AI News Roundup: UK Autumn Budget Delivers $620M for AI Computing

AI Business brings you the latest news and insights from across the AI world.

This week’s roundup covers the U.K.'s autumn budget news and more.

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UK Autumn Budget offers incentives for R&D

The U.K. government unveiled its autumn budget statement this week, which contained several measures covering AI and tech.

Chief among them was £500 million ($627M) of funding to establish more computing centers to support AI development. The cash spans the next two years and will be used to expand more sites following the establishment of new British supercomputers like Isambard-AI and Dawn.

It was also announced that the R&D Expenditure Credit and Small and Medium Enterprise Scheme will be merged from April 2024 in a bid to simplify the system. The rate at which loss-making companies are taxed within the merged scheme will be reduced from 25% to 19%, and the threshold for additional support for R&D-intensive loss-making SMEs will be lowered to 30%.

The government is also trying to cut barriers to businesses, including announcing a new business rates support package worth $5.4 billion.

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Amazon offers free AI training

Amazon has launched ‘AI Ready’, a program to provide free AI training to 2 million people globally by 2025.

The initiative includes new courses including lessons related to generative AI. The e-commerce giant teamed up with Udacity and Code.org in a bid to make AI education accessible to a diverse audience.

Through the new AWS Generative AI Scholarship, the company will provide Udacity scholarships, valued at more than $12 million, to more than 50,000 high school and university students.

While under its deal with Code.org, Amazon will offer an hour-long introduction to coding and AI for students.

Cognigy launches contact center AI tool

Chatbot developer Cognigy has unveiled a new conversational AI solution for enterprise contact centers.

Dubbed AI Copilot, the new offering is designed to support customer service agents. It provides information and knowledge to agents in real time.

AI Copilot guides agents through processes for effective query resolution and can automate post-call busywork.

The fully customizable solution can also perform tasks like sentiment analysis, data retrieval, task automation and call summarization.

F1 gets AI to deter track infractions

The FIA, motorsport’s governing body, is developing an AI system to recognize cars and improve track limits policing.

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In a Q&A posted on the body’s website, the FIA is working on a computer vision-based system to identify cars during race incidents to accurately enforce penalties.

“This involves shape analysis, where we have a line that is the track edge and the software works out the number of pixels past that line,” Chris Bentley, head of information systems strategy for single-seat races said.

The FIA is planning to run the computer vision system at this week’s final Grand Prix of the 2023 in Abu Dhabi.