The new Labour government has shelved £1.3bn of funding promised by the Conservatives for tech and Artificial Intelligence (AI) projects, the BBC has learned.
It includes £800m for the creation of an exascale supercomputer at Edinburgh University and a further £500m for AI Research Resource, which funds computing power for AI.
Both funds were unveiled less than 12 months ago. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) said the money was promised by the previous administration but was never allocated in its budget.
Some in the industry have criticised the government’s decision. Tech business founder Barney Hussey-Yeo posted on X that reducing investment risked “pushing more entrepreneurs to the US.” Businessman Chris van der Kuyl described the move as “idiotic.”
“We never actually planned to pay this” - conservatives
They made populism in a nutshell.
I just got back from a month-long visit to the UK after 5 years of absence, and growing up there for 30 years before that. 1.3BN could definitely be better spent on things that will improve the lives of thousands of people right now.
It doesn’t really matter since it sounds like the promised money was imaginary to begin with.
You need to invest in the future aswell as the present.
I agree with that, and AI is an interesting thing to invest in. I just think there are more immediate requirements for the country in the short term. I only saw a small part of the country, but it’s got significantly worse in 5 years, and will certainly not benefit from a small investment in Edinburgh or wherever this was supposed to go.
You need to invest in both. You might not get an immediate return on this investment. But it’s the future without a doubt. Investing in AI doesn’t mean money isn’t invested elsewhere too. It’s probably two different funding buckets anyways.
So the Conservatives, just before the general election, announced a policy that sounds good, didn’t budget for it, did zero civil service legwork for it, just so that when Labour came in they’d have to scrap it and look bad?
Why am I not surprised?
“pushing more entrepreneurs to the US.”
Weird that private capital expects taxpayer money for their ventures lol
Or are they offering equity stake for these investments?
Grifters gonna grift. They’ll come here anyway even if they get the funds because there’s more and the Elons and Trumps make it easy for them to peddle snake oil without consequence.
I don’t know if this particular funding is reasonable or not, whether it’s cost-effective, but my kneejerk reaction is that I don’t really feel that a large parallel compute system for a university is the worst thing that one could get.
I do kind of wonder whether the university needs to actually own the computer, though. Like, there’s commercial demand for a large parallel computer. This isn’t the Large Hadron Collider or something. Maybe it’d make sense to just do grants for parallel compute time.
EDIT: Plus it sounds like it isn’t just owned by the university, but also co-located:
Edinburgh University had already spent £31m building housing for it.
I mean, why? The university presumably isn’t aiming to advance the system administration or maintenance of parallel compute clusters, but the software that runs on them.
