BRUSSELS, Oct 8 (Reuters) - The European Commission on Wednesday announced a 1-billion-euro ($1.1 billion) plan to ramp up the use of artificial intelligence in key industries amid a push to cut the European Union’s reliance on U.S. and Chinese technologies. The EU executive’s Apply AI strategy followed an action plan unveiled in April which seeks to lighten the regulatory burden and costs for startups struggling to comply with landmark AI rules which entered into force in August last year.
The move also underscores Europe’s goal of achieving strategic autonomy in key sectors amid trade tensions with the United States and China and the dominance of U.S. Big Tech. “I want the future of AI to be made in Europe,” Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a statement. “AI adoption needs to be widespread, and with these strategies, we will help speed up the process. We will drive this ‘AI first’ mindset across all our key sectors, from robotics to healthcare, energy and automotive,” she said. The Commission singled out healthcare, pharmaceuticals, energy, mobility, manufacturing, construction, agri-food, defence, communications and culture as critical sectors that should use more AI. Sector-specific measures under the Apply AI strategy include setting up a network of AI-powered advanced screening centres in healthcare and developing agentic AI in manufacturing, climate and pharmaceutical industries. The 1 billion euros will come from EU research projects such as Horizon Europe and the Digital Europe programme, which may encourage EU countries and the private sector to provide matching funds, the Commission said. ($1 = 0.8569 euros)
jesus christ fuck ai.
AI is such a pointless waste of money.
I asked AI for a good resource for a list of all Latin prefixes, stems and suffixes.
It made up a book and a university website.
When I told it it was wrong, these things did not exist, it insisted they did indeed…
The links it made up opened 404 errors.
I feel like it tried to force feed me the gray stuff inside the soulless Krabby patties in that one Spongebob episode.
it’s faster and preferable to just burn money
Abandon ship! Every agent for themselves!
You can tell how many idiot and traitorous right wing MEPs the EU has nowadays.
EU investing in AI is not a win, good, or anything desirable.
AI is the worst “technology” to surface in a “post-fact” news, which helps proliferate fake news, misinformation, biased and propagandized talking points (i.e. pro-israel, anti-hong-kong-sovereignty, racism and transphobia…), kills jobs and undervalues labour in a cost of living and housing crisis.
This investment is a signal saying that the EU will not be a union for its people, but for its elite and businesses. It’s an abdication of morals by EU politicians and governments.
Do people not realise that von der Leyen is a right-wing fan of totalitarianism? What she supports cannot be good for us.
Do people not realise that von der Leyen is a right-wing fan of totalitarianism? What she supports cannot be good for us.
She might just be defined by her connections in her actions, the person not mattering. I’ve heard that this person is just not very bright in some things outside of the bulk of their experience and knowledge. In general might be true for politicians. Their stakeholders need to have perspective. They need to keep faces, show good sense of humor and negotiating talent, and don’t show what they think.
Not even totalitarianism, just power held by small elites, and this is a natural attraction for any human who got into rare places (also UvdL is notably a member of elites). See any sci-fi or fantasy universe, their plots often involve main characters and their small groups of acquaintances, traveling over all the world, solving millennium-old riddles, making color revolutions, and what not. All by a small group of heroes, all knowing each other. That’s just natural. Humans always strive to monopolize decision-making for their group, without outsiders.
So - that person might not even understand they are evil. Maybe they are not. At the same time it’s often really hard to tell which layer of a personality is the true one.
Long story short - yeah, I wouldn’t trust judgement of people like UvdL or maybe Kallas (elites too, just ex-Soviet), and I wouldn’t let them near power. But they themselves might not be malicious agents, just people thinking they are some sort of princess Leia in the New Republic, while the world is completely different and, notably, isn’t comprised of NPCs in a game.
As to the point - it’s a good technology to encourage critical thinking. It teaches you to trust nothing and nobody. The older generation, though, and even mine, show the opposite reaction, but anyone growing in a world where anything can be drawn believably by a computer will be used to think before believing.
It’s good long-term. Short-term it’s a catastrophe. They could use that investment for making a Xanadu-like EU-wide information system, plus cryptography as reinforcement, to counter the catastrophe, instead they are adding to it. Somehow with tech everyone tries to climb up and up faster, instead of fixing the foundations of towers they climb. Hypertext with reverse links and changes notification and global object identities and replication could solve so many flaws of WWW, that we wouldn’t need a lot of what’s been built on top of it.
I think the best answer would be to combat algorithms altogether.
The most ethical we could do with AI, is to discourage the usage of DeepSeek, ChatGPT and Musk’s filth, and the like; and to favour European models that are:
• energy efficient
• do not discriminate
• as accurate as possible
• states before every prompt, that information is not always accurate, and the reader should consult non-profit, scientific and educational sources insteadNo disrespect to you, but it is clear you don’t understand the technology well.
Algorithms are, per definition, routine computations to perform a task. Even clicking on a link and then the browser requesting and displaying the page associated with it is an algorithm!
And about (generative) AI: -They cannot be made energy efficient because generation (giving you a text or image) is incredibly energy consuming -You cannot build an AI without bias or discrimination, because all your training material has to be unbiased and without discrimination - and social progress means that we will continue to recognize previously unknown harms in society. AI can only be as unbiased as its most biased training material. And the amount of data you need for training is too high to be efficient to gather before training. -AI cannot be made to be accurate. It is definitionally impossible, because it is basically an extension of auto-correct - it can only predict the next likely word from a huge collection of data. Accuracy is never a part of the algorithm of AI. -In terms of public service, it would be better to point out above chatbots that they can only generate legibile text, all other aspects are secondary.
So, in summary, what you suggest is technologically impossible, or at least misguided.
Well to specify, I mean algorithms for social media.
And isn’t DeepSeek far more energy efficient than ChatGPT? Wouldn’t it help to at least try to reduce it?
That said, thank you for the clarification, all that helps. I appreciate it.
It’s true that AI has been a net negative for society. But leaving the cobtrol of AI tech at the hands of powers that want to hurt the EU’s sovereignty is even worse.
Shooting yourself in the foot so others can’t shoot you in the foot? No.
How about outlawing and banning the shooting of feet instead? That might work better.
The EU is also working of regulating AI. What else should they do? You can’t outlaw people using AI.
Why can’t you outlaw it? Define generative/inference AI systems, ban companies from interacting with EU people and companies, and then heavily punish anything being revealed to be commercially sold, made or used with that AI within the EU.
You can certainly try. The result would just be that people would use it in secret. Also what is “AI” to you? What exactly are you proposing to ban? You can’t ban something that isn’t well defined.
I’d prefer for the guns to be removed from both powers and civilians.
yeah exactly! AI should have never been allowed to exist and/or allowed to be used in the EU, and anything created with it should be heavily punished.
They only have to do this 700 more times and AI will break even…for this year.
