European Union as an AI innovation advocate

Jan. 29, 2024

Why in news?

To address worries that Europe might be putting too many regulations on artificial intelligence (AI), the European Commission has introduced a set of rules.
These rules aim to help start-ups and other businesses get access to hardware like supercomputers and computing power and allows them to create large-scale AI models.
This move comes after the political agreement reached in December 2023 on the EU AI Act, which is the first-ever comprehensive law on AI in the world.
The goal of this law is to encourage the development, deployment, and use of trustworthy AI in the European Union (EU).

What’s in today’s article?

Europe’s AI innovation plan

The European Commission has launched a package of measures to support European startups and small businesses in the development of trustworthy AI.
The plan includes:
- Acquiring, upgrading and operating AI-dedicated supercomputers to enable fast machine learning and training of large general-purpose AI (GPAI) models.
  - GPAI models are AI systems that can perform a wide range of tasks.
  - They can be applied to many different tasks in various fields, often without substantial modification and fine-tuning.
- Facilitating access to the AI dedicated supercomputers, contributing to the widening of the use of AI to a large number of public and private users, including start-ups and SMEs.
- Supporting the AI startup and research ecosystem in algorithmic development, testing evaluation and validation of large-scale AI models.
- Enabling the development of a variety of emerging AI applications based on GPAI models.

Why is the EU especially focusing on AI innovation?

Overregulating AI
- The most visible innovation in AI so far has been led by American companies, especially OpenAI and Google.
- Europe has so far regulated technologies from a human-rights-first approach.
- However, it was being accused by the industry of yet again regulating AI even before it has spread across the continent in a meaningful way.
Criticism of AI Act of December 2023
- Last year, the European Commission agreed to implement an AI Act, but it has faced criticism.
- The law sets rules for using AI in the EU, including clear guidelines for law enforcement agencies. Consumers can complain about any misuse of AI.
- The Act also limits facial recognition technology and the use of AI to control people's behaviour.
- Companies that break the rules will face strict penalties.
- Governments can only use real-time biometric surveillance in public areas only when there are serious threats involved, such as terrorist attacks.

How is the EU’s plan similar to India’s?

As part of the programme being developed by India, the government wants to:
- develop its own sovereign AI,
- build computational capacity in the country, and
- offer compute-as-a-service to India’s startups.
The capacity building will be done both within the government and through a public-private partnership model.
- This highlights New Delhi’s intention to reap dividends of the impending AI boom which it envisions will be a crucial economic driver.
In total, India is looking to build a compute capacity of:
- anywhere between 10,000 GPUs (graphic processing units) and 30,000 GPUs under the PPP model, and
- an additional 1,000-2,000 GPUs through the PSU Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC).
The government is exploring various incentive structures for private companies to set up computing centres in the country.
This includes:
- a capital expenditure subsidy model which has been employed under the semiconductor scheme, a model where companies can be incentivised depending on their operational expenses; or
- offering them a usage fee.
The government’s idea is to create a digital public infrastructure (DPI) out of the GPU assembly it sets up so that startups can utilise its computational capacity for a fraction of the cost.
- The startups will not need to invest in GPUs which are often the biggest cost centre of such operations.

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