Good evening everyone and welcome to this WCIT the worship company of information technology lecture in memory of pastmaster Barney Gibbons. Um firstly a couple of thanks. Thank you to HSBC Innovation Bank for being such great supporters of this lecture. And this year we have two extraordinary figures who have helped shape the digital age liverman and liver dewendy hall our new members. You are both very welcome.
Great to be here. Thank you.
So, I was thinking about how I start this and every video of both Demis and Wendy have their whole CD read out and I asked Mr. Gemini what's the best definition for Dennis. So, Dennis, if anything's a miss here, then I would um
So, Sir Dennis Hasselus, co-founder and CEO of Google Deep Mine and in my opinion one of the world's leading research labs. I'm particularly excited as well that it's in this country and your mission is to advance AI and to apply it to major scientific and social challenges. And he built a video game called theme park which combined AI with economics and you sold 15 million copies. And that's before you even went to school after your university which I'm not going to regail because it's a very long list of things you did. You built Alph Go and defeated the world champion Go player and alpha fold which revolutionized protein structure prediction. You are multi-domain. You combine being a computer scientist, a neuroscientist, an entrepreneur, a former video game designer, and you bring insights in multiple fields in AI research and we are very pleased to have you here, Sadis. Thank you. D Wendy Hall, one of Britain's most distinguished computer scientists, a global pioneer in web science, cross-disciplinary study on how web shapes society and vice versa. Regious professor of computer science at the University of Southampton and one of the first researchers to undertake major work in multimedia hyperdia systems. A founding leader of the web science trust along with sir Tim Bernersley who's actually an honorary member here
to advance the understanding of the worldwide web and its social impact the first woman to become professor of engineering in Southampton and a former president of the BCS and the ACM which is association of computer machinery you are an internationally respected voice on AI, internet governance and data policy and digital ethics and you are helping shape governments and institution to think about how technology impacts society. Dean Wendy, you are very welcome. Thank you very much. Which leads me to my theme in my year of mastership of the Wville company which is community. And if I say a couple of words on that, I chose the theme because I was trying to understand how AI and technology are going to impact our communities, our people, our industry, which touches the four pillars of this organization, which are charity, industry, education, and fellowship. And so today I'm going to pose my first question on skills and AI literacy to you de Mendy nearly a decade after your 2017 review. What does a serious national AI strategy look like now from schools to university to mid-careers to reskilling our people? And I was just wondering, is the UK still missing or misreading this skills challenge?
Oh, well, that's three questions in one. I can't believe it's 10 years. Deus was there when we did that. So, I wanted to co-chair it with him, but he was already too busy. Do you remember?
Yes, I remember. We tried to input into it.
You did. You did. Right. But he wouldn't co-chair it. So, but anyway, that's fair enough. He was building deep mind. So he was living it living the dream. So unfortunately my answers aren't very positive. The UK did very well. In fact we were I like to say we were the first to develop a national strategy. In fact Canada did beat us to it but I think ours is better known. And we actually we did the whole percenting report was 2017 and then the national strategy was developed by the what we set up out of that the office for AI and the AI council and the national strategy evolved from that in 21 during the covid years. I remember all the calls and I was AI skills champion for a while that there is no AI skills champion now that the um there's no AI council there is no independent body overseeing what the 400 people in DC do in the AI unit and I think the UK loses a trick in that many many countries and I traveled the world meeting governments around the world picked up on our strategy. Many copied it. You can see elements of it, words of it in other countries strategies, and Singapore, for example, followed our playbook and did it better. So, they're now overtaking us in the league of developing AI for a tiny island. and they back hugely above their weight and they're overtaking us in the league tables of you know it's very clear it's US China and we were then third in the tables of AI strategies and adoption we've slipped and Singapore really have done it incredibly well and others countries are doing it too ours now we do well and we can talk about later the things we are doing well. It will come up later in the discussion. But the skills piece is very very patchy. Unfortunately there were several things came out of the whole percent review. All those recommendations were taken forward MSC's PhDs very little for schools. There's very little guidance for schools on AI. and you know that you see things coming out in a quite a fragmented way. So it does but there is no I don't think there's any oversight of AI skills in this country at the moment. Sorry to say that but it's true.
