Devon Whittle

Seeing some bad takes on British Government AI funding: some notes. 1. The Government has announced a tranche of funding for a number of different AI-related organisations and initiatives. It comes to roughly £600m (excluding private sector input.) This has led to a series of partisan bad takes by people who don’t really follow this conversation. That is annoying because only I can have partisan bad takes. 2. Two common takes: “this is nothing, AI labs spend hundreds of millions every day/month etc! We can’t compete! Common British L” Or “Government is terrible at picking winners and investing, should be left to the private sector.” These takes reflect usually partisan pre-existing notions, neither actually understands what this money does or doesn’t do, and neither actually examines what the money is going towards either. Apples to oranges type stuff. 3. Let’s break down two of the more significant sets. The first is more funding for AISI (+£120m), and the second is for a new AI Biosecurity Lab (£100m, + around £200m from frontier companies). 4. AISI is the world’s best resourced institute doing this work and leading in its class. Don’t take my word for it - feel free to read MI5 Chief’s recent speech, or any number of expert statements from frontier companies. IT IS NOT a frontier AI company competitor. IT IS NOT designed to produce cutting edge LLMs or agents or consumer applications. It is, effectively, a research organisation staffed by clever people whose job is to analyse what frontier AI companies are working on and test their stuff. So if you’re measuring this announcement of investment and saying “it’s nothing compared to what AI firms spend”, you’re comparing totally different things. Instead, look how much spending Britain’s AISI gets relative to its international counterparts on getting access and insight into this frontier. 5. The UK’s AI Biosecurity Lab (AIBL) is even newer than AISI, and a world first. IT IS NOT a competitor to private sector biolabs. IT IS NOT an example of Government intervening and ‘picking a winner.’ Its job - modelled after AISI - is to “develop technical capabilities that help the UK better understand, prevent, detect and respond to biological threats.” It will do this by attracting best in class talent + working with frontier companies + working with the UK’s wider biosecurity landscape + other agencies. 6. Both of these organisations represent continuity in British Government thinking: ‘AI brings with it a whole bunch of positive things, but also risks. We should create organisations that attract top talent to help us analyse and understand this technology.’ You see this in MI5’s recently launched AI Threat Assessment Centre (AITAC) and the AI Economics Institute (AIEI) launched earlier this year. You can absolutely think this is the right or wrong approach btw but that’s the broad strategy. 7. So the comparisons to frontier companies’ spending is just misplaced. You’re working yourself into a tizzy over a misunderstanding of why the state is allocating resources. You shouldn’t compare these to frontier companies, but instead to other AISIs or other foreign govt AI investments I guess. Finally, if I asked many of those commenting what they would do differently, I would guess they wouldn’t really know.