Jamie Heagerty

member of technocratic staff

[Jamie Heagerty @JamieHeagerty]

@matthewclifford @scrollprize Ahh, was following this. Just incredible - the greatest kaggle. Was always on the look out for problems in govt you could make a challenge like this

[Jamie Heagerty @JamieHeagerty]

+ am in no doubt I have missed other incredible work the team have done. Even more excited to see what comes next!

[Jamie Heagerty @JamieHeagerty]

BOLD is brilliant from @KanishkaNarayan - just look at some of the things the founders have done 🧵

[British Open-ended Learning and Discovery Lab @bold_lab_ai]

Hello world :)
We are BOLD — the British Open-ended Learning and Discovery Lab!

BOLD is a new academic research lab fully focussed on paradigm breaking discoveries in fundamental AI. We work towards more efficient & open AI that is built around human needs and capabilities.

To pursue these breakthroughs, we pioneer new modes of collaboration in academia that are more focussed, resourced, agile, and collaborative. Rather than fragmenting resources, today we are sunsetting 5 of the UKs leading AI labs to join forces under our joined scientific vision.

Our vision is centered around three pillars:
⚡ Beyond backpropagation – questioning the foundations of the field.
🤝 Human-centric learning & discovery – treating humans as core to our algorithms
🤖 Embodied learning – fast learning and adapting methods that deal with the messy real world

BOLD is backed by @UKRI_News and @EPSRC with £30M – and this is just the beginning. We are urgently looking for partners and sponsors to 10x this.

👉 https://t.co/eFVFW31mqz

👉 https://t.co/Eoad4G18KL

@j_foerst, @CULLYAntoine, @tonizza82, @shimon8282, @tonizza82, Ani Calinescu & @_rockt

[Jamie Heagerty @JamieHeagerty]

tl;dr: great things will come of this. This lot have been building the future! Talent + exploratory research are so valuable for the UK. Credit to @UKRI_News @EPSRC and @SciTechgovuk

[Marc Warner @MarcWarner10]

Very cool work with @GoogleDeepMind, @mhclg and @faculty_ai to help improve the planning system: https://t.co/bHvP3d9Fli

[Kanishka Narayan MP @KanishkaNarayan]

🚨 2 major new AI labs in the UK 🚨

3 months ago, we launched a £40m call for a fundamental AI lab in the UK.

Given the exceptional bids we received, we have doubled down: 2 new AI labs, £60m seed funding.

▪️@BOLD_LAB_AI: led by @j_foerst, with an exceptional team of @CULLYAntoine, @shimon8282, @tonizza82, Ani Calinescu & @_rockt

▪️SOFAIR: led by Prof David Barber, with a world-leading team of Mirella Lapata, @yaringal and @LourdesAgapito

The best of UK academia, government and industry, together, to make fundamental advances in AI 🚀

https://t.co/bk5HMyXzSi

[British Open-ended Learning and Discovery Lab @bold_lab_ai]

Hello world :)
We are BOLD — the British Open-ended Learning and Discovery Lab!

BOLD is a new academic research lab fully focussed on paradigm breaking discoveries in fundamental AI. We work towards more efficient & open AI that is built around human needs and capabilities.

To pursue these breakthroughs, we pioneer new modes of collaboration in academia that are more focussed, resourced, agile, and collaborative. Rather than fragmenting resources, today we are sunsetting 5 of the UKs leading AI labs to join forces under our joined scientific vision.

Our vision is centered around three pillars:
⚡ Beyond backpropagation – questioning the foundations of the field.
🤝 Human-centric learning & discovery – treating humans as core to our algorithms
🤖 Embodied learning – fast learning and adapting methods that deal with the messy real world

BOLD is backed by @UKRI_News and @EPSRC with £30M – and this is just the beginning. We are urgently looking for partners and sponsors to 10x this.

👉 https://t.co/eFVFW31mqz

👉 https://t.co/Eoad4G18KL

@j_foerst, @CULLYAntoine, @tonizza82, @shimon8282, @tonizza82, Ani Calinescu & @_rockt

[Jamie Heagerty @JamieHeagerty]

@rowlsmanthorpe If you form and bet on a team aiming for SOTA, you're ngmi. If you bet on someone w an all consuming obsession for AGI / aligned super-intelligence / open-endedness / etc...

[Google DeepMind @GoogleDeepMind]

We’re working with @SciTechgovuk, @mhclg and @i_dot_ai on a new AI housing application planning prototype. 🏡

By cutting down the time spent on repetitive tasks, it could help planning officers focus their attention on complex projects and reduce processing times by up to 50%. → https://t.co/C2AdQOHPiX

[Incubator for Artificial Intelligence @i_dot_ai]

@Tom_Westgarth15 We are hiring more AI engineers to work on government's hardest problems! https://t.co/tf8C7nLpFX

[Tom Westgarth @Tom_Westgarth15]

Laura Gilbert built 10 Data Science and the Incubator for AI, which have both pioneered the deployment of technology across the British state. Few people have contributed more to improving the UK’s state capacity in AI than Laura and the teams she was a part of.

10DS modelling reportedly informed the choice to prioritise by age rather than occupation. This is widely credited with saving lives versus the occupation-based alternative being lobbied for at the time.

10DS and the brilliant folks there did a lot of other great stuff, including building live COVID data that policy teams and the public relied on, as well as releasing a lightweight data sharing tool on GitHub where anyone can access it free of charge. Today, it has amassed over 200,000 public downloads, used by teams across government and industry to make data sharing easy.

Onto AI, where Zack has suggested that Laura doesn’t have lots to offer to public discussion. Whenever I speak with frontier labs, they tell me the U.K. now has the most ambitious and sophisticated approach to deploying AI in public services.

With Extract (which Laura’s Incubator for AI team developed), planning documents are now converted into digital records in 40 seconds, versus the 1–2 hours of planner time it typically takes manually, with higher accuracy. That’s roughly a 100–180x speedup, and is contributing to a 45% reduction in processing time to build the housing and infrastructure the UK is sorely in need of.

The public sector team who built Extract scaffolded Gemini so that it could orchestrate Segment Anything and pose estimation models to map geospatial information from text and diagrams in a way that even the GOOGLE DEEPMIND TEAM hadn’t worked out how to do at the time.

So rather than outsourcing to big tech, which I’m sure Zack and many others are more than sceptical of, Laura helped build true public sector state capacity that reduced our reliance on the private sector, while also delivering a world class public service.

Powerful AI systems are going to usher in a centuries worth of social and economic transformation within only a couple of decades. This requires a deep analysis of where capabilities will develop, an understanding of which externalities we want to mitigate, a vision of what a good life looks like, and amassing the people, tools, infrastructure, and institutions to build that vision. 

Of course Laura is precisely the sort of person that has much to offer in answering these questions. We should be cherishing the tireless civil servants and incredible technical talent that have built capabilities that many folks think the public sector would never be able to do.