British Open-ended Learning and Discovery Lab (BOLD) Festival launches with ambitious call to transform AI research in the UK

The BOLD Launch Festival, aiming to supercharge the British Open-ended Learning and Discovery (BOLD) programme and open the door for a courageous new chapter of artificial intelligence (AI) research in the UK, closely followed the announcement in June of the new UK AI research lab. BOLD brings together teams from the University of Oxford, University College London and Imperial College London alongside collaborators including NVIDIA, AMD, Iconic, Nscale and Era4 in a focussed effort supported by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). BOLD aims to accelerate progress in artificial intelligence by rethinking not only the scientific questions researchers ask, but also how AI research itself is organised in academia.

“I was thrilled by the excitement and energy at the BOLD launch. Artificial Intelligence is one of the defining technologies of our time. Thanks to the UK government, UKRI and EPSRC, the BOLD lab will search for high risk, high reward breakthroughs outside the current LLM approach. BOLD’s ambitious focus is to put the human in the loop, this would change the current paradigm in the field. BOLD are creating a diverse research ecosystem where universities, industry and partners collaborate openly to ensure the UK remains at the forefront of AI research and innovation."

Professor Jim Naismith, Head of the MPLS Division at the University of Oxford

The programme connects five internationally recognised UK research groups—FLAIR, WhiRL, DARK, AIRL and LASP—into a single lab operating with a shared research culture and common ambition. Supported by dedicated research infrastructure and compute partnerships, BOLD aims to scale open research to address questions that individual single PI groups cannot tackle.

Central to the programme is a commitment to expanding what academic AI research can achieve. The BOLD team believes that advances in AI now require new ways of working: larger, more integrated teams, shared infrastructure and a culture that combines the openness of academic research with the pace and ambition often associated with leading industrial AI laboratories and start-ups.

Professor Jakob Foerster, the programme's Founding Director, said, "BOLD is about creating the conditions for researchers to attempt what would otherwise seem impossible. We are bringing together outstanding researchers, shared infrastructure and unprecedented computing resources and are developing standardised open scientific practices to maximise impact. In this research environment bold ideas can flourish and breakthroughs can not only happen faster but also be turned into real world impact for the people of the UK."

Alongside its core leadership and a wide network of partners and collaborators in compute and infrastructure, the programme will recruit the best in emerging AI talent, providing exceptional researchers with the freedom, resources and computing power needed to pursue ambitious ideas. By attracting leading talent to the UK and fostering collaboration across institutions, BOLD aims to strengthen the UK's position as a global leader in AI research.

BOLD is currently seeking to appoint a small number of exceptional, senior researchers as BOLD Fellows - people who have already established a strong, original research track record in AI or a closely related field.

"Breakthroughs in AI depend on giving researchers access to world-class accelerated computing, open software and deep technical expertise," said John Josephakis, Global Vice President of HPC and Supercomputing at NVIDIA. "Through our longstanding collaboration with the teams behind BOLD, NVIDIA has provided academic grants, compute resources and engineering support. BOLD's model of shared infrastructure, open science and integrated teams is exactly how we believe the next generation of AI research should be done. We look forward to continuing our support as researchers from Oxford, UCL, Imperial and other institutions advance open models and pioneer more efficient ways to build AI, strengthening the UK's leadership in AI research and scientific discovery."

As a member of the BOLD partnership, AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) will provide compute resources for BOLD researchers. Support will be provided through infrastructure maintained by AMD, cloud service providers, public-sector partnerships and hardware contributions. Thomas Zacharia, Senior Vice President, Global Public Sector and Strategic Partnerships at AMD, said, "Through our memorandum of understanding with the BOLD Lab, AMD is exploring bringing together advanced computing, open software and technical expertise to help researchers pursue ambitious new frontiers in AI. By expanding access to compute and supporting open academic research, our aim would be to help BOLD researchers accelerate experimentation and contribute to the UK’s leadership in AI innovation and scientific discovery.”

Postgraduate student posts are being funded by corporate partners including Iconic and Lendable. Iconic Chief Scientist Borja Gonzalez Leon, said, "AI is creating entirely new possibilities for entertainment, but real progress will come from exploring new ways for AI to learn and solve problems, not simply doing more of what already exists. BOLD brings together world-leading researchers to tackle these big challenges, and we're proud to support the next generation of talent through our PhD scholarships. By investing in ambitious research today, we're helping ensure the future of AI and entertainment is shaped here in the UK”.

The BOLD launch represented the programme's first public step to its vision: creating a new operating model for AI research that enables ambitious, high-agency teams to tackle scientific challenges beyond the reach of traditional, fragmented research groups under the mandate of open-source and open-science. Open science sits at the heart of the initiative. Through open-source software, shared infrastructure and transparent research practices, the programme aims to invite scrutiny, encourage contributions from the wider community and create a public research asset that others can build upon.

"The launch of BOLD demonstrates what becomes possible when we connect exceptional people, ambitious science, and a shared national purpose. Through AI@Oxford Research we are helping to build an ecosystem that spans the whole University while working closely with partners across the UK. Fundamental advances in AI will come not only from new technical advances, but from new ways of collaborating, learning, and discovering together. BOLD embodies that ambition."

Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt, Chair of AI@Oxford Research

Rather than a conventional conference, the BOLD Festival combined talks, collaborative working sessions and interactive celebrations around a simple mission: Talk. Connect. Suggest. Build. and invited participants to Never Stop Asking Questions. Participants were invited to challenge assumptions, develop new collaborations, propose ambitious research ideas and help shape the future direction of the programme. Opening the festival were core members of the BOLD leadership team: Professor Jakob Foerster (University of Oxford’s Department of Engineering Science), Dr Laura Toni and Professor Tim Rocktäschel (UCL’s Department of Computer Science), Professor Antoine Cully (Imperial’s Department of Computing), and Professor Ani Calinescu (Oxford’s Department of Computer Science).

Dr Kedar Pandya, Executive Director for Strategy at the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), who attended the launch, said, “Every so often a proposal comes to us that has the potential to really disrupt the status quo. BOLD is such a once-in-a-decade opportunity. It promises to deliver public benefit and UK national resilience through transformative breakthroughs in basic AI science”.

The Festival also welcomed speakers from BOLD allies including Hudson River Trading (HRT) and notable university donors including XTX Markets. Their participation reflects growing interest from leading organisations in BOLD's vision for ambitious, collaborative AI research. Iain Dunning, Head of AI at Hudson River Trading (HRT) said, "Applying AI to markets is very challenging and requires new ways of thinking. BOLD’s research agenda focuses on core fundamentals, like moving beyond backpropagation, human-centric learning, and resource-agile systems, which we think is valuable and essential for advancing the field."

The festival concluded with a celebration and networking session, with one message emerging clearly: the future of AI will depend not only on new technologies, but on new ways of bringing people and research expertise together. BOLD aims to provide a blueprint for that future—building an open, collaborative research ecosystem capable of tackling some of the biggest scientific challenges of the coming decade.

Bold Fellow recruitment