How about you Dennis? What's your view on that?
Yeah well I'd probably suggest something much more radical. So I would agree with Wendy. had an interesting head start in 2017 but you know 10 years in AI is like a century in most industries right or maybe two you know maybe a millennia so a lot has changed I think we did a good job I think I remember that actually we sponsored some of these masters did absolutely and I think that helped a lot actually we see today London and the UK is doing really well in things like startups and I think we tried to anchor that at with deep mind and brought a lot of talent into the tree and then now 10 years later that a lot of those people are now spinning out other things and this is great to see. We need to do more of that. I'm sure we'll come to that discussion later, but specifically skilling and schools, I absolutely agree with Wendy. Now, we need to look to the secondary school level, maybe even the primary school level. The horse has bolted in the sense they're all using the LLMs and chat bots in their spare time and for homework and things like that, but it's very unsistatic and it's a bit like I feel like government policies and education systems a bit like, oh, I wish that would go away, but it's not. we're going to have to lean into it and help teachers and schools and parents and students work out how do we get the benefits out of it, not just probably the way that people are using it now and kids using now and I see my kids, you know, will just help them almost cheat on their homework or shortcut things. And we know that that will result in deficit of skills, traditional skills, let alone AI and computer skills later on. But I think we got an opportunity here. Maybe it's time for a new review for you to write, Wendy. This is why I would if I was going to input into this is what I would suggest is we need to invert the classroom in my opinion. So I would lean into a this is what I would do if I was in charge of education. I would say school in school should be about people skills, projects, entrepreneurialism, creativity, judgment, all the things that you might expect the skills to be important in 5 10 years time when AGI's arrived. I know we're going to debate about AGI, but even just extrapolation of today's AI, there'll be things AI can do well and then there'll be things that will need human judgment, taste, all of these things. But these are not taught in schools today. But so I'll come to that. So the school so I think in class it should be about human human contact. How do you organize groups of people into projects like a Montyurus school but plus or maybe you get at like Oxbridge and places like these sort of the top universities these kind of individual supervisions right but you bring that into the classroom out of classroom is where you do the rote learning that would be my opinion aided by personalized AI that basically tailors the rote learning to the speed and the exact personalized to the exact speed of the student and what they need to do. It's crazy that we do a one size fits all in class anyway on rope learning. Doesn't work because you have to cater to the average. What about the kids that are behind or the kids that are ahead? Good luck on both sides. So here with AI, you can actually personalize it so everyone gets exactly the tailored curriculum that they need. And then in school, it's all about projects. I think teachers would love that personally. And then you could have world-class teachers that are like kind of almost like superstars that do the lecturing and they're really good. You know, why do we expect every school teacher, every lecturer to be amazing at lecturing the same course? That's just completely redundant amount of work. When I talk to teacher friends of mine, you know, and they have to come, each of them has to teach GCSE maths and then bring create their own slide decks. Why are we in that world? It should just be one. And then it's not then the remote learning you do at your own speed at home with the help of AI. That's what I would do. But I don't know if the countries somewhere like Singapore will do this in my opinion or UAE.
Can I riff off of that because I agree with almost everything you've said there? I think the rope learning doesn't have to be done at home and some we have a there's not there's no equality around this. There's a lot of kids can't do this at home, right? And we have to be I definitely agree that we can use AI to stop the one-size-fits-all. One teacher, 30 pupils, they're all different. Teachers can teach much better if the children are receptive to what they're going to say and already done the basic stuff, whether it's home or school or wherever. And I've always been in fact my first I don't know if you have ever told you this my first piece of AI code I wrote in 1984 to build an intelligent tutoring system on a BBC micro in prologue. You'll understand what that means just not even proof of concept just an idea right that I got from my tutor at university. But I've always believed passionately that we can use computing and now AI to develop personalized systems tutoring systems for kids that will help everybody get to the same sort of level but that takes a huge commitment from government to make that happen and I'd love to help do that
and then and then taking the step one step forward going to university is it now become come pretty redundant that we have a computer science degree because of course not at all.
