Government’s AI plans aim to boost growth
The UK Government’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) plans aim to boost growth and provide a “vast potential” for future innovation according to Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer.
The AI Opportunities Action Plan was launched last week with proposals that include investments to boost growth and deliver services more efficiently.
In a speech setting out the government’s plans to use AI across the UK to boost growth and deliver services more efficiently, Sir Keir said the government had a responsibility to make AI “work for working people”.
According to The Rt Hon Peter Kyle, Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, (pictured below) Britain is currently the third largest AI market in the world and is home to an extraordinary array of global talent and pioneering AI firms like Google DeepMind, ARM, and Wayve.
But he said the UK, despite its record of scientific discovery – from Alan Turing on algorithms and general purpose computing to Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web – risked falling behind the USA and China when it came to advances in AI.
The ambition of the Government, through the use of the AI Opportunities Action Plan, is to shape the AI revolution on principles of shared economic prosperity, improved public services and increased personal opportunities so that:
- AI drives the economic growth on which the prosperity of our people and the performance of our public services depend;
- AI directly benefits working people by improving health care and education and how citizens interact with their government;
- The increasing of prevalence of AI in people’s working lives opens up new opportunities rather than just threatens traditional patterns of work.
What is AI and how can it boost growth?
AI promises to transform nearly every aspect of our economy and society.
AI is a general-purpose technology with broad applicability and multiple use cases across sectors. It presents the opportunity for machines to learn, adapt, and perform tasks that have the potential to assist people, businesses, and organisations.
At its heart, AI allows computers to learn and solve problems almost like a person but at speeds and capacities that dwarf the abilities of an actual human.
The opportunities are endless – from advancing drug discovery, making transport safer and cleaner, improving public services, through to speeding up and improving diagnosis and treatment of diseases like cancer and much more.
AI systems are trained on huge amounts of information and are able to learn to identify the patterns found within it, this allows AI to carry out tasks such as having human-like conversation, or predicting the products an online shopper might buy.
Debbie Weinstein, Google’s president across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, believes AI has the power to change the way we fundamentally live, work, and learn, through its capacity to assist and empower people in almost every field of human endeavour.
“That’s why it’s important that we support the next generation in being equipped with the right digital skills to thrive,” she said.
In November 2024 Google launched the AI Campus, a two-year education pilot aimed to help inspire, inform, and educate local sixth form students in the field of AI, in Camden, London.
The pilot offers students access to cutting-edge resources on AI and machine learning, as well as offering mentoring and industry expertise from Google, Google DeepMind, and others.
Students are also provided with real-world projects which connect AI to diverse fields – including health, social sciences, and the arts – to allow them to explore the range of local and global challenges that AI can be used to address.
The company also announced a Google.org grant of £865,000 to fund AI literacy programmes across the country.
Speaking in 2023, after the launch of Google’s Economic Impact Report for 2023 set out to understand the potential impact of AI on the UK’s economy, she said: “AI is the most profound technology that humanity is working on today. It’s a critical part of solving big societal challenges, from tackling climate change to developing new personalised medicines.
“That’s why it’s so inspiring that some of the early seeds of this extraordinary technology were sown right here in the UK. From British mathematician Alan Turing in the 1950s, to the team at Google DeepMind’s work on protein folding today,” she added.
For Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, the development of AI is the most important technological advance in decades. Writing back in 2023, he called it as fundamental as the creation of the microprocessor, the personal computer, the Internet, and the mobile phone.
“It will change the way people work, learn, travel, get health care, and communicate with each other. Entire industries will reorient around it. Businesses will distinguish themselves by how well they use it,” he wrote.
How does the UK Government intend to develop AI?
Estimates from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) support the claim that AI could increase productivity, however it also warns that the changes may be gradual.
A lot of investment is required to see the type of growth the UK Government is hoping for. It says the AI Opportunities Action Plan is backed by leading tech firms, some of which have committed £14bn towards various projects, creating 13,250 jobs, but this is only the start.
