Oxford to host government-backed UK AI lab

The University of Oxford has been selected to host the British Open-ended Learning and Discovery Lab, a cross-university UK AI Research Lab backed by the government. Led by Associate Professor Jakob Foerster in Oxford’s Department of Engineering Science, BOLD will bring together researchers from Oxford, UCL and Imperial College London with industry and technology partners to develop open, human-centred and resource-efficient AI systems for workplaces, infrastructure and public services.

The lab is part of a £60 million investment announced by UKRI’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to support two pioneering AI labs over the next six years. BOLD aims to move beyond training ever-larger neural networks on vast datasets, focusing instead on scalable approaches that could support education, transport, healthcare and scientific discovery. Its research will centre on three pillars: training methods beyond backpropagation, human-centric learning and discovery, and embodied learning for robots and physical systems under real-world constraints.

Open science will be central to the programme, with plans to release open-source model training software, model weights, benchmarks, evaluation data and software. BOLD will seek to multiply government funding through industry partnerships and translation support from Oxford Science Enterprises and Oxford University Innovation. The project includes £2 million for doctoral hiring and plans for an initial cohort of 12 BOLD fellows and 18 PhD students across Oxford, UCL and Imperial.