The American Big Tech companies are sowing the seeds of their own downfall by embracing the current US administration's Orwellian agenda. Much of the world will turn against them and their technology - Europe already explicitly is - and at home when times change, they will be remembered as Vichy-like collaborators for their betrayal of democracy.
I agree, in a sea of bad news, this is some very good news.
I hope it continues and robs Musk, Thiel and the other Big Tech hobgoblins of the power they were dreaming AI would give them.
Yes, but GPT-4 was at 7% and regarded as world best only months ago.
The true significance here, is that they've replicated the industry leader so easily and so quickly.
And it's a great idea to pump another $500 billion into these people, why? ...
Why not just put the money into Mistral?
Because they are not, as Silicon Valley/American thinking would have it, trying to "win" some AI Arms Race measured in stock market valuations.
This is so European governments & their civil service, educational institutions, the EU itself has an AI untainted by either American or Chinese values, and also independent of either of them.
There's a huge amount of humanoid robots in development, this list though long, I'm sure is missing some.
The €60 million in funding isn't much, though ten times more than what DeepSeek said they needed.
I suspect we're on a path where more and more American AI, as it embraces Orwellian police state/autocratic tendencies at home, will be outlawed in Europe.
Western countries rejected the state having a large role in their economies in the 1980s and ushered in the era of neoliberal economics, where everything would be left to the market. That logic dictated it was cheaper to manufacture things where wages were low, and so tens of millions of manufacturing jobs disappeared in the West.
Fast-forward to the 2020s and the flaws in neoliberal economics seem all too apparent. Deindustrialization has made the Western working class poorer than their parents' generation. But another flaw has become increasingly apparent - by making China the world's manufacturing superpower, we seem to be making them the world's technological superpower too.
Furthermore, this seems to be setting up a self-reinforcing virtuous cycle. EVs, batteries, lidar, drones, robotics, smartphones, AI - China seems to be becoming the leader in them all, and the development of each is reinforcing the development of all the others.
Where does this leave the Western economic model - is it time it copies China's style of capitalism?
This is what is being banned.
- AI used for social scoring (e.g., building risk profiles based on a person’s behavior).
- AI that manipulates a person’s decisions subliminally or deceptively.
- AI that exploits vulnerabilities like age, disability, or socioeconomic status.
- AI that attempts to predict people committing crimes based on their appearance.
- AI that uses biometrics to infer a person’s characteristics, like their sexual orientation.
- AI that collects “real time” biometric data in public places for the purposes of law enforcement.
- AI that tries to infer people’s emotions at work or school.
- AI that creates — or expands — facial recognition databases by scraping images online or from security cameras.
Almost everything on this list is outlawing what an authoritarian regime would want. How long before the EU bans the American Big Tech AI, that it seems is toadying to Trump to enable it.
My guess is it will be the Chinese.
I know some people say the excellence of SpaceX's engineers is unaffected by him, but the anti-science dolts and frauds providing "leadership" to America, especially the one who owns SpaceX - has to drag their efforts down to some extent.
Even before the recent change in administration, China's Moon plans were more detailed and thought out than the US's.
As with everything European there's a bewildering number of acronyms, national, and pan-national agencies involved. The French space agency CNES is leading this, though all ESA member states pool resources, and the Ariane rockets.
Confusingly, there is another ESA reusable rocket initiative centered around building a brand new rocket with a new type of engine, though it doesn't start launch testing until 2026.
Europe is behind the US and China on reusable rockets, but its space program will benefit from the world's move towards protectionist economic policies. It has always been helped by the 'buy European' policies of European governments, & geo-political changes make this approach likely to become stronger.