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EU to mobilize 200B Euros to invest in AI
- tiberius_p 2y agoWe need to invest in defense not in AI.
- _ink_ 2y agoSadly, AI will be needed for defense.
- tiberius_p 2y agoYes, but what kind of AI? LLM chatbots or military robotics? LLMs seem to be drawing most of the money these days and I don't think that should be the focus of the EU. We need advanced drones and anti-drone defense systems, advanced air defense against hypersonic missiles and glided aviation bombs, high precision artillery systems, anti-tank weapons. I don't see LLMs making any breakthroughs in those fields. Maybe transformer neural networks can be tuned to solve some prediction problems in these areas. Maybe some vision models can be tuned to detect and track aerial threats, or movements of troops. My point is, we need investment in AI for defense not in customer support chatbots. Unless it's chatbots that generate smart military moves on the battle field...we don't need them. Let the Americans and the Chinese play with their chit-chatbots. We have bigger fish to fry.
- FinnLobsien 2y agoboth
- moffkalast 2y agoRoger roger
- guiriduro 2y agoYes, that's what the arms manufacturers want. Let's not do (much of) that.
- rad_gruchalski 2y agowhy not? we’ll be throwing rainbow flags at Russians when they decide to invade?
- sgt101 2y agoMore likely "reparations" - €500bn a year or we're coming to Berlin ! Genuinely - this is a one way bet for the Russians, smash up Estonia and extort the Germans, spend the money on more guns and then kill all the Poles. Coming to a continent near you soon!
- ivewonyoung 2y agoUK and France(along with the US) have nukes, so it's a much different scenario than WW2.
- tmnvdb 2y agoFrance and the UK have nukes precisely because they did not believe that a country would be willing to risk total destruction to protect another country.
- sgt101 2y agoin every contingency - this is correct I think. It's been very important to the Nato stance to have multiple nuclear armed states, it made Soviet calculations extremely difficult. With the USA leaving the alliance I think that either a joint Euro bomb needs to be developed or Germany needs to acquire one. Perhaps a polite fiction (continuing the current one by the USA) of France providing nukes for German, Dutch, Danish and Polish war planes could be used.
- 2y ago
- jajko 2y agoI agree, I think they are trying to cargo-cult Silicon Valley ecosystem without realizing that it will never have a chance in European's clueless bureaucracy, massive social safety nets etc. It doesn't mean nothing can be built, but it won't ever be as effective and bleeding edge for various good and bad reasons and mere fraction of whatever goals aimed for. And defense spending is a must, how in 2025 they could NOT invest easily 5% of GDP into security is beyond me, thats not a bad requirement from trump actually (if some time is given to reshuffle budgets). There are threats from all sides - one genocidal dictator on our borders repeatedly keeps stating how he will wipe out few hundreds of millions with atomic bombs aimed at our cities. Inner threats with Hungary and Slovakia now. Then there are global threats, be it China or maybe even US if trade wars will go on 100%, and who knows what Turkey actually wants. Yet Leyden's blind focus on green deal when whole world literally abandoned it, killing our industries while making 0 difference long term is... I don't have a nice word for it. If there is actually some sound logic behind those moves she failed remarkably with communicating them to literally everybody.
- rdm_blackhole 2y agoThey can't invest 5% of GDP in defense because they don't have the money. Germany does not want to raise it's debt ceiling and France is basically broke and hasn't had a functioning government for the last 7 months. NATO has been treated as a free ride by Europe. They were supposed to invest a certain % of their GDP each year in their defense spending but because the US was always there as backstop, they basically never did. Now a lot of countries in the EU have to play catch up and make up the under investment of the last 20 years which will take many years and even possibly decades before it is reversed. Also Macron is on his way out and the most likely politician to come after him is from the far right. His voice and power is waning and since he has lost the majority in the assembly, he is a lame duck with very little power to change things.
