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Many observers of Britain’s technology scene rue losing DeepMind to Google in 2014. Its capable founders had ambitious plans and could not find anyone in Britain who had the vision and cash to help them make them happen. They sold for £400 million when a cheque from the government or a smart domestic investor could have seen DeepMind become Britain’s OpenAI — the latter, set up in 2015, was valued at $500 billion last year.
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“If you’re lucky enough to be a country that starts to see something emerge that could be [trillion dollar in] scale, it feels fairly obvious to me that you need to do something about it,” [AI expert and venture capitalist Ian] Hogarth says. “It still to me feels tragic that nobody in the UK really realised how important DeepMind was.”
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While DeepMind’s cofounders Sir Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg are exceptional, others are following in their path, inspired by what the pair have achieved. In response the government should get behind them, Hogarth says. It can do that in a number of powerful ways, just as the Americans and Chinese already do.
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“The primary driver of economic growth in the UK was the City and finance. That has been superseded by technology, globally,” he says.
“Fundamentally what the UK needs is a government that has an understanding of technology embedded in every aspect of what it does. It’s not a bolt-on advisory council but actually a mindset that this is something we have to win.
“You want the prime minister to be waking up thinking about who are the five companies that could really, really matter. This is actually the meat and potatoes of the next 20 years of the UK’s success or failure.”
Where possible, government spending should be directed at this small group of “winners” to help create $100 billion-plus national tech champions, he argues. Giving lucrative computer contracts to Microsoft, Google, Nvidia and the like, or drone contracts to US defence companies, actively hinders the development of their UK-based rivals.
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