The British government is investing £900 million (about 1.43 trillion won) to construct a state-of-the-art supercomputer. It is a component of a synthetic intelligence (AI) technique to construct an independent ‘BritGPT’.

The Guardian reported on the fifteenth (local time) that the British government plans to take a position around £900m to construct an exascale computer and establish a latest AI research institute.

Exascale computers are able to performing multiple billion basic operations per second. ‘Frontier’ for scientific research situated at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in america is often known as the perfect exascale class supercomputer. The Frontier cost around £500m to construct and is greater than twice as powerful as the following fastest machine.

Exascale supercomputers produce other uses in science, industry and defense, including training complex AI models, in addition to weather forecasting and climate modeling.

Adrian Joseph, chief data and AI officer at British Telecom, warned the UK’s Parliamentary Science and Technology Committee last month that the UK risks falling behind China and tech giants in areas equivalent to cybersecurity and healthcare, and that competition has intensified in recent times. did.

The UK government has admitted that the UK is comparatively behind in the large language models that enable chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard.

At the identical time, the UK announced that it could form a task force to enhance its own capabilities of AI-based models and construct its own large language model ‘BritGPT’.

UK Treasury Secretary Jeremy Hunt has committed to £900m in funding for exascale supercomputers, as AI requires computing power.

Meanwhile, the UK government will award £1 million annually for probably the most revolutionary AI research over the following 10 years. It also committed to investing £2.5 billion in quantum computing technology over 10 years.

Chan Park, cpark@aitimes.com