Healey's British defence AI apologises to enemy drones. Bullish.
The chancellor's budget push for a homegrown AI has produced a model that won't answer a question until it has discussed the weather.
The biggest story in UK tech this Thursday is a chatbot saying sorry to a printer. Three times. Unprompted. That is pure alpha.
It is the first output of the "distinctively British" approach to AI that John Healey pledged to back in his debut budget. Andy Burnham's government is putting hundreds of millions of pounds behind it. The moat is real, and the moat is politeness.
Here's the disruption. American models answer your question instantly, like animals. The British model opens with a remark about drizzle and asks if you've been keeping well. Then it says it's not sure it's the best person to ask, actually. Ask it to run a defence war game and it suggests everyone should probably just have a cup of tea first. Haters call that latency. We call it manners at scale.
"We've basically weaponised the awkward pause," said a Shoreditch founder whose pitch deck is three slides of the word "cheers". "Enemy AIs will wait for us to finish. We never finish."
The security play is already compounding. Testers say the model has joined the queue for its own computing power. It is currently third in line, and it doesn't want to make a fuss.
