Britain is known for many things: rainy weather, Paddington Bear, and free healthcare being among the top ones. AI, however, has not been something the UK was particularly known for. Until now, that is – Locai, a British-built AI, has arrived to challenge the big players from the US and China.
Locai Labs claims that its new AI can outperform GPT-5, Gemini, and DeepSeek on conversational ability and human preference using the Arena Hard v2 benchmark.
Forget-Me-Not technology
Locai uses a new technology called Forget-Me-Nt to speed up AI training without using armies of human trainers. Of course, how a model is trained does not really matter to most of us as end users. We just care about the results, but Forget-Me-Nt is interesting because it allows the AI to improve continuously without human input.
By generating its own training data and never forgetting what it learned previously, training times can be drastically reduced. Catastrophic forgetting, where a model loses earlier knowledge when learning new information, has been one of the major hurdles in AI development so far.
Community-powered AI
James Drayson, CEO of Locai Labs, said: "Britain does not need to outspend the world to lead in AI. We need to outthink it, because we will not win the AI race simply by building bigger data centers."
We all know that OpenAI is currently building massive new data centers to power ChatGPT, and there is no way a small challenger could compete with that level of investment without raising billions. Instead, Locai Labs plans to use the power of a blockchain-based network as user numbers grow.
Locai Labs will ask users to contribute their own computing resources in the form of processing power, rather than building its own data centers. This crowdsourced model, the company believes, will allow it to compete on the world stage.
What's it like to use?
The proof, as always, is in the pudding. Locai is live in early access today and is available online.
I managed to get an activation code from Locai Labs so I could try it for TechRadar, and I am impressed, even if it currently lacks many of the features ChatGPT offers.
There is no mobile app, image creation, or voice mode, for example, but it was fast and responsive to my text prompts, providing answers that felt accurate and on a par with what ChatGPT produces. It reminded me a little of using ChatGPT 4o, but with the basic feature set of an earlier version, like ChatGPT 3.1.
Since there is no voice mode, I cannot tell if Locai has a British accent, but its responses felt a bit less surf-speak than ChatGPT, which can occasionally stray into the overly informal.
For now, all you can do in Locai is chat via text prompt, upload files, and search the web. Compared with everything ChatGPT can do, it feels very sparsely featured. There is also a limit on "tool calls" per session, which constrains its performance, although you can reset this simply by starting a new chat.
Locai may be the polite British newcomer, but politeness alone will not win the global AI race. It needs scale, features, and staying power. If it can deliver all three without tripping over its experimental architecture, the UK might have finally coded an AI worth talking about.
How it copes when, or if, it reaches ChatGPT-level user numbers is the question that will define its future. If Locai can stay standing when that happens, then the UK might finally have a real seat at the AI table.
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