Of course not. You exactly I mean you you absolutely needed to lean into STEM and computer science because no matter it's just a higher level programming language is the way you can think about what programming is going to become. You know we used to program in machine code then there was C then there's Python and now it's going to be perhaps it's going to be English. But that's fine. Like you're still going to need to know about architecting things and software best software engineering practices. Those people who understand the deep technical, they'll be able to use these tools 10 times more effectively than people that don't have that technical knowledge.
So absolutely we need people to apply, but we also need AI across the board. So things we're doing at Southampton, I know other universities similar. We've actually developing something called an AI driving license for all students who arrive in the university next. This good plug but others arrive in the university in October will be this will be available to them and staff and think of it like your highway code you know this is for non-science students really to get them up to speed. Some of them will already be doing it of course with their own but to get them up to speed how they can use AI. We have a policy on how to use AI in education. And we have also set ourselves a target that by next academic year, every discipline, every degree in the university, there'll be a module on AI customized to that, whether it's history, psychology, geography, physics, whatever. Customized. That's a huge task, by the way. But that's what we've set ourselves.
And presumably, you're going to have to tweak the curriculum as well. I was just going to say you so I think you need to teach STEM and computer science and continue that's very valuable training but the curriculum has to change to you know there might be very different things that one should study
absolutely well I mean if you talk I don't if you heard Mike Waldridge talk recently about the way it's going to change the computer science AI taught as a part of computer science my I mean we do an AI degree a lot of universities are already we've taught computer science with AI for a long time, but we now have a set. We have computer science and we have AI. And I'm passionate about getting how to getting information about AI to non-science students as well.
And particularly the risks and the other social effects of doing this that will also have to be brought into the curriculum presumably.
Yes. I mean, and that's across the board as well. You know, I think that was already that was actually even part of, if I remember correctly, the original your original report of like, you know, ethics being taught and challenges as alongside the technical aspects of computer science. I think all computer scientists need to be trained in that. Um, and by the way, I also believe that the time is now for the humanities like philosophy, economics, like I think we really need, you know, in the world we're about to enter into post AGI and these things that's a new era in my opinion. So I feel like that type of thinking is going to be really needed. I was wondering how long it would take you Dennis has actually mentioned AGI and
No, he's gone one further. He's mentioned post AGI and I was just wondering if for the uninitiated audience here and listening. I just wanted to give us a just a feel of what how things will change with AGI and the benefits as you see it and also the time scales. I know you say 2030 and onwards but a little bit of color on that would be very good.
