Innovate UK

Frontier AI Discovery in Lancashire

Innovate UK

Business

Expires:

Total: 25000000

Individual: 50000

Minimum company size: 1

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Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), will invest a minimum of £2.5 million on Frontier AI. This funding is from Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation and is subject to a sufficient number of high quality applications being received.

The aim of this competition is to advance the development of frontier Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and foundation models in the UK.

This competition has 2 phases, the second phase will be available to successful applications from Phase 1. Innovate UK will invest a minimum of £50 million for development of Frontier AI demonstrator projects in Phase 2, delivered by collaborative consortia.

Funding for Phase 2 is subject to Business Case approvals.

The Frontier AI R&D Consortia programme aims to accelerate and deliver novel UK-led AI capabilities.

The programme is bringing together large scale consortia, to develop foundation models and frontier AI solutions aligned with one of the four missions:

  1. AI-Enabled Health and Life Sciences: Making the UK the best place to develop and deploy AI across medicines discovery, development and manufacturing, predictive healthcare applications, and clinical trials.
  2. Advanced Materials with AI: Building a world leading AI-first materials R&D capability spanning aerospace, net zero technologies, defence materials, semiconductors.
  3. Secure AI for National Security and Defence (NS&D). Enable the UK’s defence sector to become a leading integrator of secure AI-enhanced command and control and AI enabled sensors.
  4. Fundamental AI: Advancing Foundation Model AI capabilities that can underpin multiple sectors and future applications.

In this competition series, Foundation Models refers to highly generalisable AI models or model families. These are designed to adapt across multiple downstream tasks or domains and are anchored to a hypothesis that supports adaptability.

In this competition series, Frontier AI refers to be any AI and ML systems that deliver state of the art benchmark performance against or genuinely new to the world capability in a clearly specified area.

This advance must be attributable to innovation in one or more of the following:
  • model and system architecture
  • training methodology
  • core control and learning algorithm

The Frontier AI Discovery is Phase 1 of the pipeline. We are seeking applications that will assess the feasibility of ambitious collaborative R&D proposals and help build consortia for Phase 2. These proposals must capture opportunities aligned with the thematic priorities by developing new‑to‑the‑world AI and ML capabilities.

As part of our funding portfolio, we expect to fund at least 25% of projects on the development of foundation models.

Your proposal must deliver:

  • feasibility and technical proposal for Phase 2
  • business model evaluation
  • the development of delivery consortia for Phase 2
  • de-risking of the next stage of development through this feasibility study

Successful Phase 1 projects will be invited to submit full proposals for collaborative R&D projects with project costs from £5 million to £10 million per project and duration of 24 to 32 months. Funding for Phase 2 is subject to Innovate UK Business Case approvals.

Phase 2

Any organisation can lead a Phase 2 project and for your consortium to be eligible your project must:

  • have total costs of between £5 million and £10 million
  • last between 24 to 32 months
  • end by 31 March 2030

Phase 2 project consortium must have minimum participation from:
  • large organisations contributing 30% to 40% of the project costs
  • SME organisations contributing more than 30% of the project costs
  • academic organisation contributing 20% to 30% of the project costs

In applying to this competition, you are entering into a competitive process. This competition has a funding limit, so we may not be able to fund all the proposed projects. It may be the case that your project scores highly but we are still unable to fund it.

Our experience from similar competitions suggests that you could have 2% chance of success.

We consider a range of factors when determining whether to provide funding to applicants. This includes an assessment of prior conduct, such as any outstanding payments owed to Innovate UK or UKRI. Such factors may influence the funding decision, potentially resulting in a refusal of funding or an award subject to additional scrutiny.

We also reserve the right to adjust funding allocations for any of our competitions. This may be in response to changes in policy, portfolio funding considerations or broader government funding decisions.

This competition closes at 11am UK time on the deadline stated in this Innovate UK competition brief. We cannot guarantee other government or third party sites will always show the correct competition information.
Funding Expires 21 hours from now

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