It’s hard to escape ChatGPT’s prevalence in the AI computing world. While much has been written about its capabilities, there has been much less insight into its technical makeup and whether the UK has the technological means to exploit the new technology and support the expected growth requirements.
To aid this growth, the UK government’s recent £900m investment into supercomputing is of course good news and a positive step in making sure the UK can keep up with the current ChatGPT revolution. But the current top three supercomputers are from the US, Japan and Europe. The UK needs to be front and centre when it comes to computing power. Ultimately, that is what drives significant scientific and technological breakthroughs.
However, just building a machine for ‘BritGPT’ is not enough, simply because AI models are evolving very quickly, and the compute power that they require is increasing far faster than traditional computing methods can keep up with. This has been widely recognised by the high-performance computing community and the UK government needs to be more visionary and provide more support for post-Moore solutions to lead the next computing revolution....