Ellison’s $2.5bn Bet - Can Santa Ono turn Oxford into Europe’s Silicon Valley?
Professor Santa Ono, global president of the Ellison Institute of Technology, talks to Stephen Horn and Laila Rizvi in Oxford about Larry Ellison's $2.5 billion bet on the city. He explains why the institute chose Oxford and the UK, how it plans to recruit around 7,000 scientists, and why he sees commercialisation as central to solving problems in health, food and climate. He also answers questions about NHS data, the institute's independence from Oracle and how it will measure progress.
Transcript
Larry Ellison built Oracle into a cornerstone of the modern tech economy and is now the world's second richest man. Well, today Ellison is placing a $2.5 billion bet on Oxford. His Ellison Institute of Technology is expanding from Los Angeles to Britain's oldest university town in a move to fuse AI, medicine and sustainability all under one roof.
However, countless investors have tried and failed to recreate Silicon Valley's magic elsewhere, so why Oxford and what makes Ellison's strategy any different?
This is Agents of Tech. I'm Autria Godfrey in Washington, D.C. and I'm joined by my co-hosts Stephen Horn and Laila Rizvi from London today. Pleasure to see you both.
Hi Autria. Hi.
Alright, this is a huge interview. Last week you both travelled to Oxford to speak with Professor Santa J. Ono, president of the Ellison Institute of Technology at Oxford, about Larry Ellison's bold new push to turn Oxford into a global centre for AI, medicine and sustainability.
Alright, so I guess my question to the both of you is Oxford poaching some American companies and some American scholars here.
Yeah, my big question was why Oxford? Because Larry's from America, he went to U Chicago, which is where Santa Ono went to college. So it was confusing for me as to why is Larry being so generous to Oxford? But I think as it turns out, that you get more bang for your buck in terms of research at Oxford compared to the rest of the world, which was super interesting and I didn't know.
I was blown away by this, Autria, because I'll be honest, I had not heard of the Ellison Institute of Technology before we had embarked on this. And I had no idea of the size of the vision. It is not just the money, you know, they're recruiting 7,000 research scientists. That's the entire size of Oxford University. And the model that they're using is a global model, but based in Oxford, which is very interesting. But it's really, really fascinating that they're tackling the world's biggest problems. They're looking at climate change, water, all these different things, but from an entrepreneurial perspective, they're looking at making money out of solving these problems. I have never seen a vision as big as this and a vision that I knew nothing about.
Okay, before we get to the interview, we want to know what you think as you're listening. Can Oxford really become Europe's Silicon Valley? Is Ellison's 1.9 billion pound gamble a bold new model for science and technology, or possibly another moonshot that's too hard to scale. Weigh in, sound off in the comments below. And while you're there, don't forget to like and subscribe. Now straight ahead to our interview. Take a listen.
Santa, thank you so much for joining us today. You're welcome. It's great to have you. It's great to be here.
So I'd like to kick off and ask you, what is Larry Ellison's big vision for the EIT?
The vision is an exciting one. That's why I'm here. And it is really to solve some of the world's most difficult and pressing issues like food insecurity that has to be solved by agritech, the climate emergency, incurable diseases. And to bring in one single location next to one of the world's greatest universities, the talent, world class talent supported generously to build teams, that supported by artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotics will be able to create those solutions. Not only to do fundamental science, but end-to-end solutions that will benefit all of humanity.
Santa, one of the things that I'm just really interested in is how are you going to do all this at scale? I'm an entrepreneur, and the UK is now more welcoming to entrepreneurship and particularly places like here at Oxford. But how are you going to do this at scale?
I would say that to scale, the EIT recognises that we need to have a critical mass of talent, but we also need to invest in a transformation that has been occurring, especially the last 10 years in the UK, with investments in serial entrepreneurs that really understand how to take fundamental discoveries and to bring them to market. EIT is going to be part of that investment.
From the very beginning, on day one, one of the things that Larry Ellison committed to was investments in scholarships, both undergraduate and postgraduate. The first cohorts are already here. We are bringing the best talent, the young talent, some of them have already started companies, some of them have already published papers in Nature. And they're coming here not only to work in our laboratories, but to be trained to be entrepreneurs. So the way we scale it is a multi-pronged strategic approach to contribute to the UK ecosystem.
It's a really exciting vision and a lot of my professional life I've been working alongside maybe the Gates Foundation, which is in some ways similar, you know, a person very successful in technology who's wanted to give back and to solve problems. But yours is a fundamentally different model, isn't it? Which is based on science capitalism, is based on the ability to make money to solve these problems. Could you go a little bit deeper into that and those differences?
