B (4:36)

Okay, let's try and keep them separate, slightly separate for the moment. I mean, that fundamental point, if you have energy as expensive as Britain's is, does it make the data centers, the hardware that you were talking about earlier, does it make them prohibitively expensive?

A (4:54)

Absolutely.

B (4:55)

It just can't be done.

A (4:56)

It's really. I don't know if it can't be done because they're trying. So governments are trying to change policy to make it more accessible. But certainly when I speak to people in the industry, they say the absolute number one thing holding Britain back is its energy infrastructure. So if I could color in a recolor in the bar, I would say.

B (5:15)

I'm not saying the audience are wrong. Other opinions are available.

A (5:17)

You said it is expensive. We're already struggling to get energy to, for example, factories, manufacturers complaining that they can't get connected to the grid. And people don't like data centers. So there's a huge amount of NIMBYism with it. They don't come with lots and lots of jobs. No, it's sort of boring sheds housing lots of servers and people don't like the look of them either. So it's actually, it is quite difficult to get them built. Whereas in the US you've got a lot more space and you're seeing companies like Microsoft bring Three Mile island nuclear Power Station back to life Matter doing the same. It's so fascinating that all the big tech companies are also making these massive energy investments because they need it.

B (6:00)

And the scale is such that you need transformative change in what your planning rules, in your energy supply, in all the kinds of things that will make a data center work.

A (6:12)

So you put them in space or maybe in the sea. That's another thing people are doing right. It's cold.

C (6:17)

And I think the thing also to notice that kind of, you know, you're absolutely right about the NIMBYism. I think I read recently there were kind of 25 data centers that local residents complained about. And I think that Microsoft is just recently to your point about Brad Smith, I think, said that they're now making these guarantees about when they build a data center, the energy prices won't go up, that they were creating a certain number of jobs that, you know, they're realizing that there will be pushback on these things and, you know, the impact of a data center. There aren't going to be that many jobs actually inside a data center. If anything, they're probably the lights are off most of the time. So, you know, we have to see sort of like the gains might not be made by that community where the data center is located, which will, I think will mean that there is going to be pushback. So we're going to have to think about like, how do you reward. It's a bit like energy prices. Should you reward people who have whatever wind farms in their area or solar power who agree to have that in their local area? Should there be an incentive given to local communities in order to have a data center built in their area?

B (7:26)

Can we talk about the bubble and talk about the tech numbers, the way tech is driving the market, the concerns people have about the bubble. I bet Guinness Global Investors gets a phone call or two about this every day. When shall I get out? Some say, you know, Jamie Dimon spoke to the BBC relatively recently and said he was far more worried than others about a serious market correction. Others just dismiss it and say, you know, off we go. Does it keep you up at night, Katie?

A (7:54)

No. People ask me about it all the time. I wish I had a Better answer. And I wish I knew, because then I'd be a very, very wealthy person. I mean, I didn't think that the market would go as high as it did last year. So Nvidia, which at the start of the year was valued at $3 trillion, by the end was valued at $5 trillion. And I'd never have predicted that. I think perhaps we need to make a difference as well between what's going on with the public companies. So the listed businesses like Matter and Microsoft and Nvidia, which are making a lot of money from AI, and then the private companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, which have these enormous valuations, and the reason they have those valuations is because investors think they're worth that much, essentially. But we don't have a. Under the bonnet of how these companies do. So American businesses are not like those here in the uk, which when they're private, put their accounts on Companies House and we can have a look at them. We really don't know how they're doing. And so I think it's a big question at the moment, and what analysts in the city I speak to are worried about is this sort of issue of circular deals. So the likes of Nvidia putting money into OpenAI in exchange for buying their chips, does OpenAI really have the money to do that? What sort of revenues are they making? We don't know. And so I think that's why. And then you look at like the likes of Greenland and Grok and all these mad things that keep happening, and it wouldn't take much to perhaps suck investor confidence out of the market.

B (9:24)

That circularity, that ecology of these huge companies and the numbers that they are now playing with. Does, does that alone concern you?

