In a speech at the AI Summit in London, Kanishka Narayan, Minister for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Online Safety, said the UK government aims to make the UK a home for open source AI developers to mirror the success of the web.
In his speech, Mr Narayan spoke about the need for the UK to determine its own AI strategy. “We have to ask honestly: What is the story we are being told about AI today? Too often, it is a story of AI inevitability. The UK has never accepted that view of progress. We have rejected technological determinism in favor of institutions: the institutions of the state, the institutions of communities and the institutions of the people,” he told delegates attending the summit’s headline stream.
“When Tim Berners-Lee opened up the World Wide Web, he did something profound. He removed barriers to building. He created a platform that anyone could join. From the World Wide Web to Alphafold, Britain has always chosen to open up new technologies rather than shut them down.”
“The world’s best AI tools are not built behind closed doors by a few companies. They are built by people who distribute their code, share it and let others improve it. We want those who choose to build here in the UK to know that this is a country that will help them succeed,” Narayan said.
The Minister used his speech at the AI Summit to talk about the recent Hack for Impact hackathon and the Open Source AI Builders Fund, which is worth more than £500,000. “If we build something here that can evolve further, we don’t get stuck with a prototype,” he said.
A recent hackathon, supported by Nvidia, brought together hundreds of open source AI developers from across the UK to use the City of London’s open data to build tools to tackle challenges across public services and city infrastructure.
Mr Narayan said the UK government is providing £500,000 worth of computing power from UK AI research resources, or 160,000 GPU hours (graphics processing unit hours), through the Open Source AI Builders Fund. The goal is to provide projects with the necessary AI infrastructure to move from prototype to public AI tool.
In addition to funding open source AI, Narayan said the government’s in-house AI incubator will offer a mentoring scheme to open source AI developers through the AI Builder Mentoring Scheme. It aims to pair hackathon winners with experts from the government’s in-house AI team, the Artificial Intelligence Incubator (i.AI), to help turn the best ideas into practical public tools.
i.AI has invited top AI experts from UK universities through its open source fellowship program to develop open source AI tools to improve public services from education to policing, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) said. DSIT says its AI Builder Mentoring Scheme is going further, helping the UK become the world’s go-to destination for open source AI builders.
A new Open Source AI Development Board has also been established, and DSIT says 10 UK-based developers under the age of 30 will be given direct access to the government and be able to influence how AI is used and developed. Chaired by Mr. Narayan, the board will hold a series of roundtable discussions through 2026.
Narayan said the board would put developers “directly at the heart of the government’s open source AI strategy.”