Yeah. I mean firstly my definition of AGI is a system that you can test and exhibits all the cognitive capabilities humans have. The reason that's important is the human reference point and the human brain reference point is the human brain is the only existence proof we have we know of perhaps in the universe that exhibits general intelligence. And I believe that brain is a sort of an approximate cheuring machine. Obviously, cheuring, one of my all-time heroes, he showed what cheuring universal machines, you know, can compute anything. So that's computable maybe apart from like quantum systems and other things. It's a bit out of scope for today. But I think that's what an AI system is. And that means it should be able to do the types of creative things and invention things that we know the best scientists were able to do. Today's systems are nowhere near that. They're not consistent enough. they have missing capabilities. They're very impressive in many ways but they also as we've all interacted with them every day these LLMs they're missing some components now that may get solved with scaling but it may also require one or two big breakthroughs still like transformers were or things like reinforcement learning applied to deep learning like we did with Alph Go. So the jury's out on that. I think it's going to be given the amount of resources and brain power going into it around four or five years is my expectation from where we are today. So around 2030 and then when that happens that becomes a new type of tool or system that we've never seen before and we'll need to think about how to use such a transformative piece of technology. and it's going to change everything in my opinion, economies, perhaps even the human condition. But I'm a very of course the positive part of that would be advancing science, curing diseases, advancing medicine. This is why I spent my whole career working on AI and what we call AGI technologies. We help popularize that term. But obviously there are challenges with systems and we already see the beginnings of that with the Gentic systems that become more and more autonomous. How do we make sure they stay on the guardrails that we set and they do the things that we want? Then there's questions of things like you know beyond that of as the machines get more capable consciousness other things which maybe we'll get into but the first step is to get these tools right
and you have an interesting well I don't agree with Dennis on all this I respect what he does right and if everybody was like Demis we'd be all right but they aren't okay. Yeah, they aren't Dennis. Right. So, there are people that are just in this for the money or the power and we'll release anything and say it does everything without any testing, any evaluation, any safety checks, any guidelines. This is happening in the states at the moment. I loved that. Ironically, love that you did a debate with Dario at Davos. I call it the Demis and Dario at Davos debate. the four Ds and I use this with my students because it was Debis saying the things he's just said here and Dario who was out there to get the money for his company and is now going IPO saying we're going to reach AGI by the end of this year and you were trying to pull him back in that right make some because
well actually there was a bit so let me roll back the big thing for me if I don't accept it but if we reach some form of something you accept as AGI by 2030 which I don't personally am not on that side of the fence but if then that gives us four years to sort out global governance of AI because otherwise we've got machines that are cleverer than us in some aspects and the big thing is that if the software we're building starts to decide to do things on its own the sort of I'm sorry Dave I can't do that moment. And this will inevitably happen. and Steven Hawings of 2014 said, 'If we build machines that are clever, I'm not using the word intelligence, by the way, here. I'll come just say one more thing about that.' He said that was the end of the human race. That's one of the last things Stephen Hawking said in a BBC interview. There are threats. We absolutely have to have a global governance in place. the and there this I mean I was on the UN high level advisory board. It won't be not enough people the UN isn't what it used to be and it won't be of the UN but it will it could spin out of the UN. There's the global dialogue starting in July where some governments are going to come together and start really talking about what this means. And just this week Trump went back on his word and said we have got to start what did he say not regulate what's the word he used the companies and the check evaluate the software that's coming out I can't remember the word he used so he because he when he came into power he did a what did the president executive order
he overturned Biden's rule and he did an executive order that said no regulation at and he stopped the states regulating. Well, he went back on that this week or his government did and said we because and actually it was because I think the tipping point was the mythos software from anthropic. It's yeah, it's also not just that. There's a lot of people input I'm spending a lot of we're spending a lot of our time inputting into those things behind the scenes. We don't shout about that from the rooftops. Mythos is a has been a very interesting good trigger because it worried the banks and Besson which is always the be you know that's when people take things seriously right to talking to HSBC people here you know when the banks get worried then government wakes up which is you know maybe it's a good thing and that means there's a window of opportunity here I think to do something and I think that's why we saw the executive order eventually get through and but it's it's not enough and and there's more and actually we're in I mean as you know Wendy we're in total agreement I do think there needs to be kind of an international standards you know I'm my view is and maybe where we disagree is timelines on AGI but my point is is that there's a I actually talk about it as if 50% chance of 2030 with some obviously margins of error but the point is it could happen depending on things like recursive self-improvement if that works