Professor Alan Smeaton:

This gives me an opportunity to mention one of the fears that keeps me awake at night from a previous question, which is the dominance of big tech. That comes about because those big tech companies have the data, expertise, compute resources and marketing budgets to put these tools basically at our fingertips.

One of the things that does allow me to go to sleep at night in this particular area is the availability of open source and open data sets. This has been tremendous. This only happened within the last nine months. The first of the big tech companies to do this was Meta, which made its Llama models open source, which was a complete surprise. I would believe personally that the reason it did this was because it was a little bit asleep when it came to the development of large language models for chat-type interfaces. Meta figured the quickest way to catch up is to make its openly available, so it was the first to do so. Then, the second to do so on a very large scale was DeepSeek, the Chinese company. Now, it becomes quite feasible for any research organisation or Government Department to download and start to use one of these open access models, to hope-----