Britain is a serious AI power. The launch of the Sovereign AI Unit and a £500m commitment to help the most promising companies reach global scale is a welcome recognition of that strength.
But we have an AI advantage that no one is talking about – our connections across the Channel.
Britain’s AI strength is relational as well as domestic. It is built on where researchers trained, who they collaborated with, and which institutions share their assumptions about how science should be done.
Recently UCL has been visiting Paris, talking with leading institutions there about cutting-edge projects in AI and computational healthcare.
The Eurostar that took us there takes less time than the Acela from Boston to New York. Americans treat the Boston-New York corridor as an integrated innovation ecosystem with MIT and Harvard at one end and Columbia and the financial institutions of Lower Manhattan at the other, with sustained investment in the connective tissue between them. The proximity is seen as infrastructure....
