Rather than a 'focus on making it work for local communities' etc, my advice at this point for an incoming PM would be:
- Make the UK as attractive as possible an environment for companies like Anthropic et al to set up operations.
- Build, build, build compute capacity - do NOT end up overdependent on the US or others when this becomes a real bottleneck.
- Focus on sovereign UK capacities in the AI supply chain where we can have an edge, and cutting edge applications of frontier AI (like the DeepMind spin-offs)
- Focus on government-wide awareness of frontier AI capabilities and direction of travel
- Focus on forward-looking adoption in the economy
- Do whatever can be done to ensure access to the top frontier models, especially for organisations like UK AISI and organisations using these models to strengthen digital infastructure.
- Above all, double down on the UK's world-class position in AI safety, evaluation, and red-teaming. The world needs this, and we can make it a real advantage.
The point is (a) to ensure AI properly benefits the UK economy (b) to ensure the UK retains and further develops leverage in the global AI landscape, and (c) uses that leverage to continue raising standards on frontier AI safety, rather than allow itself to be made irrelevant.
Supporting local communities is of course good, but we need to look head on at the situation we're in right now, not the situation we'd prefer to be in.
