00:00Well, London has officially reclaimed its crown as Europe's leading tech hub, toppling Paris in the latest rankings from the
00:07global database platform Dealroom.
00:09It was driven by a surge in deep tech and artificial intelligent investment.
00:13Joining me now is Digital Media Lecturer at the University of Stirling, Dr. Conor McCune.
00:18Great to have you on the programme. Now, look, London's back on top as Europe's tech capital, but in AI,
00:24can anyone really close the gap with the US and China?
00:28Yeah, I think that's a really great question to ask. And the answer is complicated, but it's not impossible.
00:36I think the biggest reason the UK can't close the gap right now, it really comes down to three things.
00:41It's the scale of capital investment, a lack of hardware power and then a little bit of risk aversion.
00:47So the capital scale is something that we'll have to see how that works out.
00:51And as time goes on, but the UK is taking more risks and with big investments from companies like AMD,
00:58they've just pumped two billion dollars into the UK's hardware investments.
01:03There's a real chance that the UK could become a bigger player in the future of AI.
01:08But it does seem that Britain's really good at starting tech companies, not quite as good as keeping them.
01:16Yeah, definitely. I mean, the UK is an ideas hub for sure.
01:20And, you know, a lot of the technology that we use to train AIs these days actually started off in
01:26a company called DeepMind in the UK.
01:29That's not the same thing as the LLM technology that really powers them, but we train them on technology that
01:35was developed in the UK.
01:36But the problem is that the capital scale that I mentioned, there are lots of 500 million pound companies in
01:44the UK that can write a check for a 5 million pound startup here.
01:49But if you want to get to that next level, that kind of trillion dollar scale level, the US still
01:55remains one of the places that that's where that money is.
01:58So when people talk about the AI race, they focus on chips, data centers and the billions of dollars you've
02:04mentioned.
02:04What is London's edge?
02:08It's ideas. It really is ideas. It's the quality of talent that is available in London.
02:14And you're seeing companies like Waze, Eleven Labs and, yeah, Google remain seated in London because they want easy access
02:23to our graduates.
02:25And they want easy access to the ideas that are being generated here.
02:29It's a really safe place to go for high quality workers.
02:33If we're having this conversation in 2030, Conor, what's the one thing that would convince you that the UK has
02:39succeeded in AI?
02:40I mean, does it need its own DeepSeek size champion?
02:44I think it does.
02:45The one thing that would convince me if I saw UK powered models that answered UK based questions trained on
02:53UK data delivered through UK data centers, then I would know the UK is genuinely in a good shape.
03:01If it was delivering that stuff off of its own hardware back end, that would convince me.
03:07I spot a business opportunity. Anyway, Dr. Conor McCune, thank you.
03:13Get in early.
03:13Yeah, let's get in. Thanks ever so much.
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