AI is the best chance to revolutionise public services – but Britain has fallen well behind
Two Brits won Nobel prizes last year for their work on AI. Sir Demis Hassabis created Deep Mind which uses large datasets not just to learn to win at Go but also to identify protein structures; Geoffrey Hinton won his for the original insights into how a large language model could work.
Their research careers overlapped at one key place: UCL’s Gatsby computational neuroscience unit, backed by the great David Sainsbury.
We don’t just have great research strengths we also have great data. This became clear when Boris asked me to join him on a science and innovation trip to the US East Coast. We were going to see how we were doing on life science and genomics research compared with leading research institutes in America.
Our life science researchers’ aim was to link up genetic data with health data collected by GPs and hospitals throughout someone’s life; connecting up that data in the US is virtually impossible, as they have a far more fragmented system.
So we have brilliant innovative thinkers and precious public service data. But as so often we have not done so well at converting these extraordinary advances and resources into commercial companies or useful British applications. If you think not of the Nobel Prizes but of the Oscars, we seem to end up with the best supporting actor awards.
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