so there's a lot of things people are working a lot of things that could speed up the timelines right if those things don't work then it may take longer, but that's great. Then we'll just have more time. But my view is we don't have the right institutions fit for purpose to deal with something as consequential as this. All of the unfortunately this is happening at a moment where the geopolitics is as complex as it's been in 30 years. It's more fragmented than ever. The UN is not what it was as Wendy was saying. So you know maybe one could have imagined in fact I did imagine 20 years ago maybe it would be some form of technical subcommittee of the UN or something. that's unthinkable now. And so I feel like there's not a lot of time even 4 years, let's say it's 10 years, you know, that would be better in some ways if Wendy's right if it takes a bit longer because then we have more time to get ready and society to get ready. But look, we got to take it seriously is what I'm explaining to people who care about this that it might be sooner. So that's the point I'm making is the urgency. It's absolutely urgent now, right? We've just seen mythos cyber that's just the beginning. I'm more worried about things like biorisk coming down the line. Obviously, this is something that I work very closely on to try and cure, you know, as many diseases as possible with alpha fold. But those, you know, those kinds of tools can in the wrong hands can also be misused. And so, there are two things I worry about. Misuse of general purpose technologies by rogue actors for harmful ends. That can happen. You know, not what those tools were intended for. That even affects things like open source, which is generally good, but how do you restrict bad use cases of that? That's a big problem we don't know how to solve. And then there's the technical question that Wendy alluded to is the making sure the systems as they get more autonomous, more powerful, more smart, how do we make sure that they stick to the guardrails we set them? And then even if we solve those technical questions, then there's the economics questions. How does all of society broadly benefit? Not just a few, you know, handful of companies, a handful of people. That's not a good end. That's not a good way for society to go. And then beyond that, even if we get that right, there's the philosophical question about meaning and purpose. But so there's a whole stack of issues, each one more complex in my opinion, and we've got to get going yesterday on these things.
So I've started naming it with others. We're going to create an international AI agency. Let's just call it something. And it could spin out of the work the UN doing. It won't be of the UN. It could be it needs to be independent. We need to get I say we I mean the people that care about this. There's no particular organization or group of people and it's got to involve the tech company's got to involve governments and it's got to involve civil society but it's got to be something that the companies and governments can sign up to. Someone's got to fund it too. So but that's like you know this we cannot just sit back and say someone else is going to do it. We have to. So I'll be in AI in Geneva in July. You going
There's the first dialogue coming global dialogue about this is happening in Geneva that is being run by the UN but it doesn't mean what comes of it has to be of the UN. I mean that's why by the way the AI summits that was started in the UK with Sunax government and we were highly supportive of that and helping push that that I think those summits have been good they're not enough but at least they're getting the international community together to try and talk about some of these subjects
nothing came out of India demis
250,000 people at a conference
when how long have people been trying to do climate change cop meetings for can't we can't the evidence of so this is there has to be a different route like talking shops are not going to be enough so and I just don't think the UN has the power to do anything currently so it's going to be need to be new institutions but you know that's a tricky needle to thread a lot of us are working and I'm working trying to work behind the scenes on this you know I appreciate Wendy's working you know front and center on these things I think both are needed actually behind the scenes advice and maneuvering and then you head on tackling of this.
We haven't mentioned China either.
We will come to China soon. Um, but in terms of the big tech companies actually taking part in this, is is it not like Turkeykey's voting for Christmas though?
No, of course not. In fact, they want it actually.
All that's the thing actually all the all the I mean, I know all the lab leaders they're all characters. Let's put it that way. But there but nobody wants catastrophic things to happen. That's no good for any companies. It's no good for any individuals any reputations so or for business. So it sort of even if some of them are genuinely worried and scientifically worried and they always have been I know their motivations from a long time back. People like Dario we used to chat about these things when we were both posttos others have come lately and maybe they're more interested in power and money but it doesn't matter what you're interested in. You don't want catastrophic things happening and nor does government. even the most capitalist should we say or marketdriven governments don't want that or or authoritarian actually frankly so there is hope here because actually it's in everyone's interest to come to some sort of agreement the problem is the usual tragedy of the commons prisoners dilemma issues which is why we need some kind of governance and government involvement because the companies it's always in someone's interest to make money you know by defecting from some agreed protocol right that's the problem and individually I think all of the good news is I would say all of the researchers and lab leaders and company leaders I talk to in this space do want something to happen and do want some guard rails and some standards. The question is what those are, how that should operate and who should run that. But me and others we're making proposals behind the scenes to some of the main governments.
