Europe has reserved for now the role of comparsa and client. It has become clear this week: the irruption of artificial intelligence of the Chinese company Deepseek has caused an earthquake that has affected US technological giants. Meanwhile, in Brussels the question emerges again: Why does the European Union not to be in this career of the digital revolution? Do not investigate much to find the answer: investment.
There is a cataract of figures that show the scarce monetary commitment of Europe in innovation and its uncoordination. , it is built with many of those numbers. For example, only 7% of world investment dedicated by large companies dedicated to the development of computer programs and digital applications comes from Europe; 71% is spent in the United States and 15% in China. The photo of the hardware (Computer equipment, chips research …) Nor does it leave the Union, 12%, compared to 40% American and 19% Chinese.
Specific evidence on artificial intelligence can be found with the same result in OECD studies. linked to this activity approached 450 billion dollars in the United States; at 250,000 million in China; and barely reached 50,000 million in the EU.
“The investment deficit has been gigantic,” says Ibán García del Blanco, international director of the Lasker consultancy and, when she was socialist Eurodiput, who also speaks of a lack of common strategy in the Union. “At the state level there is no possibility,” he says.
They look at the direction that García del Blanco points out. In fact, the first, of 2018, saw the light just one year after Beijing published its plan for the development of the new generation of artificial intelligence. But in light of the results it seems that it has been much less successful. Aware of this, Brussels has reserved an important role to artificial intelligence in its economic program for this legislature, which already in this first quarter is proposed to deploy its first actions in this field.
The objective would be that the EU does not lose this train of the digital revolution, which this time, even for accumulation of lost opportunities so far from the century, seems decisive. A challenge after what was seen this week, in which it has become clear that Depseek is a rival at OpenAi, the company that has developed Chatgpt, Anthropic or Google. It remains to be seen if Mistral, a French company and the biggest European bet in this field will be achieved.
It is true that what happened with Depseek demonstrates that not everything is a matter of money. After all, this Chinese model would have developed with much less investment than in North America. And for that the French Eurodiputo David Corman, of the Greens, this week has been grabbed. “The United States has invested greatly and has given free rein to its gafam [acrónimo de Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple y Microsoft] to develop AI in order to obtain an advantage over China. Not only did they also imposed a moratorium on China in the supply of their high -end semiconductors. And what happened? China has developed its own model, even with less efficient chips. We do not have to obey pre -existing models if they do not agree. You just have to have political value and will. ”
This political thrust is the one that has, of course, in the two great world powers, as Anu Bradford, a professor of law at Columbia University, makes clear. This Finland, specialized in digital regulations, explains in his latest book, Digital empiresthat there is a “battle for technological supremacy” between Washington and Beijing, in which their respective technological giants have an outstanding role. In that contest, artificial intelligence is a key fighting field. “The race […] It is a priority for what is at stake from the economic point of view, but also for political and ideological reasons, ”writes this Finns based in the United States.
Both Bradford and Corman come to introduce the geopolitical element to explain why the United States and China have the will to lead the race. But the will requires tools that deploy it. And there, for example, Draghi aims to develop a European body that drives the most advanced investigations, emulating the American model of ARPA (Agency for Advanced Research Projects), a way of translating in facts that lack of Common strategy that makes many efforts and resources lose efficacy in the EU due to lack of coordination.