- rvnx 2y agoThe irony is that if we don't invest into defense, war would still likely break-out, but we may suffer less (or die less) because of a quick loss. Now we have a weak army in the EU, if Russia invades one of our friends, then the war will be over in two days because France, Germany, USA will do their usual "we condemn blablabla, we send you prayers and sympathy", but there would be no long-lasting war. A bit similar to Ukraine, it's a half-assed initiative, drowning billions of USD, but not efficient enough. If the answer had been much stronger, it would have worked, but now we get the worst of the two options (doing nothing, or going all-in). Also not to forget, that at the end of the rifle, it's not people saving their house, it's about protecting a system that supports the wealth of politics. The main difference for the invaded people would be to whom they pay taxes, and ironically, could now be facing sanctions from their supposed friends (like the living folks in Crimea, who got punished by US/EU; punished because they have been invaded and victims of a war). In the second case, if EU defense is increased moderately (like currently plans), war would still breakout but it may drag for longer, and casualties without increasing odds of winning. The third case, where EU alone without the US is significantly stronger than China, Russia and North Korea, it's nice but I don't see it happening. Like you said, Macron is likely going to be replaced with pro-Russian Le Pen / Zemmour-like. The world is getting dangerous.
- jycr753 2y agoIt's wasted money if they don't change their level of bureaucracy
- randunel 2y agoIndeed. The EU grants are ridiculously red tapey. Companies have entire departments dedicated to the red tape that European grants require, from the initial participation / auction with hundreds or thousands of pages of documentation, through various stages of thorough checkbox ticking, to the final reception of the project. Only the usual players with well established "EU Funds" departments can realistically get them, such as Accenture, IBM, Cognizant, Microsoft etc.
- ivan_gammel 2y agoI have seen (and worked in) a number of startups that did receive research grants including AI research in Germany. This notion of terrible European bureaucracy is exaggerated. It’s not worse than anywhere else in the world.
- scrollaway 2y agoI work with EU grants and it’s really not. The amount of wasted work that goes into them is insane. Admin overhead is massive and it’s spent not just from the grants but also from all the companies that apply and don’t get them.
- a99c43f2d565504 2y agoI have no experience in this whatsoever but I feel like it's good to have some transparent bureoucracy even if it's slightly inconvenient if the alternative is to toss around billions in an opaque and corrupt manner like the way bookkeeping (or lack thereof) in global scale climate funds works. Note that I don't have experience in the latter either nor sources to give, yet this is the impression I have. Feel free to correct.
- pantalaimon 2y agoThose grants are then likely on the state level, not EU level.
- ThouYS 2y agoand whoosh, it's gone
- rdm_blackhole 2y agoYeah, I don't see it happening. This other tidbit from the article was funny as well: €109 billion investment plan for AI projects in France in the coming years. How can a journalist write this verbatim when the likelihood of this happening is next to nil. France had a massive budget deficit last year, it had to pass a law to increases taxes (yet again) and is basically broke. So where is this magic money going to come from? That is the question and theses announcements are never followed by any real investigation from the journalists that are parroting them. It's vaporware at it's finest.
- bloomingkales 2y agoIf the SEC is a portal between private Finance and government, then AI is a portal between tech and government. It’s a way for money people of a certain tribe to legally funnel money between the government and private sector in full duplex (bi-directional. Government gives you money, you take money and make more money, use it to buy more politicians, who then “invest” more money into … you). These governments are basically being co-opted.
- mgiannopoulos 2y agoIt will come from others. 50 Billion is a deal made with the Saudis. Another 20 from a Canadian fund.
- Luc 2y ago> So where is this magic money going to come from? It's not a French government investment. It's coming from investment funds, Amazon, the UAE, data centre firms, etc.
- bloomingkales 2y agoEU can always get a discount on that once they ratchet up regulations. I don’t understand Europe, why don’t they just focus on hyper growth with limited oversight like America?
- jycr753 2y agoI believe it's because they have this massive monster in Brussels that needs something to do (chiringuitos) to extract the maximum amount of money—corruption.
