Today, at the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Action Summit in Paris, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has launched InvestAI, an initiative to mobilise €200 billion for investment in AI, including a new European fund of €20 billion for AI gigafactories.
  • FortyTwo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    7 hours ago

    Incredible news! We’ve been needing this for a long time; the research community has been calling for a “CERN for AI” for years at this point.

    As a publicly funded researcher working in this field it’s very frustrating to see so many of our excellent, well-educated students in Europe end up contributing to the performance of American tech giants (who then use that power to undermine our democratic society). It is also hard to overstate how dependent we are on American compute infrastructure, for example, Google colab, AWS or Google Earth Engine. This last one is especially frustrating because basically the entire European research community relies on access to a service by an American tech giant to access our own globally leading high-quality public access satellite data.

    I’ve seen a lot of negativity on this news as a waste of money. Personally I’m not too sold on the usefulness of LLMs either, their hype is very much overblown. But investing in AI is not the same as investing in LLMs, and Europe absolutely needs this. AI is being used, and has been for decades, in nearly everything we do. This includes not just LLMs and deep learning, but optimisation, formal logic, all sorts of probabilistic inference, forecasting, robotics, simulation, surrogate modelling, satisfiability, and much more. The correctness of the chips your phone uses has been verified using AI techniques. Weather forecasts and disaster warnings use AI methods. The food you eat has been monitored as it grew using AI. Air travel and general infrastructure needs AI to function, much of manufacturing and design needs it, etc etc. These are not just the chat bot “assistants” that tech companies try to push so hard on the public, but computational methods that answer vital questions we cannot otherwise answer.

    Being dependent on a country like the US (or China) for something this pervasive and important is a terrible idea. Compute infrastructure, central hubs of expertise, and continental instead of national scale investment opportunities all contribute strongly to European sovereignty in this regard, for all the fields mentioned above (not just the over-hyped ones).