AI lab says brain-like engine could slash chatbot bills by 98 per cent

London firm claims Voltaic can run powerful AI inside businesses without handing sensitive data to big cloud platforms

A London AI lab claims to have built a ‘brain-like’ engine that could slash the cost of using artificial intelligence by 98 per cent and help companies stop feeding sensitive data into giant cloud systems.

Voltaic can reportedly answer queries at one-fiftieth of the cost of leading large AI models, while using far less energy.

Unlike conventional AI systems that consume huge amounts of computing power to process each request, Voltaic uses a human brain-inspired design in which only the parts needed for a task are activated.

It means the system is designed to work more selectively, cutting the amount of energy and processing needed for each answer.

According to its creator, London-based Verkko Robotics, the sparse design makes Voltaic cheaper to run and allows it to sit inside private company systems.

Verkko said the engine – due for release later this year – was designed to challenge the costly AI model that forces many firms to rely on remote data centres, many run by major U.S tech groups, to power large AI systems.

This would let organisations run advanced AI on their own hardware, giving them more sovereign control over data, cost and security.

Stephen McCreath, co-founder and chief executive of Verkko Robotics, said the AI industry had become trapped in a race to build ever-larger models.

He said: “The AI industry has been locked in an arms race of bigger models. With VOLTAIC, we aim to break that paradigm.

“As a consequence of what we are doing, in the future we will be less reliant on large data centres. This is the most exciting time in development, both within Verkko Robotics Ltd and artificial intelligence as we move towards continuous learning.”

According to Verkko, internal tests show Voltaic can operate at one-fiftieth of the cost per query of comparable requests on leading large language models.

It also claims the system can keep learning new information without wiping out what it already knows – one of the biggest problems in AI.

Systems trained on new data can become worse at older tasks, a flaw known as ‘catastrophic forgetting’.

Voltaic had a catastrophic forgetting rate of about 1.2 per cent on Core50 and achieved 77 per cent accuracy on Split ImageNet-1K, which the firm said was 14 points above the previous record set by other systems.

For companies, the commercial appeal is an AI system that can absorb internal files, processes and working habits while keeping queries away from third-party cloud providers.

Verkko says that could make Voltaic attractive to heavily regulated sectors including finance, law, aerospace and government, where privacy, client data and institutional knowledge are central.

The system is based on ‘Hierarchical Synaptic Consolidation’, which Verkko says is inspired by the way the human brain stores and strengthens memory.

Giancarlo Cobino, Verkko’s chief scientist and co-founder, said: “By shifting from dense, brute-force computation to sparse, adaptive threshold dynamics, we have built an architecture that learns continuously in real time and resists catastrophic forgetting.

“This efficiency allows the system to adapt to personal behaviour and individual user habits locally, without massive power demands.”

The launch comes as Europe tries to reduce its reliance on foreign technology providers in strategically important industries.

Earlier this year, the Technology Secretary said Britain must seize greater control over artificial intelligence or risk being left at the “mercy and whim” of a future shaped elsewhere.

In a speech at the Royal United Services Institute, Liz Kendall said the government wanted to reduce strategic dependence in key parts of the AI economy as the technology becomes increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small number of firms.

Just five companies now control 70 per cent of global AI compute, up from about 60 per cent a year ago, she said.

“The choice isn’t between a world that has AI and one that does not,” Kendall added. “It is a choice between a world where we shape our AI future, based on our own interests and values, or where we are left at its mercy and whim.”

READ MORE: Europe launches ‘anti-kill switch’ cloud shield as Trump fears grip Brussels. Four European tech firms have unveiled a new sovereign recovery system as fresh polling shows most Europeans believe the U.S could one day pull the plug on vital digital services.

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