Britain is known for many things: rainy weather, Paddington Bear and free healthcare are among the best. However, AI was not something Britain was particularly known for. So far, Locai, an artificial intelligence developed in the UK, has continued to challenge the major players from the US and China.
Locai Labs says its new AI can outperform GPT-5, Gemini and DeepSeek in terms of conversational ability and human preferences using the Arena Hard v2 benchmark.
Technology against forgetting
Locai uses a new technology called Forget-Me-Nt to accelerate AI training without relying on armies of human trainers. For most of us as end users, of course, it does not matter how a model is trained. We only care about the results, but Forget-Me-Nt is interesting because it allows AI to continuously improve without human intervention.
By generating your own training data and never forgetting what you have previously learned, you can significantly reduce your training time. Catastrophic forgetting, where a model loses prior knowledge while learning new information, has been one of the biggest obstacles to the development of artificial intelligence to date.
Community-driven AI
James Drayson, chief executive of Locai Labs, said: “The UK doesn’t need to outpace the world to be a leader in AI. We need to think about this because we’re not going to win the AI race by simply building bigger data centres.”
We all know OpenAI is building huge new data centers to power ChatGPT, and there’s no way a smaller competitor can match that level of investment without raising billions. Instead, Locai Labs plans to harness the power of a blockchain-based network as its user base grows.
Locai Labs will require users to contribute their own computing resources in the form of computing power, rather than building their own data centers. The company believes that this crowdsourcing model will enable it to compete on the global stage.
How is it used?
As always, the proof is in the pudding. Local broadcasts live available today in early access and online.
For example, there is no mobile app, no image creation and no voice mode, but it was responsive and responsive to my text instructions and delivered accurate responses on par with ChatGPT. It reminded me a bit of ChatGPT 4o, but with the basic functionality of an older version, like ChatGPT 3.1.
Since there is no voice mode, I can’t tell if Locai has a British accent, but his responses seem a little less relaxed than ChatGPT’s, which can sometimes lean towards an overly casual tone.
Currently, Locai only lets you chat, download files, and search the web using text input. Compared to all that ChatGPT can do, this seems very insignificant. There is also a limit on the number of “utility calls” per session, which limits performance. However, you can restore it by simply starting a new chat.
Locai may be Britain’s friendly upstart, but friendliness alone won’t win the global AI race. It requires size, functionality and robustness. If it could achieve these three goals without tripping over its experimental architecture, Britain might finally be able to program remarkable artificial intelligence.
How it will handle when and if it will reach ChatGPT level user numbers is the question that will determine the future. If Locai can stay in this industry, the UK may finally have a real seat at the AI table.