Powering UK’s Sovereign AI: How Ori is supporting Locai’s British LLM, L1-Large

One of the great things about operating a business on the cutting edge of AI is that you interact with some exceptional entrepreneurs. Our work with Locai Labs is a perfect example. Founded by brothers James and George Drayson, and Sujith Aleshwaram, the team at Locai Labs is pioneering UK's Foundational AI.

Locai launched one such model today, their flagship British LLM, L1-Large. You can read coverage here. The model was trained on Ori’s AI Platform and reflects a certain set of values - ones that you don’t necessarily find elsewhere. Those include privacy, sustainability practices and a focus on conversational ability and human preference AI benchmarks.

Our role was on the infrastructure side, but as often the case, this was more than a GPU-as-a-service transaction, it was a collaboration.

Here is how we were able to help them:

1. Locai Labs wanted a local UK AI partner. Part of the premise of Locai Labs is that sovereignty matters. There are reasons that you may want your model trained on your soil with data that resides in country. We offered that with our significant UK footprint of cutting edge GPUs. The importance of a country to govern AI independently, without reliance on foreign powers is only growing as the technology landscape splinters. This concept rests on three core pillars:

• Data Sovereignty: The control over a nation's own data, ensuring it is stored and processed under its own laws and jurisdictions, preventing foreign access and exploitation.
• Computational Sovereignty: The access to and control over the necessary computing infrastructure, such as high-performance GPU clusters, required to train and run advanced AI models.
• Algorithmic Sovereignty: The capability to develop, audit, and deploy its own AI models and algorithms, ensuring they are transparent, unbiased, and aligned with national values and objectives.

As the team at Locai Labs has highlighted, AI sovereignty is crucial for protecting and advancing a nation's strategic interests in an increasingly digital world. It can also make a better product. Without it, a country risks becoming a "digital colony" - dependent on external providers who may not share its interests.

On a go-forward basis, where AI becomes baked into the technology fabric the stakes get very high:

• As AI systems manage vital infrastructure like energy grids, financial networks, and public utilities - they cannot be vulnerable to foreign control. Even if they don’t win the latest benchmarks, having it homegrown is critical. Given the game of leapfrog played by different foundational models - winning benchmarks is fleeting and hasn’t yet equated to sustainable competitive advantage.
• Modern military and intelligence operations are increasingly reliant on AI for tasks like surveillance, threat analysis, and autonomous systems. Here again, dependency on foreign stacks (even those perceived as “friendly”) can compromise defense capabilities, expose sensitive data and create backdoors for espionage. They can also limit agency and independence.
• There is also the argument for economic security. Not having a stake in AI can, and likely will lead to economic dependency and vulnerability. It should be noted that the concept of a “winner” in the AI race is very likely illusory. In the game of sovereign AI, your parent may have been right when they said “eighty percent of success is just showing up.”

Locai Labs is showing up and living up to the UK’s goals of creating a talent-laden, sovereign AI ecosystem that is both self-sufficient in its core capabilities and a trusted, influential player on the global stage.

2. The other thing we offered Locai Labs was technology leadership. There are plenty of places to get GPUs, but few places to get expertise. Our team has decades of experience in the AI infrastructure space which means we could help them optimize their training runs, troubleshoot data locality challenges, architect data pipelines to eliminate I/O bottlenecks and right-size their cluster for the best price-to-performance ratio. Even in turn-key environments, expertise matters. There is a nice article in the Wall Street Journal on the subject. Entitled, “AI Boom is Leaving Consultants Behind” it points out that the C-Suite at key clients now recognize that the Deloittes, KPMGs, E&Ys and Accentures of the world don’t actually know anything more than an ambitious 25 year old. They don’t do it day in and day out. They aren’t building the systems and the software to run it. Ori does that and it shows. As James Drayson put it, “Ori was there for us every step of the way - from training the model, connecting to external data and fine-tuning the results. Hardware is one thing - it is the software and expertise that made the difference.”

3. Speaking of turn-key environments, one of the attributes that distinguishes Ori in the eyes of our customers is the simplicity and depth of our user interface. Refined constantly over thousands of customer interactions, the Ori GUI or APIs offer a powerful lever for organizations to achieve their AI ambitions. That interface offers complete flexibility around tenancy, security, performance, scale and observability. These fine grained choices mean that entrepreneurs like the Draysons can focus on the business value - not the infrastructure tax often associated with GPU clouds.

4. Lastly, Ori was able to help them achieve their goals around sustainable AI. Locai Labs trained on our HintonDeep cluster which has a net zero carbon footprint, powered by 100% renewable energy. That level of sustainability is something that everyone can feel good about.

We are delighted to support UK innovation. As a company based in the UK, with infrastructure in the UK we are committed to fostering the AI community here, from startups to scaleups to the biggest enterprises in the economy. We will keep showing up too. So if you are an entrepreneur in the UK, we want to talk. We can accelerate your time to market, give you the sovereign edge you might need and do it on sustainable AI infrastructure. If you are an entrepreneur anywhere else, we still want to talk. Ori is a global entity and odds are we can help you wherever you are domiciled.