The model there is a distributed model. Right. Where the funding, it's really a grants administration organisation primarily in a think tank. And they choose very carefully who they fund. And it has been impactful. The philosophy there is these are urgent issues, there's a resource they should, it should be used and expended quickly because there's an emergency that we face as a civilization. That makes sense.
The Ellison model's quite different, first of all, as you can see, although he does fund globally and he tries to find talent globally that he's investing quite a bit, you know, billions of pounds on a campus here at Oxford Science Park. And that's intentional. It's to integrate into one site, multiple world class scientists, so that they can bump into each other. And you can't quite get that. You get it in meetings in a distributed model, but when they're on one campus in interconnected buildings on floors that are adjacent to each other, then it's well known and that's the ideal way for that kind of collision to occur. So that there are new ideas that emerge from those interactions.
The second is, is that I think inspired by Oxford and Cambridge that have been around almost the millennia, is that I think he wants something enduring. Right. There will be a dedicated, patient investment in fundamental science. So that 10 years from now, a hundred years from now, 900 years from now, like Oxford and Cambridge, he wants it to be a lasting, sustainable institution, which I think is exciting.
And on that note of, obviously you said that Larry Ellison chose Oxford because of its longevity. Yeah. But also there's great research and innovation here. But what about the disadvantages? The UK can be a difficult place to innovate because of regulation. I mean the building of HS2, which required about 8,000 consents from public bodies, it makes it quite difficult to innovate in the real world here. But also culturally, as in as British people, we are so much more risk averse than Americans. If you ask someone in the UK would they want to be a billionaire, they would cringe at it. Whereas, you know, people in the U.S. kind of see that as an American dream. It's something to aspire towards. So why make that decision to go for the UK rather than, you know, institute in the U.S. which also has a history.
You know, Oxford and Cambridge are pretty special. So the first thing I'm going to say is that if you look at the quality of research and the impact, Oxford and Cambridge are second to none. That's been the case for centuries. It's true today. And that's not to say that there isn't great research going on elsewhere, but I would say per pound spent or dollar spent, the impact is enormous in British institutions. And I can say that as someone who has spent time both at UCL and in American institutions, I think what many people in Britain don't understand is how excellent these institutions are.
The second thing I say is that that British institutions are really changing and it's not an accident. They've been changing because I would say the UK government, over a number of administrations advised by many people in Oxbridge and in the London universities and throughout UK, have been very thoughtful in how to structure the ecosystem so that it has resources that don't exist elsewhere. For example, a single database for patient information. Right. That doesn't exist in most other jurisdictions. In some, and the idea of a biobank and if you look at sort of the inflexion points in healthcare, biomedical research, a lot of it's happened here. Yeah. Right.
UK life sciences is first rate. I mean, thinking about those things, setting the table so that now with artificial intelligence, with, you know, hopefully quantum computing, that you can capitalise on that to really make a quantum leap to solve these difficult problems. I would say the UK is the best place in the world to do that.
Because your ambition, Larry's ambition is great, you know it's a big ambition, a big, bold ambition. And if I'm right, you are looking to employ a lot of world class scientists here. And my question is, how does that work alongside the, you know, let's call it the existing university? I mean those are two big groups bumped next to each other. How does that work?
Well, it's exciting. The dream is that EIT will be about 7,000. So it's essentially in a town of 160,000 people last time I looked, doubling the number of scientists here. And there are issues with that, but it's exciting. It creates a nucleus of activity in terms of quality and critical mass that is competitive with the best global centres for innovation. That's exciting for the UK, it's exciting for Europe, it's exciting globally because of what's happening with funding in North America.
I actually watched Larry's talk at the Oracle AI World Summit, which he did last week. I thought it was really interesting. He was talking about how with regard to AI, they've trained these models on all of the publicly available data. But what's really important and really valuable is training it on private data, which is much more difficult, but also NHS data. Sure. Which has 58 million patient data, which is, you know, network linkage and unified in a way that it isn't elsewhere. Is the EIT working on using UK data and how would you address concerns about that British people might have about their data being used by Oracle, for example, to train and then use these AI models for, you know, healthcare innovation, but also potentially giving access to bioterrorism as well?
Those are very valid questions and certainly these are early days. And a lot of that's being thought through, not just here, but globally. I think there's a real commitment at the university and at the institute we're thinking through those issues. So I would, my response would be to be very thoughtful.
Yeah, because I think another thing which people might not quite understand is the relationship between the EIT and Oracle as well. And how, because Oracle is building huge data centres and are really driving the technological revolution when it comes from like the AI side. So how close is that connection and like what does it look like?
