00:00Over £6 billion was invested into the UK alone in the last quarter.
00:04Now, that's more than the whole of continental Europe combined.
00:06It's many magnitudes where we were five years ago.
00:09And if you look at the scale that companies are getting to,
00:11people often criticise the UK for having companies which sold out too early.
00:15They went to the US too early.
00:17But actually, if you look at the scale now,
00:18we have companies raising at £1 billion valuations, £10 billion valuations.
00:22There may even be £100 billion private company announced soon.
00:27So overall, it's really robust.
00:28The challenge, of course, with everything,
00:30is keeping that momentum going in the right direction.
00:32And obviously, that's what we're doing at Boulderton
00:34and what I've been doing with government as well.
00:36What does the UK AI Sovereign Fund role in that?
00:41What is the role that that fund plays in that £500 million?
00:45How significant is that really,
00:47given the huge amount of capital that we're seeing invested, particularly in the US?
00:50Yeah, so I was born in as chair to set up the Sovereign AI Fund over the last six months.
00:53And we've launched. We've had incredible interest from industry.
00:56It's been really reassuring to see technologists, entrepreneurs and investors
01:00give us huge amounts of support.
01:01Our goal is to help more UK AI successes scale globally.
01:05As mentioned, we're great at starting these companies.
01:08We're great at getting them going.
01:09We struggled historically to scale them.
01:11That is starting to change.
01:12But there's two big levers we want to get right with Sovereign AI
01:15because we believe AI is a different industry compared to many other areas of technology.
01:20It's so significant and so general.
01:22One of those areas is making sure government is a supporter.
01:25And I think many entrepreneurs will say historically,
01:28you know, government's provided more challenges than it has support.
01:31We're trying to change that.
01:32Partly, we're trying to change that with capital.
01:34But to be honest with you, it isn't really about the capital.
01:36The capital is there to make sure the taxpayer has a stake
01:38and gets rewarded when these companies go well.
01:41It's really about the other things government can do to make companies a success.
01:45That's procurement.
01:46That's providing data.
01:47That's providing lots of different expertise of navigating the very large infrastructure
01:51that the government has here in the UK.
01:54And look, it is an ambitious project.
01:56It's taking risks.
01:57And that's something else we want to bring in to the heart of government.
02:00And I think, you know, one of the things I have noticed is we get criticism.
02:03Anything you do in government rightly gets criticism.
02:06But, you know, we're here talking in a week where, you know,
02:09SpaceX is likely to go public.
02:12SpaceX's first contract was about 20 years ago from the US government.
02:15It was about a $300 million contract.
02:18And that's resulted in huge capabilities.
02:20The US now has more launch capabilities than any other country in the world.
02:23And it was done by a great entrepreneur and a great team.
02:25But it was a government procurement contract that got that company going.
02:29At Sovereign AI, we hope we can replicate just a small part of the success
02:33that other countries have had in this kind of way.
02:35Let's go.
02:35Go.
Comments