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 being among the top ones. AI, however, has not been something the UK was particularly known for. Until now, that is – Locai, a British-built AI, has arrived to challenge the big players from the US and China.

Locai Labs claims that its new AI can outperform GPT-5, Gemini, and DeepSeek on conversational ability and human preference using the Arena Hard v2 benchmark.

Founders James and George Drayson say they have created a new vision for "community AI" that combines self-learning technology with a decentralized, community-powered architecture. The goal is to create an AI that can scale sustainably and help address the UK's chronic shortage of data centers.