Everyone is getting into a "hah, not enough money", or "what about money for this other problem", without keying in on the key phrase.<p>"Sovereign AI".<p>That's doing a lot of work. Right now the UK government (HMG), is relying mostly on US companies to provide AI workloads, even the simplest workloads. Across the EU this is a problem to the extent that hyperscale cloud providers are having to address digital sovereignty more explicitly (see Frankfurt region for AWS as an example).<p>Meanwhile the billionaire owners of these companies are mainlining Snowcrash and making clear that they think they should be in charge, and screw democracy.<p>There is some evidence of election tampering in multiple countries in 2024, and a suggestion floating in the air - based on recent events - that some billionaires might be OK with that, if it serves them (see /r/somethingiswrong2024).<p>If you're the UK PM, and you believe that AI is an important technical innovation (i.e. you believe the same thing that many people at Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, IBM, HPE, all the big consultancies all believe), and you see the people who hold all the cards lining up to a very, very strong hard-line political perspective that may or may not be aligned with HMG interests, what do you do? Nothing? Or perhaps figure out how to spin up a sovereign capability?<p>It won't be perfect. But, if they can spin this up and be confident that every £ spent, 30% of it isn't being creamed off the top to pay for space rockets and superyachts, and going back into investment, you might get to a point where it's competitive and starts to get to a much better place.<p>And there are a _lot_ of researchers who don't want to work for a FAANG, who are prepared to work on this. It isn't "the British civil service" who are building this, it's every person at a UK FAANG site and researcher in a Russell group university who is building this, and prepared to do it for a smaller wage as there's no toxicity tax you need to pay them to stick around pushing adverts on a social media website complicit in making teenagers want to kill themselves.<p>As to the budget situation, if AI meets just 20% of the hype, it could start to pay for itself in efficiency savings across HMG, and then money can start paying for roads maintenance and other aspects of public spending that have been deserted for years.