The UK government has reportedly committed £900 million ($1.1 billion) towards developing cutting-edge artificial intelligence, to create its own GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) AI model, as part of a broader artificial intelligence strategy that aims to establish a new AI research facility in the nation.
Called 'BritGPT', the exascale computer is said to be many times more powerful than the UK's largest computer and can perform over a billion simple calculations per second, a metric known as an “exaflops”.
The Guardian stated that the supercomputer would be utilized to train complex AI models that can be used in fields as diverse as science, industry, and defense, such as modeling weather and climate forecasts.
Acknowledging recent breakthroughs in large-scale language models, the technology behind chatbots like OpenAI's chatGPT, which has been a sensation since its launch last year, the UK government has declared it would establish a task force “to advance UK sovereign capability in foundation models, including large-scale language models.”
This technology investment is intended to counterbalance the virtual monopoly of ML/AI by US and Chinese mega companies.
The government is also investing £2.5bn in quantum technology over the next decade. Quantum computers are based on quantum physics, which studies how the subatomic particles that make up the universe work, and quantum computers can weave together different outcomes.
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