My Lords, in moving Amendment 59, I shall also speak to Amendments 60 and 66 in my name.
AI has been a recurrent theme running through most, if not all, our discussions on the Bill, because it is utterly absent from the Bill. It seems extraordinary: what is AI without data, and what is a data Bill without AI being considered? It is difficult to see how we will have the clarity, consistency and coherence of approach to address the opportunities and challenges of all these new technologies, not least artificial intelligence, when it has remained absent from the Bill by government design.
Amendment 59 asks about the categorisation and classification of large language models in the UK in terms of the data input and the output from those models. Will the Minister specifically address his comments on this amendment to the issues around Section 27 of the copyright Act of 1988 and how that interacts with the needs of LLMs, whether there should be issues around market access for these large tech companies and whether LLMs in themselves constitute an article under the 1988 Act?
If AI is absent from the Bill by government design, perhaps even more curiously, data centres are largely absent. If AI is nothing without data, what is data without data centres? They are the factories and the boundaries fuelling this new fourth industrial revolution. Data has often been described as the new oil; I suggest that it is nothing of the sort, but we need so much actual new oil—that is, the renewables and SMRs—if we are to power this fourth industrial revolution, not least the data centres therein.
Amendment 60 looks at the current supply of data centres. Is the Minister satisfied not just with how quickly the Government plan to have data centres coming onstream but how possible it is for them to be in places where they can be hooked up to the grid, not just for existing fuels but, crucially, for renewables and potentially SMR technologies, which will absolutely be required if this fourth industrial revolution is to be not only efficient and effective but sustainable?
Amendment 66 addresses the power usage effectiveness measure used to measure the power use of data centres. Does the Minister feel that that measure is accurate, effective and useful for what we are all trying to get at here? It may be worth the Government looking again at that measure and leading some work to assess new, more effective and more modern ways of measuring the power usage of this critical national infrastructure, as he described.
In his response to the last group, I sensed that the Minister let rather an important cat out of the bag. I am always looking for the Government to be doing policy development, but he used a key word in that answer which I would very much like him to use in his answer on this group. For the Government, it seems that it is not policy development that matters but “active” policy development. I look forward to his response and the debate on this group. I beg to move.