- tmnvdb 2y agoThere is no European (capital) market and the national markets are too small to compete with the US or China. European companies are therefore unlikely to gain trust from investors that they will be able to compete. Hence these kinds of top-down iniatives are in a sense the best they can do given rather poor ircumstances for private investment.
- apeescape 2y agoEU is not a homogeneous single entity. Every state is driving their own agenda, and every state is divided into multiple parties often pulling in different directions. It slows down decision-making, in both good and bad. Oftentimes it's hard to sell a Pan-European long-term benefit, if it's cost is that some member states have to lose something in the short term. You could make the argument that similar problems exist in the US too, but I'd argue it's worse in the EU.
- igorkraw 2y ago
- pgtan 2y agosocialism's new excuse to grab other people's money
- meinersbur 2y agoI am urprised how much money suddenly is available where other future-critical projects are starved of funding while needing just a fraction of that amount, specifically nuclear fusion.
- trueismywork 2y agoNuclear fusion definitely needs more than a trillion
- mogoh 2y agoI was with you until your last two words.
- danmaz74 2y agoNuclear fusion has no clear path to reach viability with just a fraction of that amount, not even close.
- bArray 2y agoIt's the same in the UK. Pensioners had their heating allowance removed to plug a £22 bn 'black hole', whilst tonnes of money is pledged to AI. I can imagine the EU is in a similar state.
- spwa4 2y agoRemoving AI investments will not plug a 22 bn "black hole". This is 200 million europe wide, and the UK is at best 1/6th of Europe if we're very generous.
- voidr 2y agoYour comment is misinformed, you are unfamiliar with the UK context here, but even if your comment would be correct, 200/6 = 33 EUR that would most definitely plug that black hole, however that is not what the comment is about, please look at the actual context before commenting.
- bArray 2y ago
- cm2187 2y agoTax it, regulate it, and when it stops moving, subsidise it!
- kreetx 2y agoThat is how it feels sometimes. The regulators want to be in control, as if "they are responsible for anything good that comes", while the truth is that they are only able to somewhat restrict or nudge a process, while any strong process will happen regardless of it.
- gizmo 2y agoIt's a good thing that EU leadership is finally waking up to the urgency of renewed competitiveness, but the greatest problems are not addressed or even mentioned: 1. Europe's most ambitious entrepreneurs leave for silicon valley because audacious ambition is heavily discouraged culturally. Europe has many talented engineers and many founders who aim for "reasonable" success, but that's really not sufficient. 2. Big investments only work when success means outrageous profitability. That's not how it works in Europe. Businesses are supposed to make at most a "fair" amount of money. Greed, for lack of a better word, is not good. In the US businesses invest 100s of billions in AI hoping to profit trillions. No European business will be allowed to make that kind of money. 3. EU funding is laundered through established players who understand how the game is played. Giving handouts to incumbents harms competitiveness in the long run.
- piltdownman 2y ago> Europe's most ambitious entrepreneurs leave for silicon valley because audacious ambition is heavily discouraged culturally. Good. We've all seen Silicon Valley. We'll keep our Engineers, Scientists, and large inter-union projects and organisations like CERN. > Europe has many talented engineers and many founders who aim for "reasonable" success, but that's really not sufficient Not under a US metropolitan HCOL existence, sure. For most in Europe, however, wealth-generation isn't the metric of success or human worth. Work-life balance is of significantly more importance than the higher-compensation/'at-will employment' trade-off.
- tmnvdb 2y agoWhile I understand this sentiment, we do need to balance the short term and the long term. And in the long term, economic growth is compound growth. Consider an example. Country 1 grows at 2.5% (like the US) Country 2 grows at 1.5% (like the EU) What is the difference after 100 years? The first country will have grown by 1200%. The second country by 440%. The faster growing country is now almost 3x richer than the second country. This is comparable to the difference between Romania and Austria currently. As these growth effects compound, I believe that it will become hard to compete on quality of life long term.
