Robert, yes, I'm slightly mystified by some of these decisions but are we missing something? The EU as a federation has plans for exascale systems. If Starmer is planning a closer relationship with the EU to match the size of US and Chinese investments it might be sensible to throw the UK's lot in with Europe. However, Starmer seems hesitant to move back towards Europe; he seems to forget that the referendum was only advisory so rejecting bad advice isn't undemocratic. One point could be that there's a possibility the Edinburgh exascale system would have been built around US Cray systems (like, I believe, the Archer one). I think the EU exascale systems could be using their own technology, I'm not sure but getting involved in developing the underlying technology might be sensible rather than sending more cash to the US? Anyway, to my knowledge none of the exascale systems use quantum computing which - to my limited knowledge - is still relatively immature and proving difficult to scale? (Perhaps I shouldn't use the term "relative" about "quantum"!)There seems to be a lot of hype around AI and some of it seems to be categorised as Machine Learning - but I'm not well up enough in it to fully understand the boundaries (and there wasn't as much talk about it at this year's Infosec as I thought there might be). Still, Google, MS, Musk etc al seem to find it worth ploughing money in so I suppose they'll be some payback soon. Perhaps the EU is just trying to set some boundaries while they can and the UK wants to be on board with that (I know no more than you do) - but we failed with data protection and social media so I'm sure this is a losing battle as well.Anyway, I'll believe we've cracked AI when I see a Waymo taxi navigate the streets and traffic of Naples rather than the street grids and disciplined drivers of San Francisco :-)
Michael Ixer ● 298d