The aim of this group is to “strengthen the nation’s economic security by advancing sovereign AI infrastructure and accelerating the growth of the UK AI startup ecosystem”.
Absolute wrong priority. Current tech for “AI” is nothing but statistical word / image generators. They should skip that until some other advance is made toward actual reasoning. The hype has people fooled. This isn’t anything close to intelligence.
LLMs are statistical word generators, but that’s still useful for a bunch of things, and there are other forms of AI than LLMs. Either way while certainly overhyped, AI is still useful and not something you want agent Krasnov or Xi to hold you by the balls with.
AI is definitely useful for things like medical imaging analysis and meteorology. Too many people collapse “generative AI” into “AI” and it needs to stop.
LLMs are useful, mostly, for fooling investors. Looks like here this application is paramount.
Cristina Caffara, an economist and antitrust expert, says the hyperscalers have responded to this movement by deploying an “army of lobbyists” in Brussels.
At the press conference, Caffara said the lobbyists are “relentlessly” targeting senior figures in Brussels to derail digital sovereignty efforts in Europe. The panellists even speculated that the EU-backed digital sovereignty initiative, Gaia-X, had been “infiltrated” by tech companies seeking to sabotage the movement by overloading it with bureaucracy.
The hyperscalers are not deaf to Europeans’ concerns. Google and Microsoft, for instance, recently issued public statements designed to allay any worries about US hostilities; providers are building strictly EU-regulated data centres across Europe; and, earlier this year, Google launched its ‘cloud data boundary’, which gives customers more control over where data is stored and processed, and a ‘user data shelf’ for validating the security of apps built via that data boundary.
However, Frank Karlitschek, the CEO of Nextcloud, which supplies customers including France’s interior ministry and Amnesty International with open-source, self-hosted collaboration software, describes such moves from the hyperscalers as “sovereignty-washing”.
“[The hyperscalers] say they have hosting centres in Europe, so it’s all fine. But the Cloud Act states that if you’re a US organisation, you follow the US law, which means you need to give US agencies access to this data,” Karlitschek said at the press conference.
It’s things like the USA sanctioning the ICC and Microsoft blocking their email that makes this kind of stuff important.
if you’re a US organisation, you follow the US law, which means you need to give US agencies access to this data,” Karlitschek said at the press conference.
That’s the main point.
You can be a Us company, or owned by a Us company, or be somewhat dependant from a Us company, all such variants are the opposite of European sovereignty.
The Us companies want you to stay dependant.
Never forget that when they are proudly presenting all their initiatives and programs and excuses and…
