A new frontier AI research lab is coming to London via a five-year partnership between Thomson Reuters and Imperial College London announced on Tuesday.
The lab will focus on foundational challenges regarding safety, reliability, frontier capabilities and broader societal and economic impacts in an effort to pursue world-leading academic research in AI.
It will also train large-scale foundation models, a process that the organisations are keen to see moved on from being limited to the world’s largest tech companies.
“This collaboration gives our researchers the space and support to explore fundamental questions about how AI can and should work for society,” said Imperial College London’s vice provost for research and enterprise Prof Mary Ryan.
“Progress in this area depends on rigorous science, open inquiry and strong partnerships – ideals exemplified by the approach this lab will take.”
The lab is planned to host more than a dozen PhD students alongside research scientists from Imperial and Thomson Reuters. There is also hope that the new site will create a talent pipeline for the British AI sector.
“We are only beginning to understand the transformative impact this technology will have on all aspects of society” said Dr Jonathan Richard Schwarz, head of AI research at Thomson Reuters, who will join Imperial as a visiting professor.
“Our vision is a unique research space where foundational algorithms are developed and made available to world experts, advancing the transparency, verifiability and trustworthiness in which these changes are driving impact in the world.”
Particular areas of interest that have been highlighted include agentic systems, data-centric machine learning, retrieval and grounding, reasoning and planning, evaluation and safety, and human-in-the-loop workflows.