We're independent, EIT is independent from Oracle. We have a common, a founder. Of course, yes. And it's wonderful 'cause he's brilliant. Yeah. He's a visionary. That's why thousands of people listen to him. And he has great ideas. And whenever there's a step change in technology, there are ethical concerns. Yes. The responsibility of the scientists and the institutions are to think those through. And right now it's, I think indisputable. Research happening here at Oxford during COVID saved millions of lives. And so you can be scared or you can be responsible and you can be thoughtful about how you leverage new technology, is what I would say.
Can I take you up on that point about how you leverage new technology? 'Cause we're all talking about AI all the time. To most people, the jury is out, to some people would say it's going to take my job. You know, other people are concerned about privacy issues that we just talked about. And yet it's, you know, a lot of being spent and...
Trillions of dollars.
Trillions of dollars. That's right, yeah.
So what's your vision for how AI is going to be a force for good for your agenda, for tackling some of these big issues that the world faces?
So these questions about AI replacing people that will happen. Technological advances in the past have also eliminated jobs. Right. But they've created new kinds of jobs. Jobs that are, in my view, even more interesting. You still have to be thoughtful. You still have to have, you know, policies and regulation, but it's not a reason to shy away from something that we could really change the way we approach the issues and problems that we face.
Even today, I can tell you that artificial intelligence is revolutionising and shortening the time required for as you know, rational drug design. Right. Totally transforming it in a positive way and it will save lives. And so that's what I would say, the jury is kind of still out. Right. We still have to think things through and do them the right way.
There are already examples today of, I mean, if you look at what's happening beyond Oracle, if you're looking at what's happening with OpenAI and Microsoft, they're investing in fundamental science because the capabilities, the capacity of AI in solving mathematical problems, for example, that would take decades. It used to be, Sam Altman would say, he came to Michigan and he said, you know, it's almost as good as a graduate student. Yeah. Now it's almost as good as a professional mathematician. And as it advances it's remarkable. But it's not replacing the mathematician, it's decreasing the amount of time that's required to solve something that would otherwise have taken much longer. And it's the same for drug discovery as well.
I love what you said there about needing a thoughtful approach. It really resonates. Yeah.
Why do you think commercialisation is critical to addressing humanity's biggest issues? Because there's also another school of thought, which is kind of what Geoff Hinton is a, supports, which is that curiosity-driven research, which has kind of no end agenda actually results in the biggest leaps and breakthroughs and can be attributed to the success in deep learning and neural networks that kind of kicked everything off. So why commercialisation for these problems rather than just kind of free research, which has no immediate agenda?
I have great respect for Hinton. I mean, he's sort of the godfather of AI, but I think my perspective is this is a both-and issue and that's what EIT is. Yeah. The fundamental science will occur here and that will be the seed corn for future approaches to solve even more difficult issues. So it's a both-and that's part of it, but I think the idea that commercialisation is bad is comical.
Right? So if you think about what Bell Labs did in terms of the transistor or essentially that kind of approach, bringing, Bell Labs brought, similar to EIT, great scientists, funded them, created a campus for collisions and an interdisciplinary approach, new ways of solving issues back then, and then commercialise them, ultimately, that brought it to the people. We all have cell phones now. Is it bad that there was an Apple and that, that we all have cell phones, it brought it into our hands. It's indispensable now, right? Commercialisation, whether it's in pharma or whether it's in individual devices, have positively impacted all of us and is the way to get them to many, many people.
So what I wanted to ask was about your point on commercialisation, and commercialisation can take two routes where it can be commoditization of products, tech innovation, which essentially competes away capital, leaving very little for more innovation or a dynamic monopoly, which is exerted by technological innovation, not necessarily regulation or patents. Sure. Like Google, of course has won five Nobel prizes. But is a technological monopoly and has a moat because of the ecosystem it's developed. So what kind of route do you think EIT would take? Because you obviously don't want to compete away all of the capital that you reap if you continue to commoditize and make things extremely cheap to the extent that they're no longer profitable.
I would put it a slightly different way. I think that growing to a particular size where there is enough resource and talent to focus on in a patient way, in a sustained way, investments for, you know, things that may not seem possible today is essential. And so I think there's a danger to fragmentation so that you don't have the critical mass. When Bell was broken up, Bell Labs was closed and we all suffered from that consequence. So it's an outstanding question.
Can I come back on EIT's vision, the investment and you are trying to do things on a scale that has not been done before and certainly not been done before in this country at the speed that you are looking to do it at. So one of the things I'm really interested in is how you are going to monitor progress because you say about a thoughtful approach, you say about a sustainable approach, a long-term approach, but you are investing a lot of money. And I would be interested to see how you, how you do that, how you monitor progress.
