POLITICO Tech Briefing
The way the AI industry currently operates is not sustainable or good for consumers.
It’s a world of closed systems, insatiable energy demand, endless data centre construction, hyperactive announcements, eye-popping capital expenditure and a literal handful of companies calling the shots.
We founded Locai to build AI for the rest of us: people who recognise the transformative power of AI, and want to be hopeful about it, but know that any advanced technology like AI must be guided and shaped with intention and care to ensure we get the upside and less of the downside.
Since the launch of our ChatGPT rival Locai last week, there’s been a lot of interest in Locai and how we’ve built not just the UK’s first foundational LLM, but one with world-leading performance with a fraction - or fraction of a fraction - of the budget of the Big Tech AI Assistants.
Locai co-founders James Drayson (CEO) and George Drayson (Chief AI Officer) sat down with POLITICO earlier this week for an in-depth chat about Locai, what we’ve done, why and how we’ve done it, and where we’re headed from here. POLITICO PRO subscribers can read the newsletter here (£) but we wanted to share some highlights from their conversation with POLITICO's Senior Tech Reporter Tom Bristow:
- Why we chose to build on a Chinese open-source model:
“We made the decision that we wanted to build on whatever was the best open-source model available,” said James Drayson. “I think we shouldn’t just sit here and say China should be the only one to be able to use those models. Let’s figure out how we can use it.”
- A post-training breakthrough: Forget-Me-Not
When we post-trained the open-source model to align Locai to British culture, we ran into problems, with the model becoming less performant - a phenomenon known as “catastrophic forgetting”. In response, Locai’s George Drayson created a new post-training method called Forget-Me-Not to get around that, giving Locai the ability to train any open-source model and make it better, be that a consumer model or one designed for a specific industry.
- Growing without hyperscalers
Even if we had the billions of dollars required to build a series of data centres - and the years to wait for them to come online - we don’t think that’s the way forward. It’s environmentally damaging, fiscally irresponsible and, we feel, unnecessary. We see the future of Locai as being truly community-powered. As the platform grows, we plan to build a distributed network of Locai users who provide surplus compute from their own devices and consoles and be rewarded for the value they help create.
POLITICO PRO subscribers can read the newsletter here (£)
