The British government has recruited a team of artificial intelligence specialists to design and build AI tools intended to support transport management, public safety operations, and defence decision-making, using funding provided by Meta.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer has signalled a desire to both capture the economic potential of a domestic AI industry and to apply that technology to boost productivity across government operations. To that end, the newly formed group of experts will spend the coming year developing open-source software aimed at improving how authorities maintain roads and transport networks, manage public safety, and make decisions relevant to national security.
The team includes a data scientist from the Alan Turing Institute and researchers from universities. Their combined expertise covers computer vision, applied machine learning for public-sector use cases, robotics-driven imaging, and the design of reliable, safety-critical AI systems. The programme is structured to prioritise technology that public bodies can operate themselves rather than relying on commercial, closed-source systems.
Meta, which first announced funding for the project in July of last year, said the initiative would make use of open-source models including Meta’s Llama system - a large language model capable of processing multiple data modalities such as text, video, images and audio. Meta also said that tools developed through the programme would be owned by the government, enabling departments to keep sensitive information on premises and to adapt the software to their needs.
Context within the release
The announcement accompanies other material in the release addressing investor tools: a section posed the question of whether investors should be buying META stock and described a product called ProPicks AI that evaluates META among many other companies using over 100 financial metrics. That material referenced past winners identified by the tool, naming Super Micro Computer (+185%) and AppLovin (+157%), and noted a New Year’s sale offering 55% off.
Implications and next steps
The programme will proceed over the next year with the goal of delivering open-source systems that can be controlled and adapted by government departments. The combination of academic, institute and university expertise is intended to address technical challenges across vision, machine learning and trustworthy AI design relevant to safety-critical public functions.