LONDON — Britain’s financial services watchdog on Monday announced a new tie-up with U.S. chipmaker Nvidia to let banks safely experiment with artificial intelligence.

The Financial Conduct Authority said it will launch a so-called Supercharged Sandbox that will “give firms access to better data, technical expertise and regulatory support to speed up innovation.”

Starting from October, financial services institutions in the U.K. will be allowed to experiment with AI using Nvidia’s accelerated computing and AI Enterprise Software products, the watchdog said in a press release.

The initiative is designed for firms in the “discovery and experiment phase” with AI, the FCA noted, adding that a separate live testing service exists for firms further along in AI development.

“This collaboration will help those that want to test AI ideas but who lack the capabilities to do so,” Jessica Rusu, the FCA’s chief data, intelligence and information officer, said in a statement. “We’ll help firms harness AI to benefit our markets and consumers, while supporting economic growth.”

The FCA’s new sandbox addresses a key issue for banks, which have faced challenges shipping advanced new AI tools to their customers amid concerns over risks around privacy and fraud.

Large language models from the likes of OpenAI and Google send data back to overseas facilities — and privacy regulators have raised the alarm over how this information is stored and processed. There have meanwhile been several instances of malicious actors using generative AI to scam people.

Nvidia is behind the graphics processing units, or GPUs, used to train and run powerful AI models. The company’s CEO, Jensen Huang, is expected to give a keynote talk at a tech conference in London on Monday morning.

Last year, HSBC’s generative AI lead, Edward Achtner, told a London tech conference he sees “a lot of success theater” in finance when it comes to artificial intelligence — hinting that some financial services firms are touting advances in AI without tangible product innovations to show for it.

He added that, while banks like HSBC have used AI for many years, new generative AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT come with their own unique compliance risks.

LONDON — World, the biometric identity verification project co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, is set to launch in the U.K. this week.

The venture, which uses a spherical eye-scanning device called the Orb to scan people’s eyes, will become available in London from Thursday and is planning to roll out to several other major U.K. cities — including Manchester, Birmingham, Cardiff, Belfast, and Glasgow — in the coming months.

The project aims to authenticate the identity of humans with its Orb device and prevent the fraudulent abuse of artificial intelligence systems like deep fakes.

It works by scanning a person’s face and iris and then creating a unique code to verify that the individual is a human and not an AI.

Once someone has created their iris code, they are then gifted some of World’s WLD cryptocurrency and can use an anonymous identifier called World ID to sign into various applications. It currently works with the likes of Minecraft, Reddit and Discord.

Ever since its initial launch as “Worldcoin” in 2021, Altman’s World has been plagued by concerns over how it could affect users’ privacy. The startup says it addresses these concerns by encrypting the biometric data collected and ensuring the original data is deleted.

On top of that, World’s verification system also depends on a decentralized network of users’ smartphones rather than the cloud to carry out individual identity checks.

Still, this becomes harder to do in a network with billions of users like Facebook or TikTok, for example. For now, World has 13 million verified users and is planning to scale that up.

Ludwig argues World is a scalable network as all of the computation and storage is processed locally on a user’s device — it’s only the infrastructure for confirming someone’s uniqueness that is handled by third-party providers.

One example of a major digital identity system is India’s Aadhaar. Although the initiative has seen widespread adoption, it has also been the target of criticisms for lax security and allegedly worsening social inequality for Indians.

“We’re beginning to see governments now more interested in how can we use this as a mechanism to improve our identity infrastructure,” Ludwig told CNBC. “Mechanisms to identify and reduce fraud is of interest to governments.”

The technologist added that World has been talking to various regulators about its identity verification solution — including the Information Commissioner’s Office, which oversees data protection in the U.K.

“We’ve been having lots of conversations with regulators,” Ludwig told CNBC. “In general, there’s been lots of questions: how do we make sure this works? How do we protect privacy? If we engage with this, does it expose us to risks?”

“All of those questions we’ve been able to answer,” he added. “It’s been a while since we’ve had a question asked we didn’t have an answer to.”

Tesla’s vice president of Optimus robotics, Milan Kovac, said on Friday that he’s leaving the company.

In a post on X, Kovac thanked Tesla CEO Elon Musk and reminisced about his tenure, which began in 2016.

“I want to thank @elonmusk from the bottom of my heart for his trust and teachings over the decade we’ve worked together,” Kovac wrote. “Elon, you’ve taught me to discern signal from noise, hardcore resilience, and many fundamental principles of engineering. I am forever grateful. Tesla will win, I guarantee you that.”

Tesla is developing Optimus with the aim of someday selling it as a bipedal, intelligent robot capable of everything from factory work to babysitting.

In a first-quarter shareholder deck, Tesla said it was on target for “builds of Optimus on our Fremont pilot production line in 2025, with wider deployment of bots doing useful work across our factories.”

During Tesla’s 2024 annual shareholder meeting, Musk characterized himself as “pathologically optimistic,” then claimed the humanoid robots would lift the company’s market cap to $25 trillion at an unspecified future date.

In recent weeks, Musk told CNBC’s David Faber that Tesla is now training its Optimus systems to do “primitive tasks,” like picking up objects, open a door or throw a ball.

Competitors in the space include Boston Dynamics, Agility Robotics, Apptronik, 1X and Figure.

Kovac had previously served as the company’s director of Autopilot software engineering. He rose to lead the company’s Optimus unit as vice president in 2022.

Musk personally thanked Kovac for his “outstanding contributions” to the business.

Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment.

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