Can a 30-person start-up build Britain’s answer to OpenAI?

{"text":[[{"start":7.16,"text":"Britain’s bid to build a “sovereign” AI model rests with a London start-up of about 30 employees that has raised just $15mn."}],[{"start":16.12,"text":"Cosine, founded by chief executive Alistair Pullen and Yang Li, is building Lumen Sovereign, a frontier AI model backed by government support and developed alongside companies including BAE Systems, PwC and Lloyds Banking Group."}],[{"start":31.52,"text":"Officials have described it as “Britain’s first fully sovereign frontier AI model”. Others question whether the company has the talent, computing resources and capital to deliver it."}],[{"start":41.72,"text":"“We do have a track record in this field. We have done real large-scale work on large models and genuinely improved their performance,” Pullen told the FT."}],[{"start":50.68,"text":"The project comes as governments place greater emphasis on AI sovereignty and control over critical technology. Days after the UK said in June it would provide Cosine with access to its Isambard supercomputer, the US temporarily barred foreign groups from accessing Anthropic’s Mythos and Fable models, sharpening concerns over national security and dependence on overseas AI providers."}],[{"start":null,"text":"

"}],[{"start":74.4,"text":"The obstacles are formidable, however. The company has raised just $15mn, compared with the billions invested in rivals such as France’s Mistral and the far greater sums committed to OpenAI and Anthropic."}],[{"start":87.32,"text":"Even so, Cosine is one of only a handful of UK companies attempting to build frontier AI models from scratch — a field dominated by well-funded US and Chinese groups."}],[{"start":97.92,"text":"Rather than trying to match OpenAI and Anthropic across every application, Pullen said Cosine had built its expertise by adapting and training large language models for customers in highly regulated industries, including financial services and defence, where AI systems are required to run on companies’ own servers."}],[{"start":115.84,"text":"Pullen argues that work gave Cosine the technical foundations to take on Lumen Sovereign. “The kind of work that you need to do to build the model from scratch is very similar to all the work we’ve done in the past, at maybe a couple of orders of magnitude increased size,” he said."}],[{"start":129.96,"text":"The company was founded in 2022 after Pullen concluded that large language models would transform software development. Together with Li, previously an executive at several technology start-ups including collapsed payments group Ziglu and cryptocurrency exchange Luno, he set out to build what they described as an “AI software engineer”."}],[{"start":151.2,"text":"After joining the highly competitive start-up incubator Y Combinator, the pair gained early access to OpenAI’s models and fine-tuned them for software engineering tasks."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":162.16,"text":"But larger rivals established a lead in autonomous coding tools, most notably Anthropic by releasing Claude Code. The experience forced a rethink. Rather than competing directly with the biggest AI labs, Cosine shifted its focus to building AI systems for regulated industries — work that ultimately laid the foundations for Lumen Sovereign."}],[{"start":184,"text":"Cosine is building its model using a “mixture of experts” framework, an approach popularised by China’s DeepSeek. Its architecture is based on Mistral’s Large 3 model, although Pullen said Lumen Sovereign would be roughly twice the size."}],[{"start":199.08,"text":"The biggest constraint is computing power. Pullen estimates that Isambard will provide about 80 per cent of the computing capacity needed to train the model, with the remainder coming from private UK data centres."}],[{"start":211.08,"text":"Unlike OpenAI and Anthropic, however, Cosine does not plan to operate the model itself. Instead, it intends to make Lumen Sovereign available for others to deploy, avoiding the enormous cost of running AI models at scale."}],[{"start":224.72,"text":"“The tech seems great,” said one venture capitalist familiar with Cosine, but added “they need to raise hundreds of millions of pounds of investment to be remotely competitive, and at the moment they are quite early in that journey.”"}],[{"start":237.28,"text":"Pullen acknowledges the challenge. Cosine hopes to begin sharing “checkpoints” — snapshots of Lumen Sovereign during training — with partners by September before a broader public release in October. The company plans to launch a fundraising round later this year to finance the next stage of development."}],[{"start":254.68,"text":"The money would also fund an aggressive hiring push. Cosine has yet to recruit researchers from the world’s leading AI labs and Pullen concedes it cannot match the pay packages on offer at OpenAI and Anthropic."}],[{"start":266.8,"text":"Instead, he hopes the chance to build a frontier model in a small team will appeal to engineers who have become “pigeonholed” inside larger organisations."}],[{"start":275.24,"text":"Sceptics believe the lack of funding available to UK start-ups will constrain Cosine’s grand ambitions. In response, Pullen said he likes his staff to have a “healthy chip on the shoulder”, telling them: “Look, we can show that we can do it. We can definitely pull this off.”"}],[{"start":291.68,"text":"Additional reporting by Tim Bradshaw in London"}],[{"start":297.64,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1786433291_2329.mp3"}