EU auditors: Europe may be left behind in global competition to lead AI

The European Court of Auditors warned this Wednesday, May 28, that the European Union (EU) has had little success in developing a Artificial Intelligence (AI) community ecosystem and has not managed to accelerate investment in this technology at the level of the United States and China.

This is one of the main conclusions of a report by European auditors, whose essential objective is to evaluate whether the EU’s measures to take off innovation in AI have been sufficient, at a time when the EU Council gave the week The final green light has been given to the first global standards on AI.

The audit – the first in this area – noted that since 2015, EU venture capital investments were lower than those of leading AI regions (China and the United States). He highlighted that the global AI investment gap between the United States and the EU doubled between 2018 and 2020.when the EU was lagging behind by more than 10 billion euros.

In this race, “there is a good chance that the winner will take it all,” said the member of the European Court of Auditors responsible for the audit, Mihails Kozlovs.

Kozlovs warned that if the EU wants to achieve its ambition, the Commission and Member States must “join forces more effectively, accelerate the pace and unleash community potential.”

Since 2018, the European Commission and EU countries adopted a coordinated plan – reviewed in 2021 – to increase investment in AI and adapt current legislation, with the aim of putting the EU on the path of global leadership in the face of competence.

The auditors criticized that the Commission’s measures were not well coordinated with those of the Member States, due to the lack of governance tools and necessary information.

In 2018, the EU plan called on states to establish their national AI strategies by June 2019 and only 10 published their plans before the deadline, five did so before and four still did not have a strategy by the end of 2023. , exemplified Kozlovs.

Artificial intelligence

Photo:iStock

They also noted that the Commission did not have the necessary monitoring tools to monitor the performance of AI investments. The auditors stated that the Commission managed to increase EU budget spending on AI research projects but noted that it did not sufficiently boost private co-financing. Therefore, he recommended “redoubling efforts” to make these projects “commercialized or fully exploited,” according to a statement.

In response to the audit, a spokesperson for the European Commission highlighted the adoption of the Artificial Intelligence law (an area that did not enter into this analysis by the Court of Auditors) as a tool to “promote the development” of information systems. Reliable AI.

Response from the European Commission

The Commission replied that the adoption of “strong political measures”, such as the innovation package presented on January 24, includes an increase of 4 billion euros in investments in generative AI or pointed out investing more than €1 billion a year in research projects in the Digital Europe and Horizon Europe programs.

He also highlighted the political agreement reached last week to make high-performance computers available to European companies that develop AI to train the algorithmic models that feed this technology.

Currently, the United States leads the AI sector, with Silicon Valley as a global center of innovation and together with large technology companies such as Google, Microsoft and IBM at the forefront of research and development. In 2022, public spending on AI will reach €3 billion.

China, which relies on private investment from companies such as Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent, developed an AI development plan in 2017 to invest in public funds and be a world leader in 2030.