Britain must act now on AI, reckons UK government

Ah, splendid news — the UK government has finally realised that AI might be important. Technology Secretary Liz Kendall has declared that 'Britain must act now on AI,' warning that countries which fail to get to grips with it could lose control over their security and economic future. Because nothing says 'we're on top of this' like a ministerial announcement that essentially admits we've been napping while 70% of global AI compute was vacuumed up by just five companies. Five. Companies. That's not a market; that's a heist, and we're the bloke reading the paper on the train as the safe gets wheeled out.

Kendall's big insight? That 70% figure, which she presumably discovered after someone slipped it under her office door. The five companies — presumably Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, and maybe OpenAI or Nvidia — now hold the keys to the digital kingdom. Britain, meanwhile, is trying to legislate its way into relevance while running on a compute diet of old GPUs and good intentions. The gap between the warning and the action is so vast you could drive a lorry through it, which is probably how the next five years of UK AI policy will feel: lots of noise, very little traction.

But chin up — we've still got our plucky regulator, the AI Safety Institute, which has become expert at issuing politely worded reports that nobody reads. Kendall's urgency is commendable, but history suggests this will translate into a consultation paper, a roundtable, and eventually a 'UK AI Strategy 2.0' that launches just as the compute party moves to Mars. Still, at least we're not the EU, which is still arguing about Article 5 while the robots automate Brussels. Cheers.