Europe Is Fed Up and Wants Its Own AI
Key takeaways
- In my decades of reporting on tech, I’ve covered multiple efforts by countries to replicate the Silicon Valley effect.
- Nonetheless, sovereignty discussions at Vivatech were infused with hope.
- Vivatech overlapped with the G7 conference in Evian-les-Bains, France, where French president Emmanuel Macron lectured AI executives on the sovereignty issue.
Why this matters: a development in AI with implications for how people work, create, and decide.
Emmanuel Macron, president of France, discussed AI's risks at the G7 Summit.Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Earlier this month I attended Vivatech, a huge tech conference in Paris. One fear dominated the discussions: the prospect of ending up stuck using American AI, trained on American values. While the US and China are locked in an AI arms race, France and Germany, which consider their engineering talent second to none, feel boxed out. Not only are they demanding to be heard, but they are touting plans to address the situation. If “sovereignty” was your word in a drinking game, you’d be pickled within three hours.
In my decades of reporting on tech, I’ve covered multiple efforts by countries to replicate the Silicon Valley effect. While there have been plenty of individual success stories, no country or market has come close to matching the ecosystem and mindset that gave rise to companies such as Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. While investors throw boatloads of cash at American companies, Europeans get relative crumbs. One statistic I heard several times last week was that Anthropic’s recent $65 billion fund-raise was more than the entire sum invested in European and UK AI startups last year. Actual results reported by the EU seem to bear this out.
Nonetheless, sovereignty discussions at Vivatech were infused with hope. Optimists cited significant new funding, collaborative efforts, and next-generation technology that might not be as resource-intensive as the leading large language models. And several cited a wild card that might be the biggest boon to European tech in decades: Donald Trump.