AI cancer cures slowed by chip shortage, says UK's biggest tech boss

According to The boss of the biggest UK-headquartered tech firm has, artifical intelligence will find a cure for cancer that humans cannot in our lifetimes.

Key points

• Haas, who stepped down from the board of British pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca in April, informed the BBC's Sizeable Boss Interview podcast: AI is going to.
• But Haas maintained that half of Arm's employees remain in the UK and remarked the business was "by far and away the largest employer in Cambridge".
• Nevertheless, he was sceptical concerning the idea chips could be manufactured in the UK going forward.
• Arm designs the brains or CPUs of microchips already applied in hundreds of billions of phones, cars, smartwatches and gadgets throughout the globe.
• Earlier this summer, the company's peak share cost against the backdrop of the AI boom created it, in cash terms, the most valuable UK-based business in history.

Rene Haas, chief executive of Cambridge-based chip designer Arm Holdings, remarked while modelling how a DNA marker is impacted by cancer was at present "too complex" a difficulty, computers are "going to solve it" going forward.

Haas additionally informed the BBC that AI would lead to widespread humanoid robots in the next five years, but that its current rapid expansion was being held up by a shortage of chips needed to build data centres.

Haas, who stepped down from the board of British pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca in April, informed the BBC's Sizeable Boss Interview podcast: AI is going to. Find a cure for cancer that today you and I, other humans not in our lifetimes. I believe in our lifetime, AI will support cure cancer.

Modelling a cell, modelling a human, modelling how a DNA marker is impacted by cancer – it's too complex a difficulty, not only for humans today, but the computers that run AI.

"However, going forward, as we feed more and more of the models into these computers, and the computers get more sophisticated to run the models, they're going to solve it, " remarked Haas, who additionally holds a key role in Arm's main owner, the Japan-based Softbank. It has a range of investments in tech including in OpenAI.

Prof Chris Bakal, from the Institute of Cancer Research, London, and CEO of Sentinal4D, remarked the real question was no longer whether we apply AI, it's what we feed it.

He remarked in labs like his, they are training AI on data generated themselves from patient samples.

It is not scraped from the internet. It does not need a giant data centre to run. The future of medical AI will not belong to whoever builds the biggest computer. It will belong to whoever has the right measurements.

"That kind of prediction could cut years from the time it takes to develop new treatments. This is where AI delivers real benefit to patients."

In a wide-ranging interview, Haas remarked the chips Arm designs would fuel self-learning AI robots "in a very large way" in manufacturing, cleaning, security, building bridges, and doing repairs within a decade.

"With artificial intelligence, these robots can see, learn, and essentially be reprogrammed for new tasks. So, in the service industry, the robot that was programmed to create a bed can additionally learn how to arrange the towels in a room, or clean the dustbins, or whatever you want to go off and do."

Addressing reservations that AI would lead to mass job losses, Haas stated while there would be some change for workers, "the estimates of jobs going away and being completely replaced by machines is a bit overstated" and outweighed by new opportunities.

As of the long-term demand for AI, he additionally stated fears over a correction in the remarkable rise in the stock market value of AI firms were overstated.

Arm's power-efficient technology was now being applied in half of AI data centres worldwide, he stated.

This has led to a significant evolution in its business in recent months, selling its own microchips. Facebook-owner Meta asked Arm to develop the Arm AGI chip and "demand has been off the charts", according to Haas, with more than $2bn worth of demand since it was introduced in March.

There have, nevertheless, been challenges in the supply of numerous types of chips. It haas believes is holding back the roll-out of AI and data centres.

He pointed to intends for massive "multi-gigawatt" data centres in France and the US as well as aims to put them in space.

"We are absolutely in a supply-constrained environment. Can you obtain enough chips? We need more fabs before we can put a data centre in space."

But he does not believe that manufacturing, at present centralised around Taiwanese giant TSMC, could eventually occur in the UK, despite the administration holding discussions with the industry concerning the possibility of bringing parts of the physical chip supply chain over here.

"I don't think it's necessary for the UK to fabs. Fabs are particularly expensive. They take a lot of specialised workers. They take a lot of natural resources, and there's a pretty broad ecosystem for those."

As the great hope of UK tech for decades, some administration ministers have lamented Arm's sale to Japanese investors in 2016 and subsequent partial flotation on New York's Nasdaq rather than in London.

Taken together, the developments around AI cancer cures slowed by chip shortage, says UK' s biggest tech boss point to a situation that is still moving, and the coming days should bring more clarity.