Secondly, the Prime Minister welcomed a £1.5 million investment from Liquidity, which would establish its European headquarters in London. He described the move as “another vote of confidence in Britain” and a practical outcome of the UK’s AI Opportunity Action Plan, published earlier this year.

In the new AI-driven economy, ensuring that workers and the UK population aren’t left behind is a concern of the Government, and so AI skills are becoming ever-more important.

Keir’s vision for levelling up

Returning to his roots, the Prime Minister evoked the contrast between children in Somers Town and the booming tech companies across the way in King’s Cross. He praised Google AI for opening a campus in the area and urged other tech companies to help bridge the divide between high-growth sectors and low-income communities. Bringing these tech companies closer to people encourages more people to want to be involved and work in the tech ecosystem, leading to a better and stronger industry of tomorrow.

Collaboration was a key theme in the opening remarks, and another announcement has been fuelled by this teamwork. “I am really delighted to announce what is a step change in how we train home grow talent for AI, a partnership with 11 major companies to train 7.5 million workers in AI by 2030.

“We also have a commitment from NVIDIA to partner on new AI talent pipeline,” he explained, as the Government will be working with the tech company to fuel its continued expansion in Bristol.

Starmer discussed a new ‘tech first’ programme, to train up to one million young people in core digital skills. This also includes £187 million for AI in education, including:

• Embedding AI in secondary school curriculums
• A new scholarship programme for university students focused on AI research
• Additional support for small businesses to recruit tech talent

“By the end of this Parliament, we should be able to look every parent in the eye, in every region in Britain, and say, look what technology can deliver to you,” Starmer said.

Starmer and Huang discuss UK innovation

Halfway though the opening keynote, Sir Keir Starmer was joined by Jensen Huang, CEO and Founder, NVIDIA.

“The thing that is quite extraordinary and an extremely incredible opportunity for the UK, is that AI is both a technology, but is also an infrastructure. It's an infrastructure because it affects so many industries … because this technology is so broad and so transformative to every single industry. It is considered infrastructure, just as electricity was infrastructure, and just information connectivity that came about because of the Internet is infrastructure. Now we're going to have a new infrastructure, and this new infrastructure is called artificial intelligence, and it's vital that we invest in this infrastructure here in the UK,” Huang explained.

Touching on the points made earlier by Sir Starmer, Huang explained: “AI is the great equaliser … for the last 50-60 years, computer science became a field of science, and was available to tens of millions of people. But this technology was hard to use. We have to learn programming languages. We have to architect it. We have to design these computers that are very complicated … and now, all of a sudden, there's a new programming language. This new programming language is called human, everyone can use it.

“The way you programme a computer today, you ask the computer to do something for you, even write a programme, generate images, write a poem … And so this way of interacting with computers, I think, is something that almost anybody can do, and I would just encourage everybody to engage. As the prime minister said, almost every children is already doing that themselves, naturally, and this is going to be transformative.”

Huang also discussed the massive opportunity that the UK is currently facing. The UK has one of the best higher education systems in the world, and it’s the third largest country when it comes to VC investments. However, it’s “the largest AI ecosystem in the world without its own infrastructure. Which is the reason why we're talking about it so much, and is the reason why the Prime Minister's announcement of investing in computing is such a big deal.”

The new funding boost is due to completely transform AI in the UK, and help the nation become an AI superpower.

The Prime Minister concluded by reiterating that the future of British AI would not be led by the government or tech companies alone, but through the strength of the partnership between them.

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