O
n November 18, Germany, France and the European Commission announced a new European initiative for cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI). As researchers, engineers and entrepreneurs who have pushed the frontier in AI for decades, we strongly believe that Europe and non-European partners have the resources to sustain cutting-edge AI research and development, provided they pull resources together and put talent, science and engineering first. This is important, as future competitiveness and progress may depend on new breakthroughs.
Any innovative AI initiative must face how the field of AI has evolved over the past 10 years and its lesson: whatever the method, scaling computing power and training data will greatly improve the results. Here lies a growing gap between private and nonprofit research, and the opportunity for an initiative that could bring together funding, talent, computing power and data to sustain research in new architectures and methods at the right scale.
Based on our experience to date, a few features are key in cutting-edge AI research. This initiative can only succeed if:
It focuses on underexplored aspects of the research frontier, like new architectures, methods, reliability or new domains, rather than playing catch-up with the largest frontier models.
