US technology company AMD has outlined plans to support a new artificial intelligence research centre led by the University of Oxford with up to £5m in computing resources.
The investment will fund the British Open-ended Learning and Discovery Lab (BOLD), an initiative bringing together researchers from the University of Oxford, UCL, and Imperial College London to advance fundamental AI development.
Under a memorandum of understanding, AMD is exploring provision of the compute resources over the 18-month period following the lab’s launch. The partnership will focus on compute access, open-source software development, and model optimisation across the technology stack.
Headquartered within the University of Oxford’s Department of Engineering Science, BOLD is led by Associate Professor Jakob Foerster. The facility intends to investigate alternative model training methods beyond traditional backpropagation, along with multiagent systems and adaptive physical AI capable of operating in complex environments.
Jakob Foerster, associate professor in 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.”
Thomas Zacharia, senior vice president of global public sector and strategic partnerships at AMD, said: “Through our memorandum of understanding with the BOLD lab, AMD is exploring bringing together advanced computing, open software and strategic partnerships to help researchers pursue ambitious new frontiers in AI. By expanding access to compute and supporting open academic research, our aim would be to help BOLD researchers accelerate experimentation and contribute to the U.K.’s leadership in AI innovation and scientific discovery.”
AMD plans to work with researchers to publish open-source code, evaluation tools, and benchmark datasets, alongside performance enhancements intended for the broader technical community.
The arrangement builds upon AMD’s existing relationships with British academic bodies, including computing projects with the University of Cambridge on its Zenith supercomputer and Sovereign AI Innovation Lab, as well as high-performance computing initiatives at Imperial College London.
This initiative follows previous academic-industry collaborations at the institution, including an applied AI partnership between the university and Swiss financial services group UBS to establish a dedicated research facility. Further details on this prior initiative can be found in TechSparx’s report on Oxford’s applied AI research centre.
Image source: BOLD
