UK Government Forms AI Team Backed by Meta to Enhance Public Services

AI Team's Role in Public Service Enhancement

LONDON, Jan 27 (Reuters) - The British government said on Tuesday it had recruited a team of artificial intelligence specialists to build AI tools to improve transport, public safety and defence, using funding from Meta.

Focus on Open-Source Technology

Prime Minister Keir Starmer, like many other leaders around the world, is looking to tap into the huge economic potential of developing an AI industry and, at the same time, use the technology to improve productivity across government.

Collaboration with Meta

The government said the AI experts would spend the next year developing open-source tools to improve how authorities maintain roads and transport networks, manage public safety, and make decisions on national security.

Expertise of the AI Team

The body includes a data scientist from the Alan Turing Institute and university researchers whose expertise spans computer vision, applied machine learning for the public sector, robotics-driven imaging and the design of trustworthy, safety-critical AI systems.

The programme will focus on developing technology that public bodies can run without relying on commercial, closed-source systems, it added.

Meta, which announced funding the project in July last year, said at the time the experts would be using open-source models like Meta's artificial intelligence system, Llama - a large language model capable of processing data including text, video, images and audio.

It also said tools built with these models would be owned by the government, allowing departments to keep sensitive data in-house and adapt the technology as needed.

(Reporting by Sam Tabahriti; editing by William James)