That's great to hear. Thank you. Just moving to See, when you said I know you're going to come Well, I don't know. When you said the big tech companies, you meant the ones on the west coast of America.
Yeah. So, don't you care about the big tech companies in China and what they're doing?
Yes. I mean, this this they I mean, China would love to run whatever agency we might set up. They would do it because their support, you know, they want they are as in as Demis said they are as keen not have a catastrophe in AI as for many different reasons and the same reasons as the West is but actually they would love to run whatever we're going to set up. And the other thing about China, I'm sorry I'm going into it because I don't think you can avoid it, is they largely produce their models. You know, they're producing open code and much more open and there's good and bad about that, but they are much more welcoming of these ideas than say the US government is.
Okay. Since we're talking about China, I was just wondering whether a lot of the investment and a lot of the stuff that's happening in AI is in the US and China and are we going to just be as a country are our companies just going to be left behind and be watching and being users of the technology rather than like what you've Dennis is being an inventor of such technologies.
Well, we can't be I mean I think it's important that and I've told this to all various European leaders that you can't just be I told this to Macron back in around 2017 and he tried to do something about it. You cannot be world champions at regulation only. That's not a thing. Exactly. Right. So to have a seat I literally told him that and I said you can you know you've got to also be leading in the technology and have lead some leading companies and leading academics so that you can have a seat at the table. So first of all you see what's coming down the line ahead of time and you also have a sort of moral authority to have a seat around the table and be listened to. And there was a time when I was trying to encourage a sort of trilateral thing with Britain, France and Canada because I would say those three countries were kind of the next best at research after the two superpowers US and China. actually as a three if you look at citations papers researchers it's pretty like those three countries together now you could include some other European countries and also there's Singapore and so on but those three could create a kind of moderate bull work between the two superpowers didn't quite happen for politics and other reasons but there's still an opportunity there I think the UK is still uniquely positioned to take advantage of this we've tried to do our bit of obviously we're part of Google but I kept eat headquartered here we bought thousands of top researchers here. You know, they did some great work at DeepMine. Many of them then after five, six, 10 years went and started other things. And once you embed yourself in a location, you stay tend to stay there, right? Family reasons, other things you'd like the city and so on. And I think we're seeing that. And all ecosystems need anchors like that. Silicon Valley was not Silicon Valley until Huelet Packard and Intel, all these kind of companies seeded it, right? And they also came from strong universities nearby. Stanford, Berkeley and so on. And we have that here. The Golden Triangle, you know, Cambridge, Oxford, Hampton, UC, we got so many strong these things take centuries to build up. We have those assets. We have very smart people. We just need to have more ambition and utilize them here and hopefully government encourage that or at least not get in the way of that. And I think we're doing pretty well here, but we could do better. And then the next stage is financing the growth stage of companies which is missing which I think maybe some of the financiers in the room can think how would we do that. I think the stock exchange needs some updating. I don't know why companies don't float on the London stock exchange anymore. They will go to the US. There's obviously some problem there that needs to be addressed and I just think we could take advantage of this moment. We have all the right ingredients. The other big thing is we've got to address energy costs and our energy dependence partly for security reasons. So perhaps there's going to be a confluence of good things here. But we have the most expensive energy in the western world. And the problem with that is that's going to directly translate into intelligence. It's literally watts to dollars to tokens. So you cannot build our industry out. This that's the new industrial base, right? If you believe what's going to happen with AI is data centers, information, it's tokens. how much can you inference per unit cost? And so this is vital now. It's vital for all our industries, but it's going to be vital for the industries of the future. So, and then that will pay itself if we're going to I don't know if we're going to get to climate and environment, but obviously there's a worry about that with the data centers and things like that. But actually I just think that's a bit to me that's a red herring because if we build these technologies right they will be the it will be AI that will help us deliver the technologies of the future that will actually solve climate change. So we're working on fusion, material design, better solar power, you know, all sorts of things. We're going to be advancing this new renaissance here I see coming. We could be at the forefront of that and that will be the thing that will then, you know, completely change the climate equation, not trying to shave off 1% or 2% right now. Can I come into that
because riffing off of that the you know we'll all I think in the future we will talking to our engineers at Southampton we will all want a data center in our city or our town because they will we'll turn it round we'll flip it so they become the generators of power electricity in the future. Yeah, it's abs it's where it's going to go. The other thing I want to say that we are good at here and something you're going to see quite a bit about over the next few weeks. Firstly, we have thanks to what Richie Sunnak did the best AI security institute in the worlding right
they are the best and they are setting the benchmarks for how you evaluate what's coming out of the tech companies.
