Nick Clegg is no AI doomer. But don’t call him a booster, either. The former president of global affairs at Meta says that while he’s hopeful that AI will automate away certain frictions, he’s unwilling to abide all the talk of superintelligence.
Since Clegg left Meta in January 2025, days before Donald Trump’s return to the White House, the former deputy prime minister of the UK has been relatively quiet about what he plans to do next. That is, until this week, when he announced his appointment to the board of two AI companies: British data center firm Nscale and education startup Efekta.
Efekta, a spinout of Swiss company EF Education First, sells an AI-based teaching assistant that’s meant to adapt to a student’s abilities and send progress reports to their teachers. The aim is to replicate the type of one-to-one instruction that isn’t feasible in a traditional classroom setting. The platform is currently used by around 4 million students, predominantly in Latin America and Southeast Asia, the company says. The hope is that Clegg will draw from his experience in politics and tech to counsel Efekta as it expands into new territories.
When we met at EF’s office in West London last week, Clegg said he believes the classroom will be among the first settings to be radically improved by AI. But he was less cheerful about the politics of the AI race, which he says will further concentrate power in Silicon Valley. He voiced equal frustration with the “pesky Brussels bureaucrats” that he claims have knee-capped European AI founders as with the Big Tech elites that have prostrated themselves at Trump’s feet.
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
…: Nick, on the spectrum from AI doomer to booster, where do you fall?
Nick Clegg: I somewhat disregard both kinds of hype. Saying that AI is going to destroy life as we know it by next Tuesday is as much hype as saying it’s the most powerful thing to have happened to the human being since the invention of fire. I have a real aversion to hype on both sides. It’s usually propagated by people who have something to sell or want to overstate the power of their own invention.
The reason there are these wild gyrations in the way people talk about the technology is that it’s both very versatile and very stupid. It is exceptionally powerful for certain things—like coding—and exceptionally useless for many others. I think that’s why we struggle to talk about it.
I think it has to do with the uncanny quality of some interactions with AI.
We always do this, as human beings. We call it artificial, then spend a lot of time anthropomorphizing it. That’s the way we refract experiences to make them comprehensible. But it’s a fundamental mistake.
What attracted you to the education sector? How do you expect AI to reshape the practice of teaching?
I’m completely convinced that immersive, online teaching can have very considerable benefits to pupils.
We all know that every child has different abilities, learns at different paces in different subjects, in response to different teachers. The dream of personalizing education has always eluded educators—and for very good reason. It’s very difficult to provide attention as a teacher to every pupil. I think the secret sauce that AI provides is that it really allows for adaptive, interactive personalization.
Why Efekta, specifically?
Its focus is on very big, underserved markets in Latin America and Southeast Asia, and so on. There are chronic teacher shortages across those parts of the world.
S 001