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Europe, the AI Continent.

One year ago, we launched the AI Continent Action Plan. Since then, we have made huge strides:

✅ 19 AI factories are now live across EU countries.
✅ We established the AI Skills Academy to train experts.
✅ The AI Omnibus is cutting costs for business.
✅ We have earmarked €1 billion to support AI adoption in industry.

We are building a secure and innovative AI future for Europe.

Here's how 👉 link.europa.eu/nj3VH9

Commission sets course for Europe’s AI leadership with an ambitious AI Continent Action Plan

To become a global leader in artificial intelligence (AI) is the objective of the AI Continent Action Plan launched on April 9 2025.
Shaping Europe’s digital future
This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to zivi

akkoma - Link to source

Reid

@zaire @troed @GLaDTheresCake tbh I'm just fucking tired of explaining why it's all so bad on every level, from the quality of work to social and environmental impact to the violation on ethics and everything else. At this point either you're aware of all the issues and anti-AI, or you're willfully ignorant for your own ends
@zivi @Troed Sångberg @Lillian Violet
in reply to iwein

mastodon - Link to source

Troed Sångberg

@iwein

I would prefer it if organizations liked having a presence on Mastodon without having to suffer the endless harassment of the anti-AI fanatics in their mentions, indeed.

Regarding "freedom of speech" it seems you have no idea how that works. You're posting through a privately run service with its own set of rules and if you break those ("No harassment of other users on this or other servers." is one of them) they are not infringing on your "freedom of speech" if you get the boot.

@reiddragon

@Reid @iwein
in reply to Reid

mastodon - Link to source

super_user_do

@reiddragon AI is objectively useful and actually superpowers productivity if used properly, if we dont manage to make our own alternatives we'll end up falling behind the USA and China. We need an alternative that's not a dystopian

I am mostly against the usage of AI and tech in general in education where it's not really needed (ex. students with disabilities or for coding classes) and in art, but for productivity? That is awesome

@Reid
in reply to Spookybot

mastodon - Link to source

Azarilhⓥ

@teknomagic It is not a bubble like that. AI can be powerful and it's here to stay forever as far as humans go. Don't conflate useless AI in your apps with all AI. AI in sciences is pretty much a necessity. Plus, you can't impede people from using LLMs, so either you let them use the garbage american ChatGPT, or you give them an AI that actually respects copyright.
@Spookybot
in reply to Spookybot

mastodon - Link to source

Azarilhⓥ

@teknomagic A tech bubble just like "smart" appliances that we still have today? They just switched from marketing everything as "smart" to everything having "AI". It is here to stay, just not in this current form. I am not saying there is no economic bubble. It definitely looks like a bubble, tho i am no economist and some economists do say it's not, so who knows...?
@Spookybot
This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to Azarilhⓥ

mastodon - Link to source

dragonfrog

@Azarilh @teknomagic smart appliances didn't result in huge new appliance factories being built that could supply 50x the world's actual need for new appliances. If they had, those factories would inevitably have been abandoned a few years later - just as 98% of "AI" data centres will be abandoned when the post-bubble market settles down to providing the AI demand that exists.

They just changed slightly which features were added to appliances in the same factories that already existed.

@Spookybot @Azarilhⓥ
This entry was edited (5 days ago)
in reply to Azarilhⓥ

mastodon - Link to source

dragonfrog

@Azarilh AI *as a thing that makes sense to push huge tax incentives and bypassing environmental laws for* is going to go away. There are already *today* more AI data centres than a stabilized market will support - most of the ones existing *today* will shortly be stranded assets that need demolition and land remediation at taxpayer expense because the shell companies that own them have gone bankrupt and vanished into thin air.

Encouraging the construction of more will only make things worse.

@Azarilhⓥ
in reply to European Commission

glitchsoc - Link to source

katzenberger

Burning the planet to generate unverified bullshit; stealing from creators; poisoning the whole process of generation, presentation, teaching, and usage of knowledge; helping to fire qualified professionals by the thousands, to replace them with unqualified babbling machines; inflating an irresponsible investment bubble until it bursts, resulting in unprecedented damage.

You're proud of your work of utter destruction? You fools. You're enemies of humankind.

