Ian Hogarth

Ian Hogarth CBE is an investor and entrepreneur. He co-founded Songkick in 2007^[1] and Plural Platform in 2021.^[2] Hogarth is the current Chair of the UK Government's AI Foundation Model Taskforce, which conducts artificial intelligence safety research.^[3]

Hogarth attended Dulwich College, before studying information engineering at the University of Cambridge. He later specialised in machine learning during his Masters.^[4][5][6] Hogarth also spent time at Tsinghua University in Beijing, learning Mandarin Chinese.^[6]

Hogarth founded live music startup Songkick with friends Michelle You and Pete Smith in 2007. This was part of the 2007 Y Combinator program in Boston. Hogarth and his fellow Songkick co-founders were named to Inc. magazine's 30-under-30 list in 2010.^[7] The same year, Hogarth won the British Council’s UK Young Music Entrepreneur of the Year award.^[8] He was also named one of Forbes magazine's 2012 music 30-under-30.^[9]

In 2013, Songkick launched Detour, a crowdfunding platform for concerts.^[10]

In June 2015, Songkick announced its merger with direct ticket vendor CrowdSurge and a $16.6m Series C investment round. Hogarth became co-CEO of the combined company, alongside Matt Jones, the former CrowdSurge CEO.^[11]

In 2010, Hogarth and Songkick COO Pete Smith founded Silicon Milkroundabout, a career fair for high tech startups in East London.^[12] It was established in response to lack of interest from graduates hampering tech start-ups, according to Hogarth.^[13]

Hogarth co-founded Plural Platform in 2021, an early stage venture capital firm.^[14] Hogarth has invested in more than 150 companies,^[15] including over 50 AI companies.^[6]

Hogarth has co-written the State of AI report since 2018 with Nathan Benaich.^[16][17] He wrote a blog post entitled "AI Nationalism" about the rise of machine learning influencing a new kind of geopolitics.^[18] He also wrote a viral article in the Financial Times arguing that the "race to God-like AI" poses risks, and might lead to human extinction.^[19][16] Hogarth was listed as one of the 100 most influential personalities in artificial intelligence by the magazine Time in 2023.^[16]

On 18 June 2023, Hogarth was announced as Chair of the UK Government's Foundation Model Taskforce, an AI safety research organization.^[3] This AI safety research is mainly focused on "near-term" risks such as AI-enabled cyberattacks or pathogen generation.^[16] The role reports directly to the Prime Minister and the Technology Secretary, and it has a government budget of £100 million.^[3] After the AI safety summit, the Foundation Model Taskforce evolved and was renamed the AI Safety Institute (AISI), with Hogarth remaining its Chair.^[20] In a report in October 2023 Hogarth announced the appointment of Jade Leung from OpenAI and Rumman Chowdhury the co-founder of Humane Intelligence.^[21]

The AISI discovered that the safeguards designed to prevent AI models behind chatbots from issuing illegal, toxic, or explicit responses could be easily bypassed with simple techniques. Testing five unnamed large language models, the AISI found them "highly vulnerable" to jailbreaks, which are text prompts designed to elicit prohibited responses. On 20 May 2024, the AISI also declared to open its first overseas office in San Francisco.^[22]