Loading summary
Transcript25 lines
- [00:00]
Indiana University Announcer
Indiana University strengthens tomorrow's workforce with practical, real world experience. IU grads make a difference in your community, serving as teachers, nurses and engineers who rise to tomorrow's challenges and meet them. Learn more at iu. Edu Impact
- [00:20]
Miriam Eric
Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts Radio
- [00:24]
Bloomberg Host
News now let's get into a big conversation this morning. We are in the midst of London Tech Week. Lizzie, you're also out and about founders forum British AI business Double Word, the UK's first dedicated inference lab, is one of the first companies that has been backed by the UK Government's venture fund for domestic AI startups. We've spoken to the Minister about this and I'm really delighted that we have Miriam Eric, who is the co founder and CEO of Double Word in the radio studio with us. Welcome to Bloomberg Radio.
- [00:56]
Miriam Eric
Thank you for having me.
- [00:57]
Bloomberg Host
Yeah, Miriam, I know that you've been right at the heart of this government activity with London Tech Week. You've been to Downing street all how do you think about the government's announcements in terms of helping businesses like yours?
- [01:11]
Miriam Eric
So the government is taking a very different approach to how UK governments have typically treated the tech sector. So typically UK governments have had a very hands off approach and unfortunately most of our competitive countries don't have a hands off approach. And almost every single generational business that has ever been built has had a very hands on interventionist approach from their governments. And so for the first time what we're seeing from this government is wanting to back the strategically important AI companies of the future and really back them so that they not just start here, which plenty of companies do, but also stay here and scale here so we can really build generational companies in the UK as well.
- [01:53]
Bloomberg Interviewer
But are you taking what the Starmer administration is saying seriously when there's so much speculation about who's going to be the Prime Minister? And for example, Andy Burnham, the greaty Manchester Mayor, is talking about more regulation on tech.
- [02:05]
Miriam Eric
Yes, I think the tech sector gets painted with a very broad brush. I think it's like the Keir Starmer administration as well also wants a lot of regulation on big tech and social media. But I think that's very different to the very innovative startup companies and scale up companies that are kind of British at its core and they want to keep British and they're really putting kind of their money where their mouth is. And we are part of a $500 million sovereign AI fund we have received a compute allocation from. They've also recently announced two days ago a £1.1 million fund to procure compute so we can build more supercomputers in this country. And so it does seem like they're taking this very, very seriously. Although something I'm worried about is a change in government will lead to a change in the ministers in the Department of Science and Technology that we think have been doing a very good job.
- [02:58]
Bloomberg Host
Okay, okay, some praise then for those ministers. I mean, the issue though with picking the winners and losers in the UK is simply that Britain isn't spend very much money. I mean, if you look at the trillions of dollars being used for the kind of infrastructure builder in the us it pales into infosignificance. But I understand that it's sort of trying to pick the winners in terms of double word though. And you've got the backing of government, so that's one thing. Also that they are going to help you with that compute, which is very important and very costly for startup businesses. How quickly are you managing to grow though? I mean inference basically allows companies to use AI to make AI work for them and that is massively important for growth in Brint. How fast are you scaling up? What are your customers actually saying about whether they are doing good things with AI?
- [03:50]
Miriam Eric
Exactly. I think as you say, the government doesn't have a huge amount of money to throw around and so they're being very strategic in how they give this money out. Something that I've been particularly impressed with is the choices when they're deciding which startups to back. It's VC professionals and investment professionals that are choosing those companies and not necessarily like government civil servants. And so they are very selectively picking a couple of strategically important winners. Us for example. We are a dedicated inference lab. The problem of tokens and token costs is going to be a huge issue in the uk, especially given how expensive our energy bills are. And so they've picked just a couple companies that they think can really play in this space. It's not like they're picking, you know, every application level company because actually there's also plenty of VC funding to go around as well. We are predominantly VC backed and we aren't taking money from the government. Just kind of compute where, where they can be strategically important.
- [04:49]
Bloomberg Host
I mean, you've raised as far as I can make out a little over $26 million. I mean you're backed by Dawn Capital, by Octopus Venture Atomic. And so that idea though, staying in Britain, building in Britain and staying in Britain. Yes. Now what happens later as the business grows, would you be committed to staying in the uk?
- [05:08]
Miriam Eric
Yeah. The common pattern that we see is that Britain is great at starting businesses. We have great pedigree. So we are kind of Oxford ucl, KCL scientists and we start in Britain. The issue is, is that Britain doesn't necessarily have our customers. A lot of our customers are abroad and are in the US and so what we often see is companies starting here but then moving abroad and then scaling abroad. And that's specifically challenge that this government is trying to stop. We think and we've committed to building our R and D tech hubs in the UK and in London because we think there's fantastic talent to benefit here. And I would like to think of the UK as more than just an R and D hub, but also as a place where we can have, you know, great customer relationships, firstly with the government, but also with businesses as well
- [05:55]
Bloomberg Interviewer
for our markets audience. Mariam, I'd love to just point out a figure that was in the Tech Nation report this week. 30% of UK tech leaders say that AI is a bubble. If you're in this bubble, if it is one, what's your view on that? Is it going to burst?
