Syed Imran Haider 
UK’s ambitions to become the world leader in artificial intelligence have just taken a hit. This is because the government has decided to cancel computing infrastructure projects worth £1.3 billion, or $1.7 billion.
A spokesperson for the government confirmed that they were dropping the spending commitments that the taxpayers had funded in favor of other fiscal plans.
These were two commitments, which were valued at £800 million and £500 million, respectively.
The Commitments
The commitment worth £500 million was meant for AI Research Resource. This development initiative is aimed at bolstering the computing infrastructure of the United Kingdom.
This pledge had been promised last year by the government of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. As far as the £800 million commitment is concerned, it had also been promised in the previous year.
However, this amount of funding was to be used for developing a next-generation exascale computer at the University of Edinburgh. It would be capable of performing 1 trillion calculations per second.
With these initiatives, the UK would have been able to develop high-performance infrastructure for running advanced AI models.
These models require a massive amount of training data and consume considerable amounts of power.
The Decision
However, the Labour government has announced that neither of these commitments will move forward now.
A spokesperson for the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) said that they were fully committed to developing technology infrastructure.
Their goal is to ensure opportunity and growth for people across the country. The spokesperson said that they have to take necessary and difficult decision in regard to spending.
This is the case for every department, as there are unfunded commitments worth billions of pounds.
The DSIT spokesperson said that this step was necessary for restoring economic stability and achieving their national mission for growth.
The Cuts
A number of spending cuts had been announced earlier this week by Rachel Reeves, the British Finance Minister.
She revealed that the newly-elected government had inherited unfunded pledges of £22 billion from the center-right Conservatives.
Under the administration of Rishi Sunak, the priority of the UK government had been to take the leading role in AI.
They had even held a global AI safety summit at the renowned Bletchley Park country house.
This is where codebreakers in World War II had resided and eventually assisted Britain in defeating Nazi Germany.
The government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer wants to introduce new regulations for the AI industry.
In comparison, his predecessor had chosen not to issue legislation for AI to avoid restricting innovation. Last month, King Charles III had delivered a speech.
It was expected that the new Labour government would announce the first-ever UK AI Bill, but that had not happened.
A spokesperson for DSIT said that the government was still consulting on its plans for regulating the AI industry.