Well, you know, the EIT has only been around for 20 months. Right. I haven't seen anything like this anywhere in the world. Maybe in China. They built universities in a year, but aside from that, look around, it's really happening. I don't know if you saw all the cranes, the campus is being built. I've never seen so many cranes anywhere at any university I've been president or vice chancellor of. And I can tell you almost every American university president, my friends, would love to have an EIT on their doorstep.
And so, you know, the question about how to monitor progress, it's already happening. Every single week we get a progress report. And so it's kind of a hybrid between this is not a university, it's kind of a hybrid where fundamental research takes place. To your point, the freedom of inquiry and thinking about the best experiments and asking questions that illuminate things that are not understood now, that happens, but it's kind of a hybrid. There's also a very close monitoring of what's happening. Has this problem with this device been solved? And so it is a unique way of supporting fundamental science, but also having a mindset which is required for something to be built, which is competitive because it's a very competitive world in each of these spaces.
My final question for me would be one of the things that we've come back to loads of times in our series, is AI geopolitically. So the developments that have been happening in the United States, the developments that have been happening in China, and a couple of times we've come back to the issue of the place of places like the UK in that, that doesn't have the size of either of those two nations. When we did an interview a couple of weeks ago, we were talking about one of the great strengths that the UK has is the skills base, is the people, that come out of universities such as this. So is it fair to say from EIT, you are effectively a global model centred here in Oxford?
Oh, I think so. If you look at the scientists that we, the talent that we're recruiting now, it's a very global approach. You know, Larry Ellison has invested in individual laboratories that are not part of this campus. You know, right now the affiliation is with Oxford. But I'm being approached almost on a daily basis by deans and presidents of other world leading institutions that see what's happening here, and they want to plug into the sort of global ecosystem that we're trying to create.
Could be based here, but it might be no single institution, EIT also included, will not be large enough to have all the functionalities required to solve any difficult problem. And so the outlook here really is global. And that's why I'm proud that when Larry called me, he said, I'd like you to be the global president. That I think that that's an essential part of bringing together the right group of people with the skills needed to solve the problems. They don't exist, they're not all in the United States, they're not all in the UK, they're not all in Canada, they're not all in Australia. We really need to come together in this knowledge economy, in the collaborative way to solve those problems.
And that's such an exciting vision.
Yeah. Thank you.
Thank you so much, thank you.
Thank you for joining us, Santa.
Of course.
It was wonderful to have you.
Yeah, thank you so much.
Really fascinating interview there. Very jealous that you got to travel to Oxford to do that. What stood out to you during your conversation?
All what stood out to me was just the scale of the ambition for this particular project. I think, you know, it's very easy to let the numbers trip off your tongue that $2.5 billion, but $2.5 billion is a lot of money, right? And to build that out into the infrastructure that is needed to find those people, to be able to sort of make that work is, you know, an entire game changer. So what stood out for me was just the scale of this particular project, the ambition is ambition I've never seen before.
Yeah, and I also think that the difference between the various models in how university-driven research can often be curiosity-driven research, which is traditionally how we've done it, but actually agenda-driven research and with there being kind of a commercial gain at the end of it can also be equally fruitful. So I think it was just extraordinary.
I would like to ask the both of you as citizens of the UK, if you think that there is any hesitancy or perhaps citizens would be a little bit reluctant about American private tech money coming into a renowned institution like Oxford.
So one of the issues which we kind of touched upon is that the institutions in the UK are attached to kind of history, which people love, but also the culture of the UK is very different to that of Silicon Valley. People are more risk averse, people are more attached to kind of this class system, which has existed for a very long time. And the U.S. doesn't have those same undercurrents of that class system, which Oxford does frankly represent. So I think it's much harder to push this vision through to British people who don't necessarily, you know, look to billionaires or see billionaires as the British dream in the same way maybe?
I think there were huge hurdles to overcome for this. But as I said at the beginning, you know, it's just the size of the ambition and this would be such a fascinating one to watch.
Right, you know, a major accomplishment for Larry Ellison to you know, pushing that vision through and making this happen. We would welcome Larry on Agents of Tech at any given moment if he would like to come and share his thoughts on how he was able to achieve this remarkable feat. So that invitation is always open.
A huge thank you to Professor Santa J. Ono for joining us and for sharing the Ellison Institute's bold vision for Oxford. If you've got thoughts on the UK's role in the global innovation race or what it takes to build the next Silicon Valley, be sure to weigh in in the comments. Tell us what you're thinking and while you're there, hit the Subscribe and Like button. We will see you next time on Agents of Tech. Thanks so much for joining us today, Stephen and Laila. Until next time.
Bye-bye. Thanks, bye.