The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph Britain shines in AI - but let's nurture it 3 March 2016 • 6:40pm become In 2008, three Cambridge graduates founded an app called Swiftkey, which uses artificial intelligence to predict the next word you write with extreme accuracy.
 The friends Jon Reynolds, Ben Medlock and Chris Hill-Scott, who later sold his stake in the startup for a bicycle, created an alternative keyboard app used on 300m smartphones which learns users’ typing habits over time.
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 Needless to say, the technology will ultimately be integrated with Microsoft’s own products, to make them smarter and more intuitive.
 Swiftkey founders Jon Reynolds and Dr Ben Medlock Swiftkey founders Jon Reynolds and Dr Ben Medlock Credit: CREDIT: PA While this is a moment of celebration for UK entrepreneurs and investors, it’s not the first British artificial intelligence company that’s caught the fancy of a Silicon Valley monolith.
 The pattern is impossible to ignore.
 Look at the world’s biggest companies – Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft.
 All have been drawn to Britain’s disproportionately large pool of talented artificial intelligence entrepreneurs.
 British AI companies are crushing global competition.
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 It will be an AI milestone no one has ever crossed.
 Founded by two young Britons Mustafa Suleyman and Cambridge graduate Demis Hassabis, DeepMind has assembled 250 of the world’s most respected artificial intelligence researchers right here in London.
 The company has now acquired two more British AI companies, Dark Blue Labs and Vision Factory, both spun out from Oxford University.
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 The clue is in the locations of the startups.
 British universities specifically Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial College and University College London, are breeding grounds for the new generation of artificial intelligence companies mushrooming in Britain.
 "Machine learning powers everything from Netflix recommendations to your Facebook newsfeed and Google search results.
" Investors who have nurtured the companies from the early days say that founders are building on cutting-edge machine learning research done by academics at these institutions in recent years.
 That's not hard to believe: the UK has an illustrious heritage in artificial intelligence research, starting with its founding father, Alan Turing.
 Although the term “artificial intelligence” itself was only coined in 1956, two years after Turing died, he proposed the conundrum of whether machines could really “think” back in 1950, when computers were just invented.
 His Turing Test is still the ultimate differentiator between human and machine.
 Artificial intelligence may seem like the domain of geeks and scientists, but increasingly it is intertwined with our everyday lives.
 Machine learning powers everything from Netflix recommendations to your Facebook newsfeed and Google search results.
 Soon it will power your home and your car.
 According to technology research firm Tractica, the artificial intelligence market is set to reach $11.
1bn by 2024.