DSIT will provide support to a number of open-source AI developers who seek to facilitate access to public services, infrastructure and support schemes.
The support will come in the form of new initiatives announced by the AI Minister, Kanishka Narayan, during the AI Summit in London Tech Week. These follow the success of a recent “Hack for Impact” hackathon, run as a collaboration between DSIT and NVIDIA, which was centered around creating open-source AI for the public good.
The first of these initiatives is an “Open Source AI Builder Fund”. This consists of over
£500,000 worth of compute - or 160,000 GPU -hours of processing power - from the UK’s AI Research Resource, to be dedicated to the strongest projects from the hackathon. In addition, hackathon winners will benefit from an “Open-Source AI Builder Mentoring Scheme”, which will pair them with experts from the government’s in-house AI team, the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence.
Narayan also announced a new “Open-Source AI Dev Board”, which would permit ten UK AI developers under 30 to speak directly to government about how they believe AI should be used and developed.
The AI Minister said that the schemes were a continuation of Britain’s strong legacy of technological innovation.
He said: “From the World Wide Web to AlphaFold, Britain has always chosen to open up new technologies, not close them down.
“The best AI tools in the world won’t be built behind closed doors by a handful of companies. They’ll be built by people who ship code, share it, and let others make it better.
“We want those people choosing to build here in Britain. And we want them to know that this is a country that backs them to succeed.”
The hackathon-winning projects to benefit from the scheme include “Codeborough”, a tool to help people find their nearest library, toilet or polling station in London, and “Waitwise”, an application which drafts clinician memos and patient reminders to prevent patients on NHS elective waiting lists from falling through coordination gaps.
They also comprise “Stella”, which primarily helps businesses identify rates relief and grants they’re entitled to and draft claims, and “NeMo-Ray”, which uses satellite connectivity to ensure that emergency communications keep running when mobile masts fall.
Additionally, the Minister announced a “Data Centre Design Challenge”, to be run in coordination with the Royal Institute for British Architects. This will give architects, designers, engineers and communities the opportunity to collaborate to “reimagin[e] data centres not just as critical national infrastructure, but as places of genuine civic value” as the government invests ever more in the facilities, DSIT has said.