Bill Gates warns the 'evolutionary' age of AI will be brutal for workers

The government yesterday announced £100m of funding for a new AI Biosecurity Lab, the world’s first, with responsibility for monitoring biological threats and developing medical countermeasures. The lab will be supported by up to £200m of model credits from Anthropic and OpenAI.

The AI Security Institute, the UK’s internationally admired agency responsible for testing the capabilities of AI models, will receive a further £120m of funding. An additional £60m will go towards a National Cyber Shield, £70m towards a new National Exposure and Real-Time Vulnerability (Nerv) Centre, and £23m towards the government’s new AI Economics Institute, which is chaired by Nobel prize winner Simon Johnson and tasked with analysing the emerging economic impacts of AI.

In keeping with the government’s interventionist inclinations, and its willingness to use the public sector balance sheet to “pick winners”, the UK’s Sovereign AI fund has also been backed with £120m of new funding, an increase of around 25%. Half will go towards direct investments in promising UK AI companies, and half towards an R&D procurement scheme, to foster innovative solutions in areas like cybersecurity and healthcare.

Kanishka Narayan, the minister for AI, has spoken repeatedly of the importance of the UK having strategic leverage over AI technology. That wouldn’t mean the UK duplicating all parts of the AI supply chain, but instead the pursuit of a small number of globally leading capabilities that other countries would struggle to manage without. A non-exclusive set of candidates include a global role for the AI Security Institute in safety evaluations, domestic computing capacity and expertise in chip design.

So-called “middle powers” like the UK are trying to pick a path through a world dominated by two AI superpowers. Gates warned in his interview that co-operation between those superpowers will be required to avert the AI-related risks that are causing so much worry inside the leading labs. “The US and China will, on a few of these issues, have to view it as a challenge to humanity, not a nation-state win-lose type situation.” he said.

Gates also spoke to The Observer of his regret over his links with the paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein, which were the subject of a US Congressional committee hearing in June. “It definitely was a damaging thing to have spent time with him,” he said, adding that he has “lots of things where I look back and I say, okay, I hope what I learned from that is better than whatever pain or problems that it caused”.