Technology and innovation minister Patrick Vallance told lawmakers last night that the new office is intended to “streamline the regulatory journey for high-tech firms to ensure that the process is easier and simpler and that people and public services can benefit from early access to transformative technologies” such as AI.
Infrastructure and regulatory changes for AI are within the remit of the upcoming AI Opportunities Action Plan which the government announced in the summer and says will begin “shortly,” although minister Peter Kyle said this week that it could still be months away (see here).
Responsibility for standards had not been mentioned before, but Vallance said “this will be looked at as part of what the regulatory innovation office does.”
He was speaking in a debate in the House of Lords, Parliament's upper chamber, on the contribution of technology to economic growth, and replied to a point made by lawmaker Ralph Palmer about the UK losing its influence at international standards-setting negotiations.
“When I was young, we were top of the tree and now we are nowhere," Palmer said. "We started sending rubbish people to the standards conferences and we just became irrelevant.”
Also speaking was Jonathan Berry, Vallance's predecessor under the Conservative government deposed by the Labour party after elections in July. “There are not many silver bullets in technology regulation, but standards will be one of them,” said Berry. “International global standards, particularly for instance with the copyright issue in AI, are going to be a big part of that solution.”
Plans for AI infrastructure are in some disarray, and part of the AI Opportunities Action Plan is to inform the development of regulation.
Vallance told lawmakers last night that tech infrastructure is an important area for the UK and “we need significant compute infrastructure.”
— Supercomputing —
In this context, the national supercomputing project needed to be “sorted out,” Vallance said, referring to projects including an "exascale" computer at the University of Edinburgh that were shelved by Labour earlier this year.
The project was initially stated to play a key part in research around AI safety that the Conservative government had said would inform future regulation.
Vallance said it was “important that we get the AI and the exascale process sorted out, so that we have proper compute infrastructure right the way across the UK academic and business communities.”
Announced a year ago, the Edinburgh project would have researched AI safety and development among other areas such as drug development (see here). The previous government also announced last September that a supercomputer would be built at the University of Bristol as the AI Research Resource (see here).
The national resource was envisioned to research AI model safety and help align the nation's AI computing power with its ambitions for innovation and regulation.
A month after taking office, the new government shelved the previous government’s combined $1.7 billion supercomputing and AI Research Resource projects, stating they were unfunded.
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