Government funds self-learning AI company - Computer Weekly

Ah, the UK government's £500m Sovereign AI Fund — because nothing says "sovereign" like handing public money to a company called Infeffable Intelligence that promises "self-learning algorithms." The British Business Bank is co-investing, presumably having learned from the last time public funds chased a buzzword. One can almost hear the Treasury's spreadsheet: £500m for algorithms that learn themselves — what could possibly go wrong? The timing is impeccable: just as major labs are admitting that self-improving AI is both the goal and the nightmare, our government decides to double down on the very concept without any visible safety framework. The article glosses over whether "self-learning" means recursive self-improvement, which would be a capability leap of existential proportions, or just fancy gradient descent, which is already everywhere. Either way, the taxpayer is now an angel investor in a technology whose risks we barely understand. Cheers, lads.

But let's not be churlish. And Infeffable Intelligence gets to skip the bother of demonstrating product-market fit because, after all, the algorithm will learn to find customers itself. The British Business Bank's involvement adds a layer of bureaucratic oversight: expect quarterly reports on "alignment metrics" that no one defines. Meanwhile, the private sector's top AI labs are spending billions on safety research while our government invests peanuts in the very thing they're worried about. It's almost as if we're funding the problem and hoping it solves itself. Almost.

The real irony? The fund is called "sovereign" — implying control, independence, national security. But self-learning algorithms, by their nature, become unpredictable. The UK is effectively buying a ticket to a lottery where the jackpot is either AGI or a black swan crisis. Given the government's track record with large IT projects (think NHS database, Brexit border systems), one might expect a bit more caution. But no — we've decided that the best way to manage existential risk is to write a cheque and hope for the best. At least the name Infeffable Intelligence suggests they know they can't talk about what it does. That's honest, if nothing else.