C (9:35)

Okay, so I think, by the way, Katie's absolutely right to make that distinction between the publicly traded companies and the companies, Frankly. I mean, OpenAI basically is like Kaiser Sosei in the Usual Suspects. Like the main character in all of this is off stage. We haven't seen them. We don't know what's going on under the hood. We don't know what's happening with OpenAI's finances. No one knows. I would say, you know, if we were sitting here a year ago, we might say something like, google's finished. Right, because everyone's going to use perplexity for search. Desktop went up 65% in 2025. And I think there are two ways of looking at this. One is firstly, the Jamie Dimon approach, which is this is a little bit like there's a lot of competition in this marketplace right now. It's very easy to switch between these products. We're already seeing it. People are moving away from OpenAI, Gemini's growing. We're seeing sort of like Deep Seq and the open source models, which is a whole other area where I think the US tech companies could be in a lot of trouble if the market's flooded by Chinese open source models, which are, you know, 80, 85% as good, but are 10th of the price of these things. And that could actually kind of have a real impact on the valuation of the Mag 7. Sorry. Actually, no, the privately owned AI companies, to Katie's point, what I would say is there's a Jamie Dimon point of view, which is it's very easy to switch between these products. There's competition in that marketplace right now. What that means is that we all have the ability to move between various products. So it's a bit like going out and buying a can of beans. Like I can walk from my house and go and buy a can of beans in six different places and it's roughly going to be the same price. And if I want to save 10p, maybe I go to somewhere other than the other. But the real challenge there is effectively, you know, the margin price comes down to sort of like zero. And actually the value for those companies is sequestered for all of us.

B (11:38)

Right.

C (11:38)

So we're all using these products and actually, actually those. The valuation of those companies is not significant. There's the other view, which is the Jensen Wang view, which is that there are going to be some huge winners and that there will be companies that will be worth trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars and they will have effectively have a monopoly. Now, I don't know which way, frankly, I have no idea which way it's going to go. But, you know, I think that we can imagine a world in which, you know, both of those scenarios are possible.

A (12:11)

This is obviously not investment advice, but I would say, I think if you believe that AI is going to make us all more productive and more efficient and thus businesses more productive and more efficient, then and it probably does push up stock market values. And we've seen that with what's happened to the FTSE 100 this year, I mean, it's probably likely that company valuations across the board, not just the tech companies that we've been talking about, are going to rise.

B (12:39)

I guess there's a secondary question about the bubble, Greg. You say yes, and you cite Jensen Huang saying There will be companies that make unfeasible amounts of money out of this. Presumably, there is a concern that people are also pouring money into companies that will not make money out of this, and that money will simply go down the plug hole. And then you have systemic risk about companies that have had trillions spent and nothing has come out. Katie, is that a concern or is it too early to say.

A (13:12)

So the answer that I hear tech bosses trot out about this is that this happened in the dot com boom. You know, people made massive investments and a lot of them didn't work out. But at the end of the day, we all use the Internet, I'm afraid. I do think there is going to be some sort. I mean, correction is a lovely word to use because things do feel so inflated. But as I say, that's. That's exactly how I felt last year. And things, things just seem to be going up in quite a terrifying way.

C (13:48)

I mean, look, I think that where we are, it's, you know, the analogy that everyone's sort of like using at the moment is like, are we in 1996 or are we in 1999? Like, how close are we? And do people want to get out of the market now? If you got out of Google last year, you do, you know, 65% increase in the market cap of that company. I think that it's possible that there will be a drawdown at some point because, you know, valuations are incredibly high at the moment. But I also think that it's possible that, you know, this keeps Going for two or three years because we are, if we were in 1996, we, you know, in 1996, we figured out, okay, this Internet thing is probably going to, like, really help us, like, buy things, and it's probably going to have an effect on the media. And, hey, guess what, we can buy plane tickets. But probably what we hadn't seen was the rise of, you know, we definitely hadn't seen the rise of Airbnb or uber or even YouTube. Like, we couldn't see how those industries are going to completely change.

A (14:53)

Or smartphones. Right.

C (14:54)

Awesome. Yeah, absolutely.

A (14:56)

I'll leave you with an analogy that Jensen Huang gave me when I asked him about the bubble. He called it a build out.

B (15:02)

Build out, not a bubble. That's what we'll go with. Right. Could you briefly tell the 27% of our audience who think that the brain drain might be the biggest obstacle to the UK why they are completely wrong or at least address the idea of the brain drain and whether it is A brain drain or a brain surge, Katie?

A (15:20)

I feel like we've got a brain drain into London at the moment, particularly London, because I keep hearing about a lot of people in the US who don't want to be there under the Trump regime and thus are moving here as a multicultural, cosmopolitan, fantastic city with incredible tech companies. And we really do have some amazing tech companies here, I think about the likes of Wave, the driverless car business, eleven Labs, the AI audio business, for example. So I think it's the other way.

