UK needs its own 'BritGPT' or will face an uncertain future, MPs hear

The UK needs to support the creation of a British version of ChatGPT, MPs were told on Wednesday, or the country would further lose the ability to determine its own fate. Speaking to the Commons science and technology committee, Adrian Joseph, BT's chief data and artificial intelligence officer, said the government needed to have a national investment in "large language models", the AI that underpins services such as ChatGPT, Bing Chat and Google's Bard. Without such technology, the nation would struggle to compete internationally in future, he said. "We think there's a risk that we in the UK, lose out to the the large tech companies, and possibly China, and get left behind … in areas of cybersecurity, of healthcare, and so on. It is a massive arms race that has been around for some time, but the heat has certainly been turned up most recently."