The £500m bet on Britain's future
What to watch as Sovereign AI Unit launches.
Good morning, I'll be floating around events in central London today. Hope to see some of you there.
What do you get when British innovation meets Nvidia’s top open source models? Meet Jupiter — a UK LLM, developed by London startup Locai Labs. It's built by post-training Nvidia’s Nemotron 3 models to give it British language, knowledge and humour. There is even a Welsh version. All its training data is public and there is no Chinese open source in sight. Jupiter gives UK organisations a new sovereign reasoning model with frontier performance that can be deployed on-premises or on the cloud — and it’s trained for maximum performance on agentic tasks.
Happening Today 📆
Happy Launch Day: The Sovereign AI Unit will unveil its first investments at Wayve's HQ in Camden. Our webinar on Friday morning will have the lowdown from the evening. (More below).
Talking tough: The Prime Minister is meeting social media companies in Downing Street and will tell them “looking the other way is not an option” on children's online safety. Senior leaders from Meta, Snap, Google, TikTok and X are all attending the meeting with the PM and tech secretary. Meanwhile, MPs last night voted to overturn a Lords amendment to the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill which aimed to ban social media for under-16s. They voted 256 to 150 in favour of the government's approach of the ongoing consultation before any action.
Agent speak: Founders Forum Group and PUBLIC host the GovTech Summit at Central Hall in Westminster. Speakers include David Willetts and Alex Depledge. I'll be moderating a lunchtime panel on agentic AI in government.
Finance speak: Bloomberg hosts the AI in Finance Summit (invite only). Speakers include reps from Lloyds Banking Group, The Alan Turing Institute and AWS, as well as AI minister Kanishka Narayan.
Mythos surely? The National Resilience Committee chats cyber threats at 10:45am today. They'll hear from Michael Brunton-Spall, Deputy Director of Cyber Services in the Government's Cyber Unit, and Oliver Neuberger, Managing Director, Accenture Cybersecurity.
In the Lords: Peers will be airing concerns about data centres' energy use around 11:30am. In the evening there will be votes on the changes made in the Commons to the Crime and Policing Bill (covered in yesterday's edition).
Sorry, Palantir: Palantir will get a bashing from a handful of MPs when they debate the NHS Federated Data Platform at 3:10pm. Before that, Chi Onwurah will be introducing her committee's latest inquiry on the impact of technology on childhood.
In today's edition for paid subscribers:
🇬🇧 What to watch as the Sovereign AI Unit launches
🤔 Ideas to stop a 'techlash'
📈 UK AI startups have a bumper start to the year