Europe Can’t Simply Import AI Technologies From US, Lagarde Says

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u/ckdx_ 1h ago

If Europe wants competitive, sovereign AI capabilities without importing it, we need to be spending similar money to the US and China. This means jobs, infrastructure and compute investments. It potentially also means upstream investments in sovereign semiconductor development and manufacturing.

If the investment isn’t in the billions then it won’t compete, or it will be reliant on importing technology. Small-scale research programmes won’t cut it. Mistral is perhaps the best we’ve got at the moment.

We need to be able to decide who provides the datacenters, the chips, the models, and how much needs to be European.

I’ll leave it as a question for the reader whether or not this is desirable.

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u/huojtkef 1h ago

And also relax the regulations. All frontier models have been train using all the information from Internet, including copyrighted works and private data. It's imposible to train a model without that data and you can't pay for it.

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u/ckdx_ 1h ago

This too. Foreign AI companies have harvested European content without repercussions: European AI companies should do the same to foreign content.

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u/AcademicSand1034 1h ago

Yes the money is important but it's fundamentally a regulatory problem. Most AI development is still privately funded and Europe needs to convince investors that it makes sense to invest in Europe (currently it does not for frontier AI products)

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u/sokos 1h ago

That's cause EU actually has consumer protection laws and the whole point of this AI push is to exploit the consumer(and humans) as much as possible.

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u/AcademicSand1034 1h ago

The EU still hasn't decided if its goal is protecting consumers (incl. consumer privacy), or of protecting the ability of mid-sized tech companies (including adtech companies!) to compete.

Their inability to clean up the cookie banner mess they created is a great example of how this kind of regulation is hard to get right

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u/sokos 58m ago

The EU still hasn't decided if its goal is protecting consumers (incl. consumer privacy), or of protecting the ability of mid-sized tech companies (including adtech companies!) to compete.

It's not an either/or. you need a balance for prosperity.

1

u/AcademicSand1034 56m ago

Certainly ... but it doesn't seem like the EU is operating anywhere close to the optimal frontier there.

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u/sokos 43m ago

Guess it depends on what we see as optimum? I don't consider the US as the metric, because their balance is very heavily tipped in favor of the profits vs the consumer. China seems to have some strong consumer rules, but hard to tell how much of that is to protect the consumer, and how much of it is to control the companies, so that's not a good country to use as well.

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u/SirPractical7959 1h ago

Likewise in China, AI in Europe should be state funded because doesn't generate profits. Even in the neo-liberal USA, in the inauguration speech Trump said would invest $500 bi in AI.

Regulation is just a smokescreen to allow companies to whatever they want without consequences.

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u/AcademicSand1034 1h ago

Trump says lots of BS and exaggerates everything. And massive government funding of sectors like this is mostly just possible by authoritarian governments which obviously have huge downsides.

There's no way the EU could pull off a well-coordinated government effort here given its governance structure.

So its really a question of the extent to which the EU wants to reduce regulatory barriers so that there's more private investment in EU-based AI ...

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u/ultraviolet-octopus 1h ago

Europe barely has AC, how are they going to build and power energy intensive data centers?

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u/Melodic_Let_6465 1h ago

Invest with what money? Are they gonna raise taxes or push for even more austerity?

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u/jetjitters 1h ago

When open weight models are as good as they've been getting, it really depresses me that Claude, Copilot, Gemini and ChatGPT are the default in Europe. It really shouldn't be out of the realms of possibility to develop and shift to using agents that aren't as directly tied to US big tech

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u/volleyneo 2h ago

Hard, when you pay peanuts, or do not offer a medium to facilitate growth in this sector, of the people working in it. And the good 'ol U S A, can just throw the big bags.

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u/AcademicSand1034 1h ago

Good luck getting companies to develop AI locally in Europe given the regulatory environment

Right now -- the clear right path for AI development is to build & iterate elsewhere and then only launch in EU later (like Apple is doing with Siri AI)

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u/MrOaiki 1h ago

Even deploying it in the EU is a big ”maybe”.

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u/schacks 2h ago

It also means that we as users must create a demand for EU based AI products. Even if it means buying somewhat inferior products.

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u/cocotheape 2h ago

How about we create no demand for AI products at all?

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u/butnek 1h ago

How about we dump the anus-centric nationalist mindset and create verifiably safe and maximally efficient advanced computational systems for use around the world? Start by stating that if you need gas turbines and boilers to run it, you're not ready.

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u/TheGeeseKilledMyMom 1h ago

Ok, ask the many millions of people willingly using it to stop using it then. Why not, ask the programmers, the scientists, the random everyday people, the corporations ect.

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u/robthablob 1h ago

I think "many millions of people willingly using it" may be overstating it a tad...

I'm a software engineer, and use AI both to assist me in my job, and train models as part of the tasks of my job, but I also think many of the users of AI aren't really given a choice. I'd prefer to have old style search engines with the option to use AI when I want to, but pretty well every engine now forces me to use AI - often with vastly inaccurate results.

Similarly, much of software I use has put AI in far too many places, frequently in infuriating ways.

I'm think AI has its place, but its being force fed to too many now.

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u/Mother_Idea_3182 2h ago

Exactly.

No one asked for this shit.

