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The UK government has unveiled a new programme to recruit the nation's top AI experts into public service, backed by a $1m (approximately £750k) grant from Meta to the Alan Turing Institute. The 12-month AI Fellowship aims to help make the state more agile so it can deliver the Plan for Change, leveraging open-source tools to keep down costs.
Fellows will join DSIT’s Incubator for AI, with a focus on building tools using Meta's Llama 3.5 and other open-source models. Potential applications range from building AI tools for high-security use cases across the public sector such as language translation in a national security context, or making use of construction planning data to speed up the approvals process. They could also help expand “Humphrey”, a bundle of AI tools that help civil servants more effectively deliver on the requests of ministers – taking away the admin burdens involved in summarising documents, taking notes and summarising consultation responses (See - Plans and progress of UK government AI adoption).
The fellowship comes alongside the news that ‘Caddy’, an AI assistant that helps call centre workers by providing key information from guidance documents, has been open sourced. Having been tested in Citizen’s Advice to date, who built the technology in partnership with government, it is also now for the first time being used by central government, with a Cabinet Office team using it to quickly access expert guidance on grant decisions, improving speed, consistency, and value for money. Early tests across 1,000 calls showed that it could halve response times, with 80% of Caddy-generated responses ready to use with no revisions.
The government also announced it is launching the next phase of the AI Knowledge Hub – a platform that shares real examples, tools, and tips to help teams use AI. The Hub is designed to help departments learn from each other, avoid duplication, and move from small pilots to real results. As part of its next phase, new features will be added including a Prompt Library to help teams use AI to boost everyday productivity and deliver faster, better services.
At Google Cloud’s London event last week (See - Interoperability a key focus of Google Cloud’s AI strategy), Technology Secretary Peter Kyle made no attempt to hide his ambition to get closer to big tech, announcing a new partnership with Google Cloud aimed at ridding the taxpayer of the ‘ball and chain’ of legacy tech contracts. Google itself is also focused on being the platform of choice for those building any AI models, which includes open-source models like those from Meta.
Posted by: Simon Baxter at 09:35