Sir Nick said he had become “somewhat radicalised” by his experience in Silicon Valley, which had convinced him of the need for Europe to “get its act together” on AI.
Sir Nick, formerly the leader of the Liberal Democrats and UK deputy Prime Minister in the Cameron-Clegg coalition from 2010 to 2015, subsequently served as Meta’s chief policy decision maker until last year.
He recently took a seat on the advisory board at Efekta Education, an AI-powered English language platform, primarily used by students in emerging markets across Latin America, Africa and Asia.
Speaking at a roundtable hosted by Efekta, Sir Nick urged European companies to “push the boat out with this technology and not have it driven, once again, by American players”.
He said the UK had an “astonishing level of over-reliance on American tech”, labelling this “a level of dependence that is not compatible with the kind of agency and basic sovereignty – not complete sovereignty – that a country like ours should aspire to”.
While the UK’s high energy costs and copyright and content rules “virtually rule it out being a major trainer of frontier LLMs domestically”, Sir Nick highlighted possible routes to less US-dependency including open-source models and backing European LLM labs.
Efekta, an offshoot of Swiss study abroad company EF Education First, has a large UK footprint and was built specifically for emerging markets.
One of the failings of US-based ed tech companies is they’re designing their product for the US education system
Stephen Hodges, Efekta Education
Sir Nick championed Efekta’s “counterintuitive” path, having not been built for the most developed school systems “but to explicitly appeal to emerging markets, which have very particular problems of teacher shortages and lack of training and so on”.
Efekta CEO Stephen Hodges highlighted the company’s partnership with the Brazilian government, which approached the company during Covid after identifying English as the subject with the largest teacher shortage in Brazil.
“I think one of the failings of US-based ed tech companies is they’re designing their product for the US education system,” said Hodges.
“And a US education system looks vastly different than if you go to Egypt or Mongolia or any of the places we’re selling in, in that they make an assumption that there’s a qualified teacher, that there’s lab equipment and such.”
According to Hodges, “tens of thousands of teachers” were now using the platform in Brazil, roughly 95% of whom were previously unqualified to teach English.
Elsewhere, he emphasised Efekta’s expansion to Rwanda, funded by the Mastercard Foundation, where it offers a – somewhat restricted – offline product to reach rural schools without internet connection.