- [06:11]
Miriam Eric
Well, if it is a bubble, then it's an incredibly productive one. It doesn't look like the bubbles that we, we saw in the 2000s. This bubble kind of is a bubble of valuations potentially, but actually it seems like this is largely being backed up by revenues by all of these big players. We are seeing record breaking revenue growth from the likes of anthropic, OpenAI, Nvidia and others as well. And so obviously there will always be some winners and some losers as there are in venture. But actually this is being backed up by real revenue for these businesses.
- [06:50]
Bloomberg Host
It's not really delivering productivity growth in the uk, but then maybe that's also because we're right at the beginning of this, I suppose. Again, what are you offering your customers? Because part of the package is, you know, you're talking about global customers and customers in the us but part of this idea is, is allowing sovereignty and AI, allowing a kind of ring fenced AI for businesses that they're not so reliant on global or US based businesses. How do you balance that? The idea of delivering sovereign AI?
- [07:23]
Miriam Eric
So the biggest problem in AI at the moment is the problem of inference and the problem of tokenomics. And so that is the problem of like how do you actually run these models and how do you actually run them in a way that is semi affordable. So at DoubleWorld we've been thinking about token costs for a very, very Long time. But only a couple weeks ago, Uber announced that it had blown through its entire AI budget by Auckland by April. So in four months it blown through 12 months of budget because that is just how expensive AI has turned out to be to adopt for some businesses. And that's the problem we're trying to solve is how can we allow businesses to adopt AI at scale, but also do so in a way that's affordable and in a way that they can control?
- [08:06]
Bloomberg Interviewer
Well, it's interesting that Anthropic's got the token model. I wonder if you have thought strong opinions on anthropic versus OpenAI, because of course the IPOs are coming at the same time. Roughly.
- [08:18]
Miriam Eric
Yeah. And they're both incredibly impressive businesses. And only yesterday we saw Anthropic release a new model which was a version of that much reported Mythos model that everyone's been talking about. It seems in terms of capability, there's really not much between them. I would say at the moment there's probably slightly wider adoption amongst businesses for anthropic, but OpenAI seems to have much more consumer traction and so they're really, really neck and neck. But also I do believe that there's space for both and I think it's healthy that we have both in healthy competition there. But also we are very strong believers in open source models as well. And so we actually think open source models are going to play a bigger role in the AI landscape than some people currently believe.
- [09:05]
Bloomberg Host
How, in terms of, of the uk, how close? The EU has a different kind of regulatory structure. How close is the UK to the eu? I mean, you say that there's plenty of VC money in the uk. How, how are you thinking about Europe in the context of the, of the US compared to the us? I suppose. Now about that, again, that kind of sovereignty idea of the UK and Europe.
- [09:32]
Miriam Eric
So I think London and the UK really stands apart in terms of the amount of VC investment we have. So in Q1 we had record amounts of VC investment in AI startups. I think it was $5.8 billion. And so we are kind of out competing our European neighbors, although there are very strong companies in Europe as well, namely Mistral and Lovable, for example. But when we think about sovereignty in this country, I don't necessarily think about it in terms of as a competition between any other, any other country. I think about it as what do we need to make sure that we can keep the lights on when things, if things go pear shaped. And what that means is we need, you know, lower energy costs in this country. We need more data centers in this country and we need, you know, inference software and you know, great model companies as well so that we can run that AI, you know, in this country if the worst were to happen. Well, yeah, the bank of England Governor
- [10:29]
Bloomberg Interviewer
Andrew Bailey's warned that AI may need to be rationed because of the energy capacity constraints and you know, governments facing these choices between deploying AI and healthcare versus defense versus other sectors. How far off are we from those sorts of decisions?
- [10:46]
Miriam Eric
It's an incredibly good question and at the moment some companies are having to ration their usage because of how expensive they are finding it and it is particularly a problem in the UK because of our energy costs. One of the projects that we've been doing on isambad, the UK supercomputer, is at dubworld. We've been doing a lot of research and how can we make this supercomputer more efficient for producing tokens such that we can make the most of the limited kind of energy and limited money that we have so we can get the most out of it so we don't have to ration. Otherwise if we don't look at efficient inference then we will have to ration this AI and that is not going to be good for anyone.
- [11:25]
Indiana University Announcer
Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this but anyone can get the same Premium Wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do@mintmobile.com
- [11:43]
Bloomberg Host
Switch upfront payment of $45 for 3
- [11:47]
Miriam Eric
month plan equivalent to $15 per month Required intro rate first 3 months only, then full price plan taxes and fees extra. See full terms@mintmobile.com.