- 2y ago
- danmaz74 2y agoWow, I just read all the comments which are currently here (at my time of reading), and the level is worse than on Reddit. Not the HN I remember... Talking about the actual news, as usual with this kinds of programs, a lot of the money won't bring results, but that's also true for most investments from VCs. If just a few good ventures come out of it, that's already a great result. Trump is showing that the EU simply can't outsource most of its IT to the US, it's just too risky.
- rdm_blackhole 2y agoYou do understand the difference between VC money and government money right? As a citizen of the EU I care greatly when governments spend money that for one they do not have, therefore saddling me and everyone else with more debt,and two when that money is spent not in the most efficient manner but given to the established players who can fill forms the proper way as highlighted in the numerous comments above yours. If a VC like Softbank blows 100B on a bad investment It doesn't affect me but when its my hard earned tax money that could have been spent on other things, then it matters very greatly.
- danmaz74 2y agoI do understand that difference, but also the difference between having tech being developed in Europe and not having it.
- fbn79 2y agoOf this, €20bn will be earmarked for AI gigafactories. This reminds me of Northvolts. https://www.bruegel.org/analysis/northvolts-struggles-cautionary-tale-eu-clean-industrial-deal https://www.bruegel.org/analysis/northvolts-struggles-cautio...
- FirmwareBurner 2y agoWhat's an "AI gigafactory"?
- highcountess 2y ago[dead]
- olivierduval 2y agoSadly, that money will be wasted: * that money will go to "big corp" who know and have to time to build application forms... even if they don't have the knowledge ("take the money and run") * that money wont to the "real disruptors" that are small corps because they don't have time or knowledge to build application forms to get the money
- pantalaimon 2y agoOnly big corp have the capacity to comply with EU regulation in the first place.
- cbg0 2y agoThere's typically much less red tape for smaller funding programs from the EU, so if you're only getting a couple hundred thousand you'll deal with a lot less requirements than a company getting tens of millions. There's still bureaucracy, but it's not as insurmountable as some make it out to be.
- pantalaimon 2y agoAI Act and Cyber Resilience Act still apply
- rigelbm 2y agoMeanwhile Europe still doesn't have a cloud hyperscaler, so most of these €200B will end up in the coffers of Amazon, Google and Microsoft, the real winners.
- karmakurtisaani 2y agoI've been thinking recently this is where the EU should start. I don't know if it could be achieved with some top-down initiative, but it would definitely need investment to become one day competitive against the US providers.
- pornel 2y agoHere's the source: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_467 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_... • strengthen the EU's generative AI talent pool through education, training, skilling and reskilling activities; • encouragement of public and private investments in AI start-ups and scale-ups, including through venture capital or equity support • development and deployment of Common European Data Spaces, made available to the AI community • GenAI4EU: support the development of novel use cases and emerging applications in Europe's 14 industrial ecosystems • expansion of computing infrastructure to "100 000 last-generation AI chips" Overall it sounds very similar to last year's announcement: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_383 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_...
- some1else 2y agoWonder what the returns would look like if they set aside 5% of that sum to fund things like Euro competitors to Shopify & Stripe.
- dauertewigkeit 2y agoThe thinking in Europe when it comes to AI, is "AI for industry", or "AI for science". Like they think of AI as providing a supporting role in industry or science, but they do not think of AI as a goal in itself. This thinking is analogous to the way EU leadership treated "tech" for the past three decades and look how well that turned out for us... If we had good leadership, these funds would be used to setup 2 or 3 competing AI labs. Forget all that "AI for industry" and "AI for science" nonsense and just catch up to the US and China, and have something competitive, for once.
- tmnvdb 2y agoThe big difference is that this is a top-down gov run iniative, it will by nature be very different than a free market iniative.
- kreetx 2y agoI get the feeling that this might be spent on overpriced chips, so EU will not get much value for money.
- deepsummer 2y agoMaybe they host it on Gaia-X, the failed attempt to compete with AWS and other US cloud providers. Money burns quickly when you give it to EU megacorps that are experienced getting EU subsidies. In the end, even if there is some moderate success, the EU won't be able to keep the AI researchers because the high tax rates hit hard when you earn top salaries.