A new £30 million national AI research lab opened this week, led by UCL with partners at Cambridge, Oxford and Edinburgh universities. The Science of Fundamental AI Research (SOFAIR) Lab will focus on building open-source AI systems that reduce the UK's dependence on large technology providers and remote data-centre infrastructure.
The lab is part of a £60 million scheme funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). The scheme creates two UK labs dedicated to rethinking how AI works, learns and can be made more open, efficient and useful. Each lab will initially receive £8 million, with further funding available following an assessment in autumn 2026.
What the SOFAIR Lab will do
Professor David Barber of UCL Computer Science will lead the lab. At the launch, he said: "We're very thankful and grateful to UKRI and EPSRC. The £30 million investment over the next six years is a massive opportunity for us to really do fantastic, deep, fundamental research in AI and come up with new paradigms that can move the needle of AI forward."
The lab will bring together researchers from computer science, mathematics, statistics and neuroscience to explore new AI architectures, including those designed to run on widely available hardware. Modern AI relies heavily on a small number of popular architectures trained on vast data, requiring immense computing infrastructure. SOFAIR aims to expand and diversify the underlying technology so that advanced AI becomes accessible to more researchers and institutions.
The BOLD Lab and the wider initiative
SOFAIR's counterpart, the British Open-ended Learning and Discovery (BOLD) Lab, will be led by the University of Oxford, with involvement from UCL and Imperial College London. BOLD will develop systems capable of working alongside humans, navigating physical environments and operating without vast centralised computing power.
Both labs will build partnerships across academia, industry and the public sector, with targeted support for entrepreneurship and spinouts. The investments were selected in June 2024 as part of a wider UKRI initiative backed by the Office for AI.
Why this matters for science and research professionals
For researchers working outside large technology companies, access to AI infrastructure is often a limiting factor. SOFAIR's focus on architectures that run on widely available hardware could lower that barrier directly. The lab's open-source mandate also means new methods and models will be available for inspection, replication and adaptation, rather than locked inside proprietary systems. If your work involves AI methods, the next six years of output from these two labs is worth tracking closely.
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