The University of Oxford has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with American semiconductor manufacturing company AMD to support the British Open-ended Learning and Discovery (BOLD) Lab, a new AI research centre focused on advancing frontier artificial intelligence in the UK.

Led by the University of Oxford, BOLD brings together researchers from the University of Oxford, University College London (UCL), and Imperial College London to investigate new approaches to AI.

Under the agreement, AMD will explore providing up to £5 million in compute resources over the 18 months following the lab's launch. The support is expected to be delivered through a combination of AMD infrastructure, cloud service providers, public sector partnerships, and hardware contributions.

The collaboration will focus on expanding access to high-performance computing while supporting research into learning algorithms, human-AI collaboration, and embodied AI systems.

Researchers will investigate areas including model training techniques beyond the artificial neural network training method backpropagation, as well as multi-agent AI systems and adaptive physical AI.

As part of the agreement, researchers will also explore optimising AI workloads using AMD's open-source ROCm software platform. The partners plan to publish research software, benchmarks, evaluation tools, and other resources as open-source projects, in line with BOLD's commitment to open science.

The programme will be delivered in phases, beginning with exploratory research before moving on to more focused work to validate the most promising approaches.

The BOLD Lab is built around three core research areas: developing new AI learning algorithms, creating human-centred AI systems, and advancing embodied AI such as robotics.
The university said the lab will also encourage commercial spinouts based on its research.

Associate professor Jakob Foerster, associate professor in the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford, said BOLD aims to advance a more open, efficient, and human-centred path for AI through collaboration between academia and industry.

“Working with AMD, the University of Oxford would combine world-leading research with computing technology to test ideas, learn quickly and translate breakthroughs into applications,” he added.

“This support would help BOLD develop approaches to learning, human-AI collaboration and embodied intelligence while expanding open access to computing resources that benefit science, healthcare, education, transportation and public services globally.”

---