Sir Nick said his experience in Silicon Valley had made him “somewhat radicalized” and convinced him of the need for Europe to “take action” on AI.
Sir Nick was the leader of the Liberal Democrats and deputy prime minister of Cameron Clegg’s coalition government from 2010 to 2015, before serving as Meta’s chief policy maker until last year.
He recently joined the advisory board of Efekta Education, an AI-powered English language platform primarily used by students in emerging markets in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
Speaking at a roundtable hosted by Effecta, Sir Nick urged European companies to “push the boat out with this technology and never let American companies drive it again”.
He said Britain had an “alarming level of over-reliance on American technology”, which he described as “a level of dependence that is incompatible with the kind of institutions and fundamental sovereignty (as opposed to full sovereignty) that a country like ours should aspire to”.
While the UK’s high energy costs and copyright and content regulations have “effectively precluded it from being a major domestic frontier LLM leader”, Sir Nick highlighted routes that could reduce dependence on the US, such as open source models and support for European LLM institutes.
Efekta, a spin-off of Swiss study abroad company EF Education First, has a large presence in the UK and was built specifically for emerging markets.
One of the failures of US-based edtech companies is designing products for the US education system.
Stephen Hodges, Efekta Education
Sir Nick supported the “counterintuitive” course of Effecta, which was not built for the most developed school systems and “clearly appeals to emerging markets that have very specific problems such as teacher shortages and lack of training”.
Efekta CEO Stephen Hodges highlighted the company’s partnership with the Brazilian government. The Brazilian government approached the company during the coronavirus pandemic, pointing out that English is the subject in which Brazil has the greatest shortage of teachers.
“I think one of the failures of U.S.-based edtech companies is that they design their products for the U.S. education system,” Hodges said.
“And the education system in the United States is very different than if you go to Egypt or Mongolia or any of the other places we sell to, in that it assumes you have qualified teachers, you have lab equipment, and so on.”
Hodges said the platform is currently used by “tens of thousands of teachers” in Brazil, about 95% of whom were not previously qualified to teach English.
Elsewhere, he highlighted that Efekta, funded by the Mastercard Foundation, is expanding into Rwanda with a (somewhat limited) offline product offering to rural schools without internet connectivity.
