A new UK AI says it can beat ChatGPT – we tried it and here’s what we found
Britain is known for many things: rainy weather, Paddington Bear and free healthcare are among the biggest. However, AI is not something the UK is particularly known for. So far, Locai, a British-built AI, has arrived to challenge big players from the US and China.
Locai Labs claims that its new AI can outperform GPT-5, Gemini and DeepSeek in terms of conversational ability and human preference using the Arena Hard v2 benchmark.
Myosotis technology
Locai uses a new technology called Forget-Me-Nt to accelerate AI training without relying on armies of human trainers. Of course, how a model is trained doesn’t really matter to most of us as end users. We only care about results, but Forget-Me-Nt is interesting because it allows AI to continually improve without human intervention.
By generating its own training data and never forgetting what it has previously learned, training times can be significantly reduced. Catastrophic forgetting, in which a model loses prior knowledge when learning new information, has been one of the main obstacles to AI development so far.
James Drayson, CEO of Locai Labs, said: “Britain does not need to outspend the rest of the world to lead in AI. We need to move beyond it, because we won’t win the AI race simply by building bigger data centers. »
We all know that OpenAI is currently building massive new data centers to power ChatGPT, and there’s no way a small challenger can compete with that level of investment without raising billions. Instead, Locai Labs plans to leverage the power of a blockchain-based network as the number of users grows.
Locai Labs will ask users to contribute their own computing resources in the form of processing power, rather than building their own data centers. This crowdsourcing model, the company believes, will allow it to be competitive on the global stage.
How does it feel to use?
The proof, as always, is in the pudding. Locai is in early access today and is available online.
I managed to get an activation code from Locai Labs so I could try it out for TechRadar, and I’m impressed, even though it’s currently missing many of the features ChatGPT offers.
There’s no mobile app, image creation, or voice mode, for example, but it was quick and responsive to my text prompts, providing responses that seemed accurate and comparable to what ChatGPT produces. It reminded me a bit of using ChatGPT 4o, but with the core feature set of an earlier version, like ChatGPT 3.1.
Since there’s no voice mode, I can’t tell if Locai has a British accent, but his responses seem a little less surfy than ChatGPT, which can sometimes stray into an overly informal tone.
For now, all you can do in Locai is chat via text prompt, download files, and search the web. Compared to everything ChatGPT can do, it seems very sparse. There is also a limit on “tool calls” per session, which limits its performance, although you can reset this simply by starting a new chat.
Locai may be the polite British newcomer, but politeness alone won’t win the global AI race. It needs scalability, functionality and durability. If it can achieve these three goals without tripping over its experimental architecture, the UK may finally have coded an AI worth talking about.
How it fares when, or if, it reaches ChatGPT-level user numbers is the question that will define its future. If Locai manages to stay on its feet when this happens, the UK could finally have a real seat at the AI table.
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