Overview
- The UK government confirmed on Tuesday that UK Research and Innovation through the EPSRC will provide up to £60 million over six years to host two new labs and will supply access to large-scale computing capacity worth tens of millions.
- The two centres are the Science of Fundamental AI Research (SoFair) Lab led by Professor David Barber at UCL with partners including Cambridge, Oxford and Edinburgh, and the British Open-ended Learning and Discovery (BOLD) Lab led by Professor Jakob Foerster at Oxford with partners including UCL and Imperial.
- SoFair will concentrate on next-generation open-source models that work on more common hardware while BOLD will develop resource-efficient, human-centred learning methods designed to perform in real-world and physical settings.
- Each lab will receive funding elements to recruit doctoral and early-career researchers, with reports saying about £2 million per lab to support at least ten PhD students to build UK AI talent.
- The labs form part of a wider UKRI AI strategy that complements the government’s recent hardware commitments and industry investments by targeting research to lower compute needs, broaden who can deploy AI, and strengthen UK sovereign capability.