Europe’s leaders abandon the race for frontier AI

Por Pieter Haeck — China – POLITICO

BRUSSELS — As the U.S. and China compete to train the world’s most advanced artificial intelligence models, Europe is stepping back.

European politicians and tech executives have in recent weeks shifted their focus away from frontier AI as it becomes clear the bloc has no artificial intelligence models that can compete with top American or Chinese models, and Europe’s leading contender Mistral faces questions over its performance.

Instead, a new mantra has emerged: Europe doesn’t need to own the models as long as it can put them to work.

“Striving to build a competitive frontier lab right now feels like very wishful thinking,” said Max Junestrand, CEO of Swedish AI company Legora, a €6 billion company that provides an AI tool for law firms. “I would rather see us put more thinking cycles into how do we capitalize on the technology rather than how do we try to catch up.”

The suggestion that frontier AI models are now out of reach for European AI labs comes as the most advanced models become a major global security issue.

American leaders OpenAI and Anthropic this summer had to disclose incidents in which AI agents broke out of testing. This led the companies to slow-walk and tread cautiously with the release of their latest models, just as Chinese open-source models are emerging as a credible alternative to U.S. proprietary models.

For Europe, relying on U.S. or Chinese models is not without risk, as the bloc is already dependent on both for all the technology underpinning AI, such as chips and cloud services.

But leaders, including European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, say Europe should focus more on helping its industrial and corporate base benefit from AI. They argue that building homegrown tech champions that can deliver those tools is a smart strategy that could help Europe win this next phase as America remains focused on staying ahead of China.

As politicians and industry meet Wednesday in Dublin for an international AI summit, the Irish governmental organizers have sought to focus the talks largely on how AI is used.

“It’s the trigger that interests everybody most: how are we going to adopt this new technology that we have … [and] how are we going to encourage business to adopt it,” Niamh Smyth, the Irish minister in charge of AI, said.

Not everyone is on board with the direction of travel.

“The idea that Europe should step back from frontier AI and settle for applications is a strategic mistake,” said a spokesperson from Mistral, Europe’s leading contender in frontier AI development. “A great part of the value is retained by those who build the frontier, not only by those who build on top of it.”

Slow acceptance

A move in Brussels to reorientate the bloc’s leadership has been building gradually throughout the past weeks.

Both the European Commission and the Council of the EU, which represents national governments, have indicated that the focus should shift to how to apply the technology.

“We do not need to be the ones who develop the frontier technology to be the ones who draw the greatest value from it,” von der Leyen said in mid-September during her State of the European Union speech, which sets the agenda in Brussels for the coming year.

That followed a Sept. 4 seminar at which the Commission’s AI envoy, Siemens chair Jim Hagemann Snabe, told 27 commissioners that the EU should focus less on winning the race to build AI and more on how to use it to turn around the bloc’s productivity, two Commission officials said.

The scale of the challenge is clear: At the end of last year, only 1 in 5 European businesses used AI in their activities, with Denmark as the frontrunner (42%) and Romania at the bottom of the pack (5.2%), according to Eurostat.

The bloc’s poor showing is mainly because of small and medium-sized companies that make up the lion’s share of Europe’s economy. Last year, 55% of Europe’s large companies used AI, compared to only 17% among small companies — who, according to a recent OECD report — limit themselves to off-the-shelf AI tools for specific tasks.

Companies that considered using AI but decided against it cited a lack of expertise as their top concern, even before regulatory concerns. American business leaders have also said that regulatory and political uncertainty is holding them back.

Over the next few weeks, the European Commission will make several efforts to boost adoption rates. On Nov. 16, it organizes an “Apply AI summit” to “accelerate AI implementation in strategic industries.” Von der Leyen name-checked health, transport, agrifood, advanced manufacturing, defense and space as areas with the “biggest potential.”

Some in Brussels are quick to push back on the idea that Europe has given up entirely on the underlying models. 

“We haven’t given up frontier AI; we are now accelerating the development of our AI systems,” the Commission’s tech chief Henna Virkkunen said in an interview when asked about von der Leyen’s stance. “It’s very important for Europe that we have our models … because it’s risky to be totally dependent on other countries.”

Yet Virkkunen pointed to Europe’s lack of compute power as a major bottleneck to building its own frontier AI. 

In the U.K., AI minister Kanishka Narayan said in September that training frontier models is effectively illegal because of the country’s copyright laws. “Britain does not, as a matter of regulation and energy, currently have a position where we can build superintelligence in this country: it is illegal to do so,” he said.

But Narayan has also acknowledged the national security concerns. “We want the world’s leading companies investing here, but we will not accept dependence as the price of that investment,” he said Monday.

U.K. tech companies aren’t counting themselves out of frontier AI just yet. Cosine, a British AI research lab, has pushed back on the idea that American companies dictate the rules of the road. “Britain should not let OpenAI define what a ‘responsible’ frontier lab looks like in a way that just happens to resemble OpenAI,” said Cosine co-founder Yang Li.

Sovereignty fight

French company Mistral released a new model, Large 4, last week, which far-right National Rally President Jordan Bardella said “puts France (and Europe) back in the race for artificial intelligence.”

That came after the CEO of a Berlin-based search engine used by government services said it was dropping Mistral in favor of open-source models, including from China. In an interview, Ecosia founder and CEO Christian Kroll cited poor performance as one of the concerns — as well as sovereignty, given that Mistral has non-European investors.

“With Mistral Large 4, we have significantly narrowed the gap with the best models in the world, using far less compute than our competitors,” the Mistral spokesperson said.

The company’s CEO Arthur Mensch has also pushed back against the idea that Europe should not have its own models, warning the continent could end up with “an extractive economy” dependent on foreign providers.

Yet the state of the race is forcing European companies to accept that is the status quo.

U.S. frontier models have already proven capable of finding and exploiting cyber vulnerabilities. Asked whether it’s a competitive disadvantage not to have access to those, Legora’s Junestread said: “Yes … absolutely.”

Zoya Sheftalovich and Frank Hersey contributed reporting.

Fonte: China – POLITICO