On Wednesday 13 September, during her State of the Union address, the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, logically returned to the subject of future developments in artificial intelligence (AI) (see EUROPE 13232/10). On this occasion, she announced in particular that a legislative initiative would be presented by her departments to “open up our high-performance computers to AI start-ups so that they can train their model”.
This initiative, the date of presentation of which is still unknown, should build on the EU’s existing HPC infrastructure capacities (see EUROPE 13244/5) through its ‘EuroHPC’ Joint Undertaking, as well as on the various supercomputers currently under development, such as Jules Verne in France (see EUROPE 13205/17).
“Access to Europe’s supercomputer infrastructure will help start-ups reduce the training time for their new AI models from months or years to days or weeks. It will also help them to conduct the development and expansion of AI responsibly and in line with European values”, commented Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton in the wake of Ms von der Leyen’s speech.
The President of the European Commission also called for the creation of an AI body with a remit comparable to that of the IPCC for climate change. One of the tasks of this body would be to assess the “risks and benefits to humanity” of AI.
“This body would bring together scientists, tech companies and independent experts. This will allow us to develop a fast and globally coordinated response – building on the work done by the Hiroshima Process and others”, added Ursula von der Leyen.
Part of the speech delivered in the Strasbourg Chamber also focused on the current inter-institutional negotiations (‘trilogues’) on AI. The President of the European Commission stressed the need to put in place “safeguards”, by developing AI “in a way that is human-centric, transparent and responsible”.
“We put forward the AI Act – the world’s first comprehensive pro-innovation AI law. Our AI Act is already a blueprint for the whole world. We must now focus on adopting the rules as soon as possible and turn to implementation”, she said, ahead of the next trilogue on 2 October.
See Ms von der Leyen’s speech: https://aeur.eu/f/8jm (Original version in French by Thomas Mangin)