UK must learn lessons from AI race and retain its quantum computing talent, says minister | Computing
The UK will not let quantum computing talent slip through its fingers and must learn from the US’ dominance of the AI race, the technology minister said as the government announced its £1bn quantum fund commitment.
Liz Kendall said the government hopes to retain domestic quantum startups, engineers and researchers rather than losing them to rival countries as the United States gets a leg up on its western rivals in artificial intelligence.
“I’m looking at what’s happening with artificial intelligence,” Kendall said. “I think we need to learn the lessons and make sure we give our bright scientists, our companies, and our startups the ability to stay here and make it happen. And that requires a government that is bold, ambitious, and confident in these technologies of the future.”
He added: “Too many people feel like they have to move to the US to get the funding and support they need to grow and scale their companies.”
DeepMind, a groundbreaking artificial intelligence company co-founded by Nobel laureate Demis Hassabis, is still headquartered in London but was bought by Google for £400 million in 2014; Big Silicon Valley names like Meta are offering huge amounts of money to elite talent. The UK remains a major producer of AI talent, but some of its largest AI operations are bases for US companies such as ChatGPT developer OpenAI, Anthropic and Palantir.
Speaking to the Guardian at the National Quantum Computing Center (NQCC) outside Oxford, Kendall said the government did not want to take a “backseat” on quantum. The UK has spawned a number of quantum startups, including Quantinuum, a US-UK firm that recently achieved a $10bn (£7.5bn) valuation.
“I want to be at the front of the grid and be a leader,” he said.
Kendall attended NQCC alongside chancellor Rachel Reeves as part of the announcement of funding for quantum computing, which uses the principles of quantum physics to process information.
The government is providing £1bn to help companies design large-scale quantum computers for use by scientists, researchers, the public sector and businesses, under a policy guided by science minister Patrick Vallance. Additional funding of £1bn already announced will support companies and researchers to bring quantum to life in areas such as finance, pharmaceuticals and energy.
Kendall said Britain wants the money, jobs and security that building a domestic quantum computer would bring by the beginning of the next decade. Last year, Google announced that it had developed an algorithm that enables a quantum computer to run 13,000 times faster than classical computers.
However, fully fault-tolerant quantum computers that can perform some of the tasks that herald major scientific breakthroughs are still a long way off, as they would require machines that can accommodate hundreds of thousands of quantum bits (the term for a unit of information in a quantum computer).
Classical computers encode their information into bits represented as 0 or 1, transmitted as an electrical pulse. A text message, email, or even a Netflix movie streamed on a smartphone is a sequence of these pieces.
However, in quantum computers, information is contained in qubits. Housed inside a modest-sized chip, these qubits are particles such as electrons or photons that can be in several states at once; This is a feature of quantum physics known as superposition.
This means that qubits can encode various combinations of 1s and 0s simultaneously and calculate their paths over many different outcomes, which is not possible in classical computers. However, they need to be kept in a highly controlled environment free of electromagnetic interference, otherwise they can easily break down.
However, quantum computers could, in theory, help design new chemicals, drugs and alloys. Quantum computing could lead to much more efficient representation of chemical compounds; For example, it could allow accurate prediction of what a complex molecule can do, paving the way for new drugs and materials.
