Cambridge at large, but it's not Silicon Valley. I can sort of understand why politicians would look back at things and ponder what could have been done differently.

ycombigators 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm assuming you are a hunter because your gathering skills suck.

6 hours ago | parent | next [-]
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7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]
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kybernetikos 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Are you saying this with an awareness that both DeepMind and ARM were founded in the UK?

argsnd 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I am convinced that a lot of people have developed a completely distorted view of the UK by spending too much time on x.com where Elon Musk pushes his “come on, have a civil war already” bullshit and paints a picture of a country in its death throes.

7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]
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walthamstow 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

People of the UK are referred to collectively as Britons or Brits.

mike_hearn 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Number of objects launched into orbit by country, both cumulative and annual:

1. USA

2. Russia

3. China

4. Britain

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-number-of-obje...

Not bad for a small country that's never been involved in a space race and which stopped trying to be a global Great Power before the space age even started.

I'm from Britain and can't think of anyone I know who has a chip on their shoulder about technology, largely because most of us either went to work for successful American firms the moment we graduated, or in the case of my brother, made a successful tech startup, grew it to be a profitable business and then sold it for a large sum of money (to the Americans again). Many of us have managed to achieve great life success by taking part in the tech industry, and were rewarded with small ownership stakes in those firms as a result. The fact that we didn't found those companies is a pity and a genuine source of relative weakness, but the reality is that the internet makes for global markets in which for any given product category there can only be a few winners. People can't really handle more than about four or five brands vying for attention simultaneously, which means it's just not mentally possible for every country to have a successful tech company in every category. The places that managed to grow competitors to the big US success stories all relied on either language barriers or government interference.

As for the rest, note that the USA is holding onto chip manufacture by its fingernails right now, an obsession with green tech is exactly the reason there aren't many AI datacenters in the UK to begin with, and Britain birthed one of the world's top AI labs. Yes, owned by Google because only great powers can invest the sums required, but that's OK. The collaboration between Britain and America on AI has been superb nonetheless.

Don't get me wrong. The UK is in a terrible state right now, the result of decades of leftward drift after the 1980s that consistently prioritized everything except economic success. Just turning around the Titanic would take years even if the process were to start tomorrow, which it won't, and the cultural gap is real. But there are still some strong foundations there. A whole generation of Brits have learned what great companies look like by working for the Americans. That's not reflected in their politics yet because politics is in both countries dominated by the old, and currently revolves around the issue of mass immigration. Economic success is on the backburner for now. But it'll come back. And when it does, there will be people who are ready to lead.

Nursie 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The UK didn't exactly get left out, it just failed to invest in growth and productisation. Some great research comes out of there and then moves overseas or gets bought up (like ARM).

If there are any chips on shoulders, it's more to do with the government talking itself up, throwing around some feel-good bullshit, usually entirely mis-targeted (see for example Sunak talking about making a safe space for blockchain companies) and then failing to get out of the way when the country actually does produce something amazing.