"#AI" #EU #EUpol

#eu #eupol #ai

reshared this

in reply to David Hembrow

mastodon - Link to source

Erwin

@hembrow fully agree. I was going to say that I'm happy there doesn't seem to be a lot of budget earmarked for this, but billions are being pushed into the hype:
digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/…

Let's hope those to be raised from the private sector but even then, the slashing of regulations is damaging all by itself.
@EUCommission

AI Continent Action Plan | Shaping Europe’s digital future

digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu
@European Commission @David Hembrow
in reply to European Commission

mastodon - Link to source

senda

making easier for the bros to spoil our environment, render us jobless, propagate disinformation, cause mental health issues and even suicides, etc. for a plagiarism machine that barely does an acceptable job at the 3-4 real use cases is surely not the way to go. Why are you pushing for something no one wants (would you want to live near a datacenter? Me neither). Why don't we use this money to make europeans lives better? You don't care about anything but money, and that's gross.
in reply to Dave Mc

mastodon - Link to source

AlexTECPlayz

@guigsy sure, but they don't have to be trained 24/7, and most people don't need large LLM models for their use cases.

Most people can use a small 0.6B or 1.6B model (e.g through ente's new Ensu app, which downloads a small local LLM that uses 1GB of RAM and is surprisingly fast even on a mid-range phone - see in my post here: techhub.social/@alextecplayz/1…)

It's plenty for your average joe and their phone, which is VASTLY better energy-wise than using GPT5 which uses a lot of RAM in top-of-the-line, 600W+ GPUs in one or more datacenters in the USA, plus it's better for privacy since the chats and the responses are saved locally instead of being sent to be 'anonymized' and used for training data.

Or models like GPT-OSS which is 120B, and requires an NVIDIA H100 with 80GB of VRAM.

One measly midrange phone running a model in 1GB of RAM on an efficient ARM processor versus a $38,000 GPU with a TDP of 750W to answer Average Joe's inane question about X or Y.

AlexTECPlayz (@alextecplayz@techhub.social)

Attached: 3 images @ente@fosstodon.org Woah, this is cool! It runs surprisingly fast on my phone, what model and parameter size are you using? It's a 1.2GB model download, I assume it's Qwen3.5 0.8B since that model is 1GB for llama.
AlexTECPlayz (TechHub)
@Dave Mc
in reply to fnord

mastodon - Link to source

Joshix

@fnrd the linked page links a q&a: digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/…

The first question there is "What are AI Factories". The "answer" links digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/…

But I still have no clue what an ai factory is. Is it just a datacenter with GPUs?

AI Continent Action Plan - Q&A

The AI Continent Action Plan outlines a set of bold actions to make the EU a global leader in Artificial Intelligence. This Q&A clarifies some topics.
digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu
@fnord
in reply to fnord

mastodon - Link to source

fnord

Had some time to look into it. This link (April 9) lines up better with the blurb @EUCommission posted and explains the key concepts. digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/….

@joshix @ki @alterelefant @bortzmeyer

My own thoughts, feel free to read / not read:

The AI factories honestly are not a main concern in my optics; just seems like rebranded university and business projects.
However, the AI Gigafactories they're talking about can potentially be a big environmental and societal mistake especially if the focus is LLM and not more proven (and less wasteful) ML research.
I would dearly love to see some money going into the ethics of A.I. And that's not what I see happening when I briefly scan the EU Digital Skills Academy. Using GenAI seems to be the focus.
Especially in a time when since CTO's seem convinced GAI (GAI = the idea that AI is human-like conscious) is reality or can be reality this sort of hyped-up mass hypnosis can be damaging to the fabric of European society.
Therefore I worry about the AI Omnibus: the EU links are unclear and I'm not good enough at reading legislation to interpret it.
Not all of this EU money will go to waste if it ends up at universities and improves actual digital skills and digital literacy skills.
But the ethics of AI and especially GenAI / LLM need to be addressed during this EU program to prevent us ending up on the wrong side of humanity. #EUAI #EUAiAct

AI Continent Action Plan delivers major milestones

One year on, the European Commission's AI Continent Action Plan is delivering on its goal to transform Europe's strong traditional industries and exceptional talent pool into engines of AI innovation and acceleration.
Shaping Europe’s digital future
#euaiact #euai @European Commission @jan Ki | 奇 @Frank Heijkamp @Joshix @Stéphane Bortzmeyer
in reply to European Commission

mastodon - Link to source

dch

here's a suggestion before spending a bazillion on "AI".

Make it (much) easier to start small businesses.

Like, €100 instead of €1000s, and a clearly defined list of paperwork, that can be processed at a single govt agency in under 1 hour, in 1 country.

Then, simplify the byzantine pan-EU tax arrangements so this small business can just pay tax once, instead of needing to spend €4000/year on accountant support, and filing in multiple countries.

And when you've achieved that marvel of bureaucratic enlightenment, by all means circle back and examine the detritus of whatever Yucatan-sized crater the US AI industry has imploded into, to see if anything of actual value can be forged from the slag.

in reply to dch

mastodon - Link to source

AlexTECