Could Britain lead the world on AI?
While it’s easy to get caught in the current waves of change, both politically with the recent election, and technologically with the glut of AI developments we’ve seen over the last year – legacy industries are not taking changes in the AI space lying down.
Just recently, the music industry launched its first real assault on generative AI. Ultimately, this was inevitable. Whereas the huge swathes of text used to create ChatGPT were mostly public, and the huge swathes of art used to create AI models such as Stable Diffusion, MidJourney, and DALL-E were held by artists who lacked the resources or organisation to properly fight AI companies. In contrast, the music industry lacks these constraints. AI has finally met its first real legal threat from outside the political arena.
The legal precedents set down now will shape the future of AI development, and therefore the future wealth and prospects of first-world countries. They also mark an emerging trend in the world of technology: the attempt to keep the institution of intellectual property alive in a world that has lapped it. Generative AI offers us the ability to create artwork en-masse, and could make the creative element of the marketing budget of nearly anyone who wants to create a product to near-zero. The amount of wealth and resources this could free up for spending in other industries is in the billions, protecting generative AI at all costs is in every country’s economic self-interest.
Japan has lead the way in this regard, removing enforcement of copyright law for any material used to create AI. Meanwhile, China has a long history of disregarding Western copyright law almost as a matter of foreign policy. The Western world is not just risking losing its first-mover advantage in AI by continuing to entertain intellectual property, it is almost guaranteeing losing out to the Eastern world. No matter how much money the Western world has in venture capital and cheap debt, without fresh data to train AI models on, the money will enable them only to purchase fractions of the data our Eastern counterparts possess.
Remember, everything created from this point in time forward is under intellectual property rights, and thanks to the efforts of Mickey Mouse, they won’t be available to train AI on for 70 years. As creative output grows exponentially in proportion to the human population, over time, the percentage of works that are protected by copyright can only increase. If Eastern countries have the best AI models, then Western companies will inevitably use them as a cost-saving measure, thus sending more data out of Western world and into the Eastern world, where it will be used to, again, train better models that solidify their advantage in the AI space.
Britain may well be the only Western country well-situated enough to avoid this AI ratched. We are not lobbied relentlessly by the music industry, unlike America. We are not in Europe, and thus not beholden to their onerous AI legislation. We are relatively wealthy by global standards, and have a long history with AI and technology. We could, with enough effort, save the Western world from losing a critical industry to our Eastern rivals.
Our AI strategy however, has been lacking. So far, we have purchased 5,000 GPUs from NVIDIA, meanwhile OpenAI have twice that. We are investing £250m, meanwhile Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has suggested we may well see AI models costing nearly four times that. Coupled with this are the huge energy resources used to train AI, while OpenAI and Microsoft develop literal power plants to create energy for their AI development, we struggle to build the energy resources to keep the lights on. A kilowatt-hour costs 44 cents in the UK. In the USA, it’s 17 cents. The relationship between energy abundance and wealth is already well-established, and only going to increase when AI becomes a mainstay in people’s lives.
We have claimed we want to lead the world on AI Safety. So far, the AI Safety Institute has been the biggest success of our strategy. It’s well-regarded by experts in the field, and acts as a resource to draw in talent and researchers from around the world. However, you cannot lead from behind. Asking the UK to lead on AI when we are yet to produce a company comparable to America is like asking a country with no nuclear weapons to lead the world on the policy around nukes. The changes needed to make the UK a country with a world-leading AI industry mean we must move beyond the vibes politics of just talking about leading, and actually leading by upsetting entrenched and well-established interest groups. Economically, it will mean going against the music industry and other well-funded groups. Politically, it will mean crushing NIMBYism. The leader that can do this will win Britain a strong position on the world stage, and looking at the references to vague ‘requirements’ for AI models in the Kings Speech, I do not see that person, and fear we will once again lose an opportunity to make not just this country, but the world a better place.