SOFAIR — Science of Fundamental AI Research Lab

UCL · Cambridge · Edinburgh · Oxford

Science of Fundamental AI Research Lab

Building the next generation of AI through fundamental research.

SOFAIR exists to create next generation AI systems. We work in the open, scaling up research ideas to deliver everyday impact.

Explore our research Funded positions

Collaborators

UCL, University of Cambridge, The University of Edinburgh, University of Oxford

Funded by

EPSRC — Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, part of UKRI

Partner & funding consortium

Working groups

How the lab is organised

Open Source Model Development

We build and release frontier models, datasets, and training recipes in the open — reproducible by design and available to the UK research community.

Novel Architectures

Rethinking the transformer: new inductive biases, sparse and state-space designs, and architectures grounded in geometry and Bayesian principles.

AI Grid

Systems and algorithms for training frontier models across federated, heterogeneous, wide-area compute — the national infrastructure question.

Breaking news

NVIDIA invests $250 million in UK agentic AI safety and security research

We're excited to see NVIDIA announce a $250 million investment to advance UK agentic AI safety and security research. Access to cutting-edge compute is essential for understanding how advanced AI systems behave and how we can build safer, more secure models for the future.

“Safer AI starts with a better understanding of how these systems work. Access to this compute will help us investigate new open AI architectures and test their safety and security as we develop them.”

Prof David Barber, Director of SOFAIR

We thank NVIDIA for this significant investment in the UK's AI research community and look forward to the opportunities it creates for advancing fundamental AI research and AI safety.

Learn more
The NVIDIA sign outside NVIDIA's headquarters campus

Upcoming events

All events →

  • Summit · 30 Nov 2026

    Global Open Source AI Summit

    London

    The Global Summit on Open Source Artificial Intelligence, taking place in London on 30 November, will bring together leading international initiatives developing open-source AI models to celebrate their achievements, share knowledge, and explore how open AI can compete with the world's most advanced proprietary systems.

    Register here

  • Seminar · 2 Nov 2026

    Seminar

    90 High Holborn, London

Work with SOFAIR

We welcome collaboration enquiries, visiting researchers, and applications to our funded fellowships and studentships.

Contact SOFAIRMeet the team