C (15:55)

Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And I think that, you know, the Trump administration's sort of like $100,000 sort of charge for an H1B visa will be seen as an act of self harm. It's a tax on talent. I think the UK can offer, you know, an alternative to that. We have you universities and companies that are grow, you know, elite universities. We have companies that are growing. We also have, you know, frankly, as Katie said, like amazing cosmopolitan places to live. And you know, you know, that that kind of like nonsense that you see online about London being a hellhole, like just come and live here for a couple of years and you'll see that it's, you know, an incredibly fun, robust, cosmopolitan place with, you know, elite universities and wonderful museums and fantastic restaurants.

B (16:42)

May I ask you about something which you touched upon and this was the idea that British companies get to a certain size and then go, right, let's sell and that they don't develop into global behemoths. Is it something that concerns you? Is it something that can change or is it now so entrenched? Because people have been talking about this as long as we've been talking about, frankly tech, that it's is now very hard to shift. Katie, will you kick off?

A (17:17)

I don't think it's so entrenched that it's hard to shift. I think there are fundamental issues that are stopping businesses growing here to that scale, mainly funding. So if you look at the likes of Google, DeepMind, you know, when they got to a certain size, where did they turn to for their growth capital? And that is a very difficult, systemic thing to change. The government is trying to change the rules to make pension funds invest more of their money here in UK risky companies, early stage businesses. I was with an investor the other day who many of you might know, the Ontario Teachers pension plan, based in the same building as Aramco in Mayfair. And they are an enormous investor in early stage British tech companies, European tech companies. And that really, I think is where we need to go to with our pension funds if we're going to see a change in the funding of these companies. Because lot of the time that's what it comes down to. The other issue of course, is public listings in London. So getting tech companies that grow here to want to stay in London when they float. And if you look at the likes of Revolut, I can't remember its latest valuation, it was completely massive, but that's the sort of business that you would want to float on the London Stock Exchange. It looks very likely that they'll go to the us.

C (18:42)

Greg, just to be clear, when I said the Revolut valuation was nuts, I don't mean it was insanely high. I just meant that like it's a huge success story. Yes, yeah, just. No, just on that. Kay's absolutely right on that. Kind of like that growth area. We are really, really good at building early stage companies. We're not so good at scaling them in that kind of like that when they really are building out to that kind of like global size. And the pension reforms I think are really important at the moment, as far as I understand is like we get, we. The UK captures around 15% of value of most tech technology companies and they do go to the Ontario Teachers Fund or they go to a private equity company in Australia or a Danish sovereign wealth fund. And I do think that we need to start capturing more value. I think that we need to be more willing to accept risk. And this isn't just the uk, this is Europe as a whole.

B (19:34)

When you say we, who is it who needs to be more willing to accept risk?

C (19:38)

I think, look, fundamentally a lot of this comes down to government being the first, you know, sort of like particularly being able to sort of like act as a first customer for a lot of, for a lot of businesses so that they're able to sort of like go to market with the knowledge that the government will be a customer of theirs. And then once government commits, then a lot of private capital will come in. We are really good at venture capital. We don't have the size obviously of the scale of what the, what the US has. But if, for instance, and this is an idea I heard last week from a German entrepreneur is like, you know, we need to be putting together like a fund of funds, like you know, maybe sort of like with sort of part government capital, private capital, but we need to think about how we deploy that capital in fast growth businesses when they're at that stage where they're at that later stage where they're really able to sort of, you know, go into being a globally significant company.

A (20:39)

I mean, our market is just so much smaller than the US And I don't know about you, I don't think it's an ambition issue, do you? With founders, with entrepreneurs who are running these companies?

C (20:48)

No, definitely not. And I think that that's why you see so many of them think, well, I have to go and raise in, I have to go and raise in the Valley. So whether you're thinking about, I don't know, stripe or, I mean that's not a British company, but you know, two Irish guys could have raised in London. It's just that how quickly can we do that? And I think it's the speed of execution as much as anything else. Right? I mean, you know, being able to raise very, very quickly. These people want to be able to move, you know, in weeks, not months. And maybe we just don't have that ability. I don't know. What do you think? You didn't start a business just to keep the lights on. You're here to sell more today than yesterday. You're here to win. Lucky for you, Shopify built best converting checkout on the planet like the just one tapping ridiculously fast acting sky high sales stacking champion at checkouts. That's the good stuff right there. So if your business is in it to win it, win with Shopify. Start your free trial today@shopify.com win save on appliances at the Home Depot with up to $1,000 off plus up to an extra $500 off select appliances like Whirlpool that can keep up with your busy routine. The Home Depot has Whirlpool laundry appliances with fan feature fans and tumbles your laundry after it's done to help keep your clothes fresh until you're ready to grab them. Shop now and get up to $1,000 off plus free delivery on select appliances at the Home Depot. How doers get more done Free delivery on appliance purchases of $999 or more offer valid January 8th through the 28th US only C store online for details.