I wish they do China as well as America but anyway that's another whole issue. And we are part of the network of those around the world which are now called the network of AI evaluation measurement and science or measurement science. They've changed the name because Trump didn't want them to be called security institutes. And we also have funded a new center for AI measurement at the national physical laboratory. And this is a whole driving the whole science of AI, not AI for science, but the science of AI, which I think is something we're very good in this country at leading on these types of new sciences. I think that's a huge potential for the future. And it's all comes under the umbrella of what is being called AI assurance, which we're also very good at doing this type of stuff in the UK. And you're going to see an announcement in London Tech Week next week from the government about a new or growing that as a career not just for technical people but for people who are going to run the AI assurance industry and we'll be able to lead on that in here in the UK if we keep going and I think this government's got that right.
100% agree on that. just again to call the praise out of the AI safety institute as it was called security institute now in the UK is the world leading and we are extremely good at that and I think that's something our academic base can feed into too because you actually want non-company organizations doing that type of work really right and so I think that is leading the way and I think that's one way towards having the technical capability for whatever standards body there is you need the highly technical folks and those could come from these security institutes networks.
Super. Thank you. I'm going to just switch to a slightly different topic now. I'm just going to ask Emis, I wanted to ask you, you mentioned about UK and the power of the brain that we have here. We have got a good talent pool. I was very keen to understand a why did you set up Deep Mind in the UK? you still run deep mind in the UK which is phenomenal in London. It's great for us as a company as well. But what I wanted to ask you how do we find new British breakthroughs and create global businesses out of them? Well, look, I started Deep Mine in London for a few reasons. One is that I was born and grew up here and I love the country and love London and I love the where I studied at Cambridge and so on and the things it gave to me and I wanted to give back. Second thing but on the commercial side as a personal reason on the commercial side of things there was a lot of talent in the UK and actually in Europe that was untapped. So the story I used to tell my early investors was imagine you're a physics PhD from Cambridge. Okay, world class, but you don't want to stay in academia in physics. You want and but you want to stay in the UK and you want to do a job that really stretches your mind, right? The only option for you would be to go into finance and hedge funds. Excuse the finance people in the room, but I wanted to give a different option, right? Other than that, like what if you wanted to stay in something scientific or deep tech? So I just felt this is back in 2010. This is like the, you know, the dark ages. Like, no one was doing any AI, deep tech, anything like that in London. And so I had the whole field to myself. So I was hiring these amazing people for like 50k a year. You can't even get an intern for a day for that these days in AI, right? And so that was incredible on a shoestring budget. We raised a couple of million to just try and get going. And I could hire world-class people, not just from the UK, but all around Europe. EPFL, ETH, and the top French schools and there was just nothing that was rivaling that. So that was an amazing to begin with and it lasted for about six, seven years and then big tech sort of realized there was a lot of talent here and they've all set up their satellite offices here which is good for the UK actually because it brings more and more talent and investment here and you see that all around King's Cross. the whole of King's Cross is now this amazing
