European Commissioner Margrethe Vestager has overseen a raft of legislationImage: Yves Herman/REUTERS
“When I started, the most repeated advice I got was that if I want to make the company really successful, I should go to the US,” he tells DW via Zoom from the company’s headquarters in Sofia.
He opted to keep Transmetrics in Bulgaria but he is concerned that Europe is ultimately going to cede more and more ground to US and China on artificial intelligence.
“If we don’t have access to the latest foundational models, and we have to deal with the older generation models, that eventually means that the American companies could be better suited to addressing our market, which is a concern,” he says.
It’s a concern many share.
“We want startups in Europe to grow and become bigger businesses and compete with some of the big tech companies in the US. That’s not going to be possible if you just keep adding regulation on top of regulation,” Alexandru Voica, head of corporate affairs and policy at Synthesia, an AI video platform with around 400 employees, told DW.
“Being behind and waiting on the latest technologies is normally a huge minus for a society,” says Bonefeld-Dahl. She hopes that when it comes to AI regulation, the EU and the US can work together to identify common risk definitions and harmonize their rules.
“I think that’s what’s important, that we have a dialogue between democratic, like-minded nations to look at real high risks and then forget about this over-regulation,” she says.
Jarek Kutylowski, founder and CEO of Germany’s DeepL translation company, says there may be advantages for AI firms being more regulated than their US rivals but it’s not clear if it is enough to make a significant difference.
“It still remains to be seen how this influences our ability to research, innovate and bring new products to market,” he told DW.
Another issue: the funding gap
While it has been suggested that US firms holding back their most advanced AI models could allow European startups to step into the breach, many dismiss the idea out of hand.
“I think that’s a ‘make-believe’ scenario,” says Voica. “I used to work for Meta. Meta, Google, Microsoft, these companies have large compliance teams, large legal teams. And if they can’t make this work, how will a company like ours or smaller, realistically?”
EU approves first AI law
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Stavitsky and Koev say the lack of funding in Europe compared to the US makes such a scenario even more improbable.
“More EU-based companies will move to the US, raise capital there, and build products for a much more open and free market,” says Stavitsky.
Koev points out that none of the top venture capital firms or AI firms in the world come from Europe. “There is nothing,” he says. “We are completely unequipped. This thing caught us by surprise. In Europe. we are very good at adopting innovation once it has been seriously proven, but we are not early adopters.”
Some have pointed to Mario Draghi’s report on European competitiveness as a possible sign that Europe will finally get its act together on AI and other critical technology. The former ECB boss and Italian prime minister’s report called for a new industrial strategy for Europe and urged the EU to ramp up investment by €800bn a year to compete with the US and China.
“It was nice to see that Draghi recognizes that if we want to win the game of security, innovation, and prosperity in Europe, we cannot just lean back and say ‘oh, everything is dangerous’ and put millions of millions of compliance costs on the companies,” says Bonefeld-Dahl.
“A company in Europe now has more compliance costs than it has in Research & Development. And that is totally, totally wrong.”
Edited by: Ashutosh Pandey
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Publish date : 2024-09-25 04:59:00
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