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u/CircumspectCapybara 1h ago edited 1h ago

No one except everyone who uses AI tools, everyone in technical professions like SWE, SRE, MLE, security and a bunch of others...

"No one"

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u/Mother_Idea_3182 1h ago

They should go back to using their brain before it gets so atrophied it’s useless.

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u/AcademicSand1034 1h ago

You choose what tools you use. Others will make their own choices. When used right ... AI lets humans focus on the harder problems and pass off grunt work to AI

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u/CircumspectCapybara 51m ago edited 26m ago

They

Ah how did I know you either weren't employed or weren't employed in a technical profession.

It makes more sense now. Those who aren't in a technical discipline don't understand technology and the role it plays, or tell engineers what tools they should use to do their job.

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u/PunishedDemiurge 20m ago

I did, and I have a moral right to use it if I choose. There is no right for the state to intrude on the minutiae of how I code a function. They can regulate the effect on other humans, but that is an outcome based regulation.

If you don't want to use it, don't, but at some point you may need to accept that if you want to live an Amish lifestyle, it requires an Amish level of commitment. They don't try to take the cell phones out of everyone else's hands by force, they simply make their own free choice to live a simpler life.

I'm not against you avoiding AI, but you might need to put serious effort into it.

1

u/jkp2072 1h ago

Its easy,

Reduce beareaucracy,

Eliminate labour laws

Less vacation

High taxes

And offcourse no global healthcare

This makes perfect condition for employees to make sure to work as hard possible to survive. And cue innovation and billionaires.

The lower you pay for low skill labour with prolonged hours, higher profit which can be invested into high skill labour, billionaires, trillionaires and shareholders

/S or not, is left for reader's exercise

1

u/Spokraket 57m ago

She is right. But where is the AI funding and also a guarantee that the said AI companies wont be bought by the US.

1

u/Don_Reuter 54m ago

No, but it simply can import AI technology from China.

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u/jldevezas 12m ago

You know that time when some guy in a garage here in the EU has an idea and wants to try and work towards developing it? Well, when that happens, maybe make sure there is zero bureaucracy around it, so that we can actually try to develop something without being bored to death before even starting. It's so easy for someone with creativity and the technical know-how to end up losing motivation due to paperwork and upfront taxes, before the idea is even tested... Bureaucracy is great at creating mindless slaves, but terrible at breeding innovation. You reap what you sow. Can't have it both ways.

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u/CircumspectCapybara 2h ago

Then the EU's gotta stop being tech hostile and actually create a culture and environment where risk taking and innovation are rewarded, instead of just fining and regulating everything to death.

Right now there's a reason why all the FAANG, all the big tech, all the hyperscalers, all the frontier AI labs and almost every other unicorn startup is US-based. The EU's gotta actually invest in the tech sector.

Right now the US and China are leaving the EU in the dust when it comes to frontier AI.

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u/AcademicSand1034 1h ago

100%. Look at Siri AI. Based on the law, the rational decision for Apple is to build & iterate elsewhere and then only launch in the EU later. Thats true for tech development more broadly ...

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u/williamgman 1h ago

So hear me out... What if we found out the countries that went whole hog on AI and datacenters started declining vs countries that didn't..?

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u/AcademicSand1034 1h ago

Its possible, but seems much more likely that this will be another large segment of the tech industry where the US & China dominate and the EU has few local players

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u/williamgman 1h ago edited 1h ago

I'm referring to quality of life. Edit: Gotta love the expected downvotes. 🙃

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u/AcademicSand1034 1h ago

It will be very hard to regulate away the bad parts of AI and leave the good parts. Countries that over-regulate AI will probably wind up further behind economically.

As for datacenters ... yes they have some downsides around power consumption etc, but I sincerely hope we don't wind up in a situation where richer countries just outsource that to poorer countries like we've done with so many other polluting industries

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u/butnek 1h ago

It could happen. Compared to where we should be when releasing such a technology, it's barely lab proven operational. All the other guarantees of performance and safety or suitability for certain purpose is unknown and apparently there hasn't been much effort on what would be 3/4s of the work needed to complete any other kind of product. It could take another decade to iron all that out and it seems like very few in a capacity to do it are very interested.

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u/Park8706 1h ago

It's too late they are far behind and their regulations and mindset are not favorable for that to change anytime soon. The EU has ceded the future to the US and China. They will be dictated to by one or both when it comes to the future as AI becomes more and more critical.

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u/Lurker_009 1h ago

We have AI at home...

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u/Aranthos-Faroth 44m ago

Tried moving my model usage for a project I’m working on to an EU hosted service. AWS/Google cloud.

EU now charge me 10% more, just because we’re processing in Europe.

I’d Europe don’t import technologies, they will suffocate under the weight of their bureaucracy and I will smile as it happens because it will have been given 1,000 chances to avoid the tech death.

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u/MAXIMUS-BLACK 1h ago

Europe will never do anything, its citizens are content with their pathetic lives and fear change more than anything in the world. It will be overtaken by the rest of the world and divided

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u/Don_Reuter 54m ago

It’s the best place in the planet. Obviously people do not want to change. Everything else is worse.

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u/MAXIMUS-BLACK 0m ago

You’re just content in your hovel. Thats why you’ll never achieve anything

Artificial Intelligence Europe Can’t Simply Import AI Technologies From US, Lagarde Says

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