Paul Taylor

In the summer of 2018 I had a chance encounter with an acquaintance who knew I worked in health tech. He told me that he knew Ali Parsa, the CEO of Babylon Health, the company behind the app GP at Hand. We talked about Parsa’s extraordinary career and it was clear that my friend was impressed not so much by Parsa’s achievements as by his daring. He recalled Parsa reflecting that while Babylon could become a unicorn – a billion-dollar tech startup – it might also end in complete failure. Perhaps both will be true.

Over the last ten years the proportion of advances in AI that have come from research teams in the big tech companies has been gradually increasing and they are now utterly dominant. Google Brain has been one of the most important. The T in GPT stands for transformer, an algorithm developed at Google Brain that has proved uncannily successful in identifying patterns, to the extent that models built by transformers can generate realistic images and video, meaningful text, and apparently intelligent answers to queries or solutions to problems.

Senior staff at universities are increasingly concerned that the faction of the Tory Party now in government is significantly less interested in science than the one that wrote the manifesto on which it was elected.