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B (24:20)

We'll leave it there. And what I want to do now is hear from you, if we may, your questions for our panel. We're going to change the lighting so I can actually see you. Ah, here it goes. Fantastic. We'll go with one question at a time. First of all, I think first of all, lady over there.

A (24:34)

Hi, thank you so much for talking to us today, Katie and Greg. And my question relates to when we discuss data sovereignty and national regulation, how does this change our perspective on AI issues that need to be governed arguably on a global scale, such as issues with geopolitical significance, such as like AI being used in misinformation, election campaigns or financial crime being AI facilitated happening offshore. Thank you.

B (25:03)

Thank you very much. Who wants to go first?

A (25:07)

Greg?

C (25:07)

Well, I guess kind of like we would have signed up to sort of like multilateral agreements when things like financial crime and also UK law would apply. I think that when we are processing data in the uk, we need to be able to apply UK sort of like law to that. And that is one question around sort of like, sort of like us kind of companies and ensuring that we maintain control and sovereignty over that, that, that, that data and that information. So I'd say that, you know, we apply our own rules, our own standards and also, you know, there are also global standards and global, you know, international law that we would apply to that, that data and that information.

A (25:47)

I love the idea of having some sort of NATO, whatever it is, for AI, some global body that would make sure that all of the standards were the same. You know, that's almost what Bletchley park was aiming at, bringing together the Chinese, Americans, Europeans to talk about this. I just can't see it happening, unfortunately. And so I think we're back really to where we were or where we are on tech regulation all the time, which is doing it state by state, which, to Johnny's point, when you're talking about tech and services that cross borders, isn't ideal.

B (26:24)

No, no, we got some. Lots and lots of people are watching online and we have questions from them as well. I'm going to ask you both a tricky 1. Which UK AI companies should we be excited about? You should declare any interests you have. Is there anything that there are companies that you are keeping an eye on that you are excited about?

A (26:44)

Katie, I mentioned Wave, the driverless car business, which got a billion dollars of backing from Softbank and has investments from Nvidia and, and Microsoft. I also mentioned 11 Labs, which is an audio AI company. So it ingests a little bit of your voice and then it can read forevermore sounding like you. And you said, I think a friend of yours had a small investment in Elevenlabs and he's doing rather well. He's now doing rather well. And then others, the Synthesia, which does video AI, so it makes. Well, you could make Greg basically do a video even if he wasn't there, so it's quite cool. And polyai, which is another voice AI company. So Amazon's Alexa was developed in Cambridge and so we've got a real expertise around voice AI in this country.

B (27:33)

Lovely, thank you. Great.

C (27:34)

I'm going to go for a couple of healthcare companies. First one is Isomorphic Labs, which was rolled out of Google DeepMind, which is doing drug discovery, if I'm correct. And there's a very, very early stage company as well. So full transparency that my friend is the founder of along with Thomas Heatherwick. And it's basically, if you can imagine, a stick that you pee on for a pregnancies test, it's a stick that you pee on and it will give you early indicators of lots of chronic diseases and it could be quite a game changer in the healthcare industry.

B (28:10)

Fabulous. I'm going to come to the audience in a moment. Back to the audience, and I'm going to take you in a group of two or three questions. Hang on one second, because we've question. Got a. A lovely question about framing here from those watching online and thank you very much for your questions coming in to us. Is it a good idea to frame it this as an AI race between the biggest global superpowers? What, if anything, do we miss with that framing? Greg, you're nodding so vigorously. I'm going to let you answer first.

C (28:42)

I was just pretending to have some insight. I think it's not helpful to define it as a race, because if we define it as a race, then there's going to be clearly just one winner and it's the kind of the Jensen version of how it's going to play out. I think that there are lots of places that smaller countries can play within the stack. I think the UK can compete probably on frontier models with the right infrastructure, the right data, the right investment. You know, we're a long way from that right now, but we could compete. I think where we can compete is on the application layer. We are very, very good at building products, you know, that sort of sit above that, kind of like that, that structural underpinning. So I think that, you know, if we're talking about sort of like winners and losers, you know, the UK could be a big winner in very different ways, to say the way that China, like China's already won, frankly, on energy. They have electrified their grid pretty much. I know there's a lot of coal being burned in China still, but their price of energy is half that of the United States at the moment, so they have won in one particular way. I think the UK could win if we sort of use our health data, for instance, that we have within the nhs, and we could win by finding cures to chronic diseases using our kind of like the talent that we can attract here, to Katie's point, in terms of that inflow of talent, and we become winners in that way. So I think there's different ways of framing it.

