The UK must persuade a “sceptical” public that artificial intelligence (AI) can improve millions of lives and transform the way business and Whitehall works, Sir Keir Starmer said.
The Prime Minister said AI would cut through planning red tape to speed up housebuilding and promised £1 billion of funding to increase the UK’s compute power.
Sir Keir acknowledged people’s concern about the rapid rise of AI technology and the risk to their jobs but stressed the benefits it would have on the delivery of public services, automating bureaucracy and allowing staff such as social workers and nurses to be “more human”.
In a speech at London Tech Week, Sir Keir said: “Some people out there are sceptical.
“They do worry about AI taking their job.”
Even businesses were worried about the “relentless” pace of change, he said as he stressed the need for the Government and the tech sector to work in partnership.
“When it comes to harnessing the power of this technology, I believe that the way we work through this together is critical and that means a partnership,” he said.
The Prime Minister told the audience of business chiefs and tech experts: “We are leaning into this.
“We are excited about the opportunity that this could have, will have on the lives of millions of people and making their lives better.”
He said the Government was “committing an extra £1 billion of funding to scale up our compute power by a factor of 20”.
That would mean that “in this global race, we can be an AI maker and not an AI taker”.
It will also help support the transformation of public services, he said, pointing to the new work on planning.
The Prime Minister announced the launch of Extract, an AI assistant for planning officers and local councils, developed by government with support from Google.
It will help councils convert decades-old, handwritten planning documents and maps into data in minutes, and will power new types of software to slash the 250,000 estimated hours spent by planning officers each year manually checking the paperwork.
Sir Keir said: “For too long, our outdated planning system has held back our country, slowing down the development of vital infrastructure and making it harder to get the homes we need built.”
One million students will be given access to learning resources to start equipping them for “the tech careers of the future” as part of the Government’s £187 million TechFirst scheme, Downing Street said.
Sir Keir said: “I think that training young people earlier on in AI and tech means that they will obviously be better skilled as they come into work but also they will be much better at it than us.
“I’ve got a 16-year-old boy and a 14-year-old girl and they already understand AI and tech in a way which is really difficult to have even conceived of a decade ago.”
Meanwhile, staff at firms across the country will be trained to “use and interact” with chatbots and large language models as part of a plan backed by Google and Microsoft to train 7.5 million workers in AI skills by 2030.
Jensen Huang, chief executive of tech giant Nvidia said the UK was in a “goldilocks” zone because of its combination of academic expertise and finance, but had been held back by a lack of infrastructure for AI.
Sharing a platform with the Prime Minister, he said: “The UK has one of the richest AI communities anywhere on the planet: the deepest thinkers, the best universities, Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial College, amazing start-ups.”
It was behind only the US and China in venture capital investment, he added.
“The ecosystem is really perfect for take-off, it’s just missing one thing: it is surprising, this is the largest AI ecosystem in the world without its own infrastructure.”
That was why the Prime Minister’s £1 billion pledge on compute power was “such a big deal”, he said.
