London Tech Week

As the great tractor beam of London brings together tech’s most brilliant minds once again for London Tech Week, I think we can safely say that something extraordinary has been happening in the UK over the past few years.

The UK can be proud to be one of the best places outside of the Valley for world beating tech companies. That is no idle boast. Today, we attract more Venture Capital funding than Germany, France and Israel combined. We have created more unicorns than any other European country – 105 at the last count – and we have more talent and more ambition.

Our country is home to some truly exciting discoveries. Last year, AlphaFold cracked a 50 year old scientific challenge using AI – effectively solving a longstanding problem in biology and paving the way for an AI revolution in nearly every scientific field and industry, 70 years after Alan Turing first set out the possibility of thinking machines. Nuclear fusion no longer seems to be perpetually ten years out – thanks to our astonishing work at Culham and our domestic fusion start-ups. And over the past 18 months, we have led the world in biotech – producing an affordable and easily stored Covid vaccine, rolled out one of the world’s largest testing programmes per capita, and put in place a world leading variant surveillance system.

The energy and dynamism in UK tech is almost palpable, and despite the challenges of the pandemic, 20 of our expanding herd of unicorns broke the $1 billion barrier in the past six months, and today we welcome the news that Cognizant is creating 2,500 new engineering jobs here and will open two new delivery centres in Leeds and Northern Ireland.

But we don’t want to stop here. We want to go further and regain the UK’s status as a tech and science superpower, and I want the tech community to join us in this mission.

You will have the strongest possible support. We are investing records sums, increasing Government spending to ￡22 billion for scientific research of all kinds. We have a new National Science and Technology Council, which I chair, with Sir Patrick Vallance as my national technology adviser.

Our Innovation Strategy and Integrated Review have been published, and soon we will be releasing our National AI Strategy – truly one of the most advanced in the world.

So first of all, take a look at these, and tell us what you think.

Secondly, I urge you to think even bigger than you are now. Whatever you think you can do, multiply it – ten-ex it – as the saying goes. There’s no limit to what we can achieve. We always need more scientists, but what if we had autonomous robots engaged in space manufacturing in orbiting factories? What about making biology programmable? Or what if we reduced the costs of direct air capture as fast we did those of renewable energy?

A new era is upon us, of space, of biology, the metaverse. Let us seize the opportunities ahead. It’s time to build back better and as you set out to make incredible discoveries, and solve the world’s great challenges – creating jobs, and driving the economy at the same time – I urge you to make the UK, the country that gave the world the industrial revolution, AI, genetics, the place where you do it. I want to wish everyone a fantastic London Tech Week.