According to Cointelegraph, the United Kingdom announced on November 1 that it will increase funding for two artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputers to £300 million ($363.57 million). The announcement came after the conclusion of the first day of the global AI Safety Summit. The AI Research Resource, as the supercomputers are known, will support research into creating safer advanced AI models, which was the primary topic of the summit.
UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak commented that the investment will ensure Britain's scientific talent has the tools needed to make the most advanced AI models safe. The two new supercomputers will provide UK researchers with over 30 times the capacity of the country's current largest public AI computing tools. They are expected to be operational by summer 2024.
The first supercomputer, Isambard-AI, will be built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise and equipped with 5,000 advanced Nvidia AI chips. The second machine, called Dawn, will be created with Dell and powered by 1,000 AI chips from Intel. Isambard-AI will be able to compute over 200 petaflops, or 200 quadrillion calculations per second.
US Vice President Kamala Harris attended the first day of the summit, where she and Sunak agreed on the need for close collaboration on the opportunities and risks posed by frontier AI. Harris warned of potential cyberattacks and AI-formulated bioweapons that could endanger millions of lives, emphasizing the urgency for collective action on the matter. Her remarks came shortly after the Biden Administration released an executive order on AI safety standards it plans to implement.
