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EU leaders gathered on Friday for their first ever AI summit, where they discussed how Europe can strike a balance between catching up with the US and China while protecting citizens from the growing risks posed by the technology.
That delicate balancing act took centre stage at the informal summit in Dublin, Ireland, where they were joined by the head of top European AI firm Mistral, Arthur Mensch, and Nobel-prize winner Geoffrey Hinton, widely known as one of the “godfathers” of AI.
The talks are part of the bloc’s effort to reduce its reliance on foreign technology and services.
When US CEOs including OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei made calls this year to slow down AI development, Mistral urged Europe to steam ahead.
Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin said before the talks began that the leaders would explore “the balance between regulation and innovation, tech sovereignty how Europe can interact with developments in AI across the world”.
European Parliament president Roberta Metsola said she was tired of hearing that the EU had “somehow lost the AI race”.
“We have world class talent, we have a great ecosystem from a technology perspective,” she told reporters before the summit began.
The summit comes against the backdrop of a scandal roiling Nvidia, a central player in the AI industry and a huge investor in the EU, after revelations CEO Jensen Huang had extramarital affairs — including with a woman accused of spying for China.
Although US markets are more exposed to AI, tech stocks wavered on Friday as traders digested Huang’s resignation a day earlier.
An EU official told AFP that Nvidia was not officially on the leaders’ agenda but that would not prevent anyone from “bringing it up”.
The leaders would probably want to discuss what security ramifications potentially arise from the scandal, the official added.
‘Mitigate harms’
Also during leaders’ talks on AI’s impact on society and security, former Google researcher Hinton had been expected to discuss with leaders how to protect rights and jobs as well as the security challenges it poses.
Hinton and fellow computer scientist Yoshua Bengio warned of AI’s threats in the months after the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022, which kickstarted the latest AI frenzy.
EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas warned of a “dark side of AI”.
“We can all already see this in the battlefield in Ukraine, where you have drones equipped by artificial intelligence to really train to find anybody to kill,” Kallas said.
Estonia and Finland said in a letter this week that Europe needed to “establish EU-level arrangements for responding to serious AI incidents”, calling for “developing advanced AI and governing it responsibly”.
Pointing to past overdependence on non-EU suppliers for fossil fuels and critical minerals, Estonia’s Prime Minister Kristen Michal told AFP: “We should not make the same mistake. We should invest in new technologies.”
James Green, a researcher at the Centre for European Reform, said the EU needed an “all-of-the-above strategy” on AI.
“Improve the business case for developing AI in Europe, strengthen its leverage to ensure access to the best models and related technologies, responsibly promote AI deployment to reap the economic benefits, and harness regulation and international partnerships to mitigate harms,” Green said.
