Nick Clegg

There was actually something very energising about being a place that just constantly worries about what comes next, not arguing about where we've come from.

And I do think, look, we're a more ancient democracy and we're a country which obviously has gone through a huge number of changes over the last hundred years and so on and so forth.

But I do think that fresh kind of start again ambition and zeal does generate extraordinary innovation.

I agree.

What do we need to do?

I think, by the way, there's a lot of breathlessness about AI.

It's super important, very important technology, but it's not perfect.

Current paradigm, which is the sort of what's called, without getting too technical, the transformer-based probabilistic technology where you tokenize huge amounts of data, and then you probabilistically, through a mathematical formula, project what the next token response is to a human prompt.

That is the paradigm we're in at the moment.

If you, again, we can...

claim whether we think about the right analogy or not.

But if you assert that that's the equivalent to a new industrial revolution, Britain basically doesn't have a single steam engine of its own.

We don't have a single, I mean, France has got Mistral.

That's basically about it in Europe.

And we're not going to, here's the key point that the American hyperscalers are now spending every five to six weeks on their own AI data infrastructure.

What we as a nation spend on defense in a year.

No, I know.

So we're not going to.

So the question then becomes, what do you do instead?

I think we've got some fantastic strengths, our universities, our language, our culture of innovation.