This week, a grateful country learned from our Glorious Leader that the U.K. was to be not just one superpower, but two. At an event at University College London on Monday, Keir Starmer unveiled his plans for making Britain an “artificial intelligence superpower”. According to Reuters, this includes promises “to take a pro-innovation approach to regulation, make public data available to researchers and create zones for data centres”. The problem with this plan, however, is obvious to anyone who knows anything about AI and who has sufficient memory to recall Starmer’s other promise: to make Britain a “clean energy superpower” by 2030.
As has been widely discussed, Britain industrial energy prices are now among the highest in the developed world. This is a problem for AI because, unlike most computing tasks, it is energy intensive, better thought of as an industrial process. AI is not an application that runs easily on a laptop. And this is because AI does not typically run on normal microprocessors, such as the CPUs that sit at the centre of powerful desktop workstations, but on the graphics processors known as GPUs that enable 3D games, among other things. In such an application, the CPU pushes the work of rendering graphics to the GPU, leaving the CPU free for other, less intense tasks.
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