Speeches by Narayan.

“I might provide some comfort, but I also do not want to provide complacency. The comfort that I would provide is that, with respect, we have a first look at the models well before deployment. This country is the only country in the world that has a lab that is publicly located—”

“The AI and future of work unit was a cross-Government unit that we set up. We then, as a result of the Chancellor’s Mais lecture, upscaled it and broadened the scope, and it became the AI Economics Institute. We appointed a chair, Simon Johnson, a Nobel prize winner from MIT, who has looked at the impact of technology …”

“The scenario described is one of the scenarios, so I want to caveat this by saying that there is a range of different scenarios. The scenario of existential risk that you are describing in particular is a pretty low-probability scenario. With that caveat, I take it very seriously because the impact is so high that, eve…”

“As it relates to the conversation that we have just had, AI growth zones are a really critical part of Britain building its sovereignty. I say that in light of the ladder that I have described. We do not have the requisite level of compute in this country. We are not trying to blow the lights out. As you will know, the…”

“Let me just describe the current situation. The question of whether legislative specification should be a mechanism of approving the situation is, to me, secondary to the outcome that we want. Legislation might be a part of it, but to me the central outcome that we want is for Britain to be pretty much the best place i…”

“The situation that we are in is exactly as Kate says. There are good reasons for people to be worried, based on the micro evidence, which is to say that the scale and speed of AI as an economic force has been very unusual. In 2023, AI as a sector took something like 180 days to add $1 billion of revenue. Now, AI as a s…”

“I do not know about the first generation of models, but for the recent models we have evaluated all the core frontier models across the companies that I mentioned. You have to ask yourself a question. The system is putting the UK in a distinct position. Regardless of the fact that none of these companies are in this co…”

“First, I would dispute that AISI has not been able to evaluate the models. They are present in the safety cards. I am very happy to share with the Committee further detail on the pretty full set of evaluations that we have conducted on the models. Secondly, it is true that, as a result of the failures of the British st…”

“I am going to take a slightly longer approach to answering this. Let me first back out and say, “What is the point of sovereignty? What are the outcomes that determine whether you are sovereign or not?” To me, there are two core outcomes that I am really interested in that have defined our approach to British sovereign…”

“What are the consequences? If the question is about the impact of us successfully playing out the strategy that I have described, which effectively means that Britain is able to have much more leverage in the next five years than it had in the last 15 to 20 years, the consequences of that would be that we would have mo…”

“This is a central question. I read that the Pope said that technology ought to remain human. In the realm of technology, my personal motto is to focus consistently on machines that serve us, rather than the other way around. If that is your primary lens to think about this question, there are lots of ways in which we h…”

“One of the reasons I try not to comment on anonymous briefings is that I find them mostly inaccurate. I find them inaccurate on two counts here. First, it is not the case, if the AI growth zone programme is the focus of this particular question, that most of that has been driven by public financing; in fact, almost non…”

“In the last wave of technology, software was made in one of two ways. It could be closed source, which effectively meant that primarily large companies developed the software and retained all the IP. It was a shut ecosystem. To be able to participate in it and build new applications with that software, you had to purch…”

“We cannot stop those models, but we also cannot stop models that are extremely capable coming out of China, which are now increasingly proliferated. The idea that stopping these models is a tractable pathway is pretty challenging. This country is the only country in the world that is able to build a deep understanding—…”

“Yes, but it is really important for me to point out that it is not a hedge, because it is very targeted in both approaches. To take the frontier, if you said you were doing both the frontier and adoption, people might say that you were doing neither, if you had no priorities. On the frontier, our priorities are very su…”

“It is foundational. Without the compute layer and the plan to allow us to build chips and reindustrialise this country, I do not see how Britain builds sovereignty.”

“I will very happily do so. I appreciate the generous start. At a very high level, there are two or three central choices that countries can make when they think about a vision of growth and its relation to artificial intelligence. One is the question of the extent to which you want to focus on being at the frontier of …”

“Thank you, Chair. Can I first seek your permission to mirror you and take off my jacket?”

“Chair, perhaps you will forgive me for focusing more on a diagnosis of the present, rather than on a forecast of the future. On the present, the two big qualitative aspects that I and the Secretary of State have tried to bring to this role are, first, a shift in gear in focusing on small tech rather than big tech and, …”

“Whatever your objectives are, AI is going to be a central driver. If you want to reindustrialise this country, the most private capital-partnering way of doing that is to build chips in this country so that you can capture the economic opportunity of our lifetime. If you want to make sure that you are spreading opportu…”