Oher plans include:
- Invest in the foundations of AI: We need world-class computing and data infrastructure, access to talent and regulation;
- Push hard on cross-economy AI adoption: The public sector should rapidly pilot and scale AI products and services and encourage the private sector to do the same. This will drive better experiences and outcomes for citizens and boost productivity;
- Position the UK to be an AI maker, not an AI taker: As the technology becomes more powerful, we should be the best state partner to those building frontier AI. The UK should aim to have true national champions at critical layers of the AI stack so that the UK benefits economically from AI advancement and has influence on future AI’s values, safety and governance.
AI investment in the UK from companies like Google have already seen significant effect, with a PublicFirst report on the company’s activities in 2023 estimating it helped provide around £118bn in economic activity.
Key findings revealed:
- Consumers: Google services, including search and maps, save the average UK household £100 per year. Google tools have helped people in the UK earn more than £7bn a year in secondary income online.
- Businesses: Online search is the second most important way businesses say their customers find them, behind only word of mouth. Two-thirds of Google Business Profile users agree that it helps them attract new customers.
- Careers and skills: More than half of Britons under 25 have recently used Google Search to help them apply for a new job. More than seven million people have learned new digital skills through Google Search in Britain, creating a £26bn improvement in productivity.
- Economic and social potential of AI: AI tools could create more than £400bn in value for the UK economy by 2030. AI could save more than 700,000 hours a year in administrative work for GPs and teachers, offsetting cost pressures in sectors like health and education.
What are the potential problems with AI?
AI is not a perfect technology, it can make mistakes and, with its use in some sectors, there is the potential for those to be significant and dangerous.
GenerativeAI (GenAI) is sophisticated enough to give human-like responses, and if trained on enough quality data, in theory it could deal with all sorts of questions about government services.
But it has become well known for making mistakes or even nonsensical answers – so-called hallucinations.
There is also a danger of inbuilt “bias” based on the datasets being used, especially when a specific type of AI known as Machine Learning (ML) is involved. One major concern is the phenomenon of AI learning from other AIs, leading to an “echo chamber” effect. This can result in the rapid propagation of errors, as one AI’s hallucinations can be learned by others, compounding inaccuracies.
AI also needs powerful data centres to work, but Google warned in a report in September that the UK faced being “left behind” if it didn’t expand its network of such facilities.
Regulation is also another issue which AI faces and, with a number of lawsuits going through the courts in the USA over stolen data being used for GenAI programs like ChatGPT, Midjourney and StableDiffusion.
The plaintiffs include authors, visual artists, media companies like the New York Times, Getty Images and music-industry giants like Universal Music Group. This wide variety of rights holders are alleging that AI companies have used their work to train what are often highly lucrative and powerful AI models in a manner that is tantamount to theft.
Nearly every major GenAI company has been pulled into this legal fight, including OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, and Nvidia (see graphic below from WIRED).
In Conclusion
New developments such as the Minster Exchange in Cheltenham along with the much anticipated Golden Valley Development will see significant investment in the cyber industry over the next decade.
The AI Opportunities Action Plan is backed by leading tech firms which have already committed to major financial support. Pilot schemes aimed at educating the future workforce are already in place, backed by industry leaders like Google.
But there are also still plenty of uncertainties to be resolved, including supplying the energy required to power the computing necessary for AI advancement, and legislation surrounding the ethics of GenAI and other technologies.
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Stewart Boutcher, Group CTO said this about the Government’s plans for AI:
“It would be easy to be sceptical about the Government’s ambitions in the field of AI. There is no doubt that the UK will have to invest heavily to be regarded as even top ten in world-leading AI countries, let alone top three, as is the goal.
“However, there is no doubt that AI – when used effectively – can be an absolute game changer for business and Government alike, and therefore for the citizens of the country. Having witnessed first-hand the work that 10 Data Science (10DS) and the incubator for Artificial Intelligence (i.AI) are doing at the heart of Government, I am encouraged that the UK Government is finally taking this important matter very seriously indeed.”