Leading AI researchers and entrepreneurs have officially opened a new £30 million national AI research lab dedicated to developing innovative, open-source AI systems.
The Science of Fundamental AI Research (SOFAIR) Lab is led by University College London (UCL), with Cambridge, Oxford and Edinburgh universities as partners.
SOFAIR is part of a £60 million scheme funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), to create two UK labs that will rethink how AI works and learns, and how it can be made more open, efficient and useful. The lab's work responds to how concentrated AI has become. Modern AI relies heavily on a small number of popular architectures trained on vast amounts of data, which require immense computing infrastructure. SOFAIR will bring together researchers from computer science, mathematics, statistics and neuroscience to explore n