UK must have global ambition in AI, DeepMind's Hassabis says

By Paul Sandle

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain must leverage its strengths to influence how artificial intelligence is deployed around the world, DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis said on Monday, as the AI research firm's owner Google announced upgrades to its offering in the country.

Hassabis, who founded DeepMind in London in 2010 and sold it to Google four years later, said Britain's top universities and talent pool put it at technology's cutting edge.

"It's more important than ever that we are at the forefront of these technologies as a country, both economically but also geopolitically to influence how these technologies end up getting deployed and used around the world," he said.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said during a White House visit last month that the United States and Britain were working on an economic deal, with advanced tech at its core.

Separately on Monday, Google Cloud rival Oracle announced that it planned to invest $5 billion in Britain over the next five years to meet growing demand for its cloud services.

It said the investment would help the British government deliver on its vision for AI innovation and adoption.

DeepMind's Hassabis also called for the creation of international standards on the use of copyrighted material in the development of AI models.

"The complication is that these models are kind of global, they're used everywhere," he said.

He was speaking at a Google AI event after Google Cloud announced new products, including expanded UK data residency for Google Agentspace, its work productivity tool.

Google also said it would add its Chirp 3 audio generation model, which uses voices with human-like intonation, to its Vertex AI platform on Google Cloud from next week.

(Reporting by Paul Sandle; Editing by Joe Bavier)