Billions of dollars of investment is heading towards AI development in the UK. At the moment, there’s a high chance it will be spent on the wrong thing.
The UK government has pledged to invest £2 billion in the UK’s AI ecosystem, which includes £1 billion of compute infrastructure. Investment from private equity dwarfs this spend — Nvidia is investing £2 billion, Microsoft £22 billion and Google £5 billion to name a few tech giants wading in.
We know that about 70% of spend from AI teams goes on infrastructure — compute and the tools to provision it. However, the system is currently inefficient and wasteful.
At the moment, access to GPUs is limited and many businesses only have the option of procuring from the Big Tech Cos. Multicloud is desirable, but because each cloud has to be provisioned from scratch by an expert, it is far too expensive.
On that note, it is very expensive to hire MLops to manage cloud setups at all. Most startups don’t have the resources to create their own IT department. As a result, AI researchers spend far too much time provisioning their IT infrastructure, instead of innovating.
As CTO of CommonAI Compute, I believe that the industry can and must do better. We need to collaborate to create better systems and solutions that empower startups and enterprises.
The Chair of our Board, Sir Andy Hopper, summed up the opportunity and the challenge.
“AI is reshaping the global economy and will power disruption across every sector,” he said.
“However, with Big Tech’s dominance over large-scale AI models and infrastructure, startups are being denied access to this burgeoning opportunity — and even larger enterprises face the challenge of balancing their innovation agenda with the resources required to power their core business.”
We have founded CommonAI on a belief in collaborative engineering. By working together, building tools and infrastructure that are common to all, we can accelerate faster.
At the heart of CommonAI is CommonAI CIC, a non-profit organisation creating assets for members to use that cannot be bought or sold. They have been developed for use in the industry through the shared expertise of our staff and our members — startups, established enterprises, academia and public institutions.
CommonAI CIC also provides access to fractional experts. AI development requires the skills of many people, but a small company can’t afford a whole person, all of the time.
CommonAI Compute provides the infrastructure the AI industry needs. Our platform makes multicloud not only easy, but affordable, finding the best cloud vendor at the best price for each individual requirement. We even provision the setup, cutting out the need for an internal IT department.
Behind CommonAI is a group of experienced entrepreneurs and investors who know first hand the challenges the AI industry faces. They see the huge benefit to any enterprise, large or small, in being able to access specialist engineers and researchers, just when they are needed.
This is how we are going to make the most of all this investment in AI in the UK. We have the experts and the ideas; if we solve the infrastructure challenge, driving better, cheaper access to the compute, tools and knowledge they need, they can focus on what they do best — creating businesses that will change the world.