B (30:12)

Katie, Races, winners, losers, beloved of headline writers. Are they useful ideas?

A (30:20)

It might not be useful, but I'm afraid it's a fact. We are in a race. Tech is heavily geopolitical. This is the most powerful technology of our lifetime. So I'm afraid it is inevitable. And you see that on the US's limitations on the exports of Nvidia's semiconductors, for example. That's why they're putting their curbs in place, because everybody is trying to win here. And up until now, the US has been trying to give us a helping hand in that with, with its investment into the uk Whether that changes after Greenland, I don't know.

B (30:53)

Tea time on Saturday. Right, we have another poll for you. It is our final poll of the evening. How confident are you that Britain can become an AI superpower? And the answers range from very to not confident at all, with two in between. So do vote and we'll see how quickly the results come through. Can I ask you just a quickie on its pessimism and optimism? Because there is an awful lot of both around AI how do you approach it? Do you approach it as something that is this enormous opportunity, or do you see it, as so many people do, as a sort of terrifying threat?

A (31:39)

I think it's really exciting and I'm really enjoying experimenting with it. And as I said to you in the green room earlier, I used it to help write my book. So I created a model, ingesting all of the vast amounts of information that I had from court cases and judgments and all sorts of earnings calls, and it was invaluable and it enabled me to write the book far more quickly and painlessly than I would otherwise have done. And I've just found it also invaluable for research. It finds things on the Internet that I would not find myself. And I'm really, really enjoying an enthusiast.

C (32:14)

Greg, I'm optimistic that in the UK we can really use it in order to sort of like, drive growth and find new kind of exciting sort of like, ways of deploying it that we probably don't even understand right now. I think we need the right regulation. I think we need the right sort of like, guardrails. We need the right level of investment. But I think that, you know, as a entrepreneurial, dynamic country, this is a real opportunity. And I think that it's, you know, it's very easy to sort of like, look at the challenges. And yes, we know we don't have the data centers and yes, we, you know, we need to build out, you know, the capital inflows. But I think that, you know, it's kind of a generational opportunity and we can, we can really, if we grasp it and we have, see as a national mission, I think it's very, very exciting. And I really do believe that, you know, the level of innovation and okay, one fact, like The UK has won, you know, more Nobel prizes per capita than pretty much anywhere in the world. And if we can harness that kind of, you know, 19 per 10 million people, the U.S. is 11 per 10 million people. So I think that if we can harness some of that, can do that expertise and that, you know, that drive, we can do something special.

A (33:33)

Apparently, if they gave one to President Trump, he wouldn't have gone after Greenland, but there we go.

B (33:38)

Let's just ponder very briefly if we could. We are going to wrap up very soon. The army answers here that you gave. I'd like to doff my cap to the 35% that said they were unsure. Nothing more fabulous than people being honest about their own ignorance or unsureness. But 41% fairly confident that Britain can become an AI superpower, as previously discussed. A quick rumination. Do you think this is because of what you've said in the last hour and a half, Katie?

A (34:08)

No. They all live in the UK or here, presumably, so they see how great it is. I think the one major thing is discussed that's holding us back is the hardware and the infrastructure. But that doesn't stop fantastic companies growing and operating here.

C (34:24)

This is an Intelligence Squared audience. Come on. They're intelligent, they're definitely not square. No, I think that, look, I think that anyone who's kind of engaged with, with the kind of content Intelligence Squared produces knows that this is a generational opportunity because we are, you know, able in this country to really sort of, like, innovate and come up with ideas and drive things forward. So I'm so happy to see that. Was it 47%? 41%?

B (34:53)

41.

C (34:55)

Yeah. Pretty good.

B (34:56)

That's a good notes and doomsters here. There are several people and organizations that need to be thanked. Thanked. Guinness Global Investors, first of all, for all the help that they give in establishing this economic outlook. Many, many thanks to them, Intelligence Squared, who have obviously organized this. But most importantly, Katie and Greg, for everything you've given us this evening, thank you very much.

A (35:21)

Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was created in partnership with Guinness Global Investors. It was produced by me, Mia Sorrenti, and it was edited by Mark Roberts. For more information on Guinness, just head to guinnessgi.com or see the link in the episode description. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.