If supremacy in artificial intelligence was an Olympic discipline, there would only be two serious contenders for gold on current trajectories: the US and China. The European Union, as has been the case in many areas of cutting-edge technology in recent times, is barely in the AI conversation. Former European Central Bank President Mario Draghi, whose 2024 report highlighted the EU's desperate need to be more innovative to become more competitive, said recently that AI is "perhaps the most promising" route the EU has to raise growth today.
However, he decried the fact that the European Union controls little of the value chain. "Being cut off from AI, once the economy runs on it, would be more like being cut off from the US financial system," he wrote in an opinion piece for the Financial Times. "The effects would be catastrophic." Draghi's spirit was on full display in Dublin on Wednesday at an international AI summit the Irish government convened as part of its six-month stint hosting the rotating EU presidency.
The summit's motto, "Harnessing AI to Revolutionize Europe's Competitiveness," might as well have been dreamed up by the Italian former prime minister. Harnessing AI has become a lot more complicated. A slew of controversies around AI agents going rogue, from the Hugging Face attack in June when 1,200 agents hacked an online platform, to an Anthropic-designed agent sending a fake tip to US police over an unsolved murder, have caused alarm.
Many from within the tech industry, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates and the leading AI frontier labs themselves, have called for a development pausein order for safety measures to catch up. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video Yet positivity was largely the name of the game at the summit, with tech and AI industry leaders joining Irish and EU politicians to declare AI's transformative economic and societal potential — while also emphasizing the need for strong regulation and safety standards. Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin made it clear that Ireland was all in on AI.
He echoed European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen's recent assertion that the technology represented a "tipping point." He also repeatedly highlighted what he sees as the bloc's commitment to safety. "We are determined to capture the dividend by mitigating the risks," Martin told the event. "In Europe, we have charted our path ... balancing innovation and opportunity with a trustworthy, human-centered approach to AI." Meanwhile, Henna Virkkunen, the European Commission executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, security and democracy, revealed at the event that the EU had begun its first enforcement actions under its new AI Act, requesting information around security and safety from advanced AI model providers.
However, other topics that concern AI's many critics, from those fearing the massive environmental impact of data centers to others warning about possible AI-related job losses, were largely absent from the discussions. Outside the venue, a group of protesters led by People Before Profit, a left-wing Irish political party, criticized the summit for not focusing on these issues. "There is a deliberate blurring of the line here with the type of AI that is being promoted," Alexandra Day, one of the protest organizers, told DW.
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