cher Emmanuel,
Fellow leaders,
Dear representatives of European industries.
Thank you for this opportunity to coordinate among us, Europeans. As you know, Europe is the one of the largest digital markets in the world. We deliver excellent and safe products to the world every day, with our medicines, planes, cars, telecommunication systems, etc.
We deliver clean energy. We have delivered life-saving vaccines to get the world out of the COVID-19 pandemic. And we will also deliver on AI.
Today we are joined by the CEOs of the most dynamic AI companies in Europe. So allow me to start by looking at the strengths of our AI ecosystem, before we move to how we can step up.
The start-up scene in Europe is booming. The number of AI companies that became unicorns has increased by 10 times in the last few years. The number of AI professionals per capita is higher than in any other region of the world. We have a unique and strong industrial base. And thanks to that, an incredible wealth of data. But we have to put these assets to good use!
So, we want AI to be trained with these very high quality data stemming from cooperation of industries and the public sector. For that, we have created talent and computing hubs. We call them the AI factories. In our AI factories our best scientists and start-ups have access to our world-class supercomputers to forge the AI we need.
We have set up a record of 12 AI factories in just a few months. 7 are already up and running and the other 5 in the making.This is actually the largest public investment in AI in the world and our intention is that it seeds and multiplies.
Some European AI companies are already specialising on business applications. Innovative companies like Mistral and Helsing, who are here today, together with many others, are developing products that are tailored to specific business needs… customer service, intelligent drones, managing entire fleets of commercial ships… you name it.
These applications may not make the headlines every day, but they are definitely improving the productivity of industries across Europe. But we clearly know that this is not enough.
Our start-ups need resources to scale up and we are far from widespread adoption of AI in our economy and society. That is why we are moving to the next level. We want to expand our model of open cooperation to be able to host frontier innovation in AI.
As AI requires massive computational capacity, the next step will be to launch AI Giga-factories. Very large data and computing infrastructures to train very large models. Similar projects have also been announced in the US, by leading AI players. But with our European Gigafactories, computational power won’t be a monopoly of a few. It will be a service accessible to all.
Some time ago I launched the idea of a CERN of AI, to mark the similarities with a successful cooperative model. CERN has enabled countless breakthrough innovations, including the World Wide Web. Of course there are differences. For AI, we need the private sector to be fully involved in our gigafactories. And we need more capital to make it happen. We will discuss this tomorrow.
But today I want to emphasise our approach to give researchers and start-ups a unique opportunity to access top-notch computing infrastructure. It will allow industries to cooperate and federate their data. It will – for example – allow hospitals to safely train models based on images and genomic data they own. It will allow unprecedented advances in basic science and climate modelling. Like CERN, which attracts scientists from all over the world, our gigafactories will be open for the best talents. Because Europe is in general open for collaboration.
The development of AI for public good demands not just competition – but also collaboration. Europe has a long and successful tradition of Pooling knowledge, sharing research – think of Horizon… and working together. This is the European way.
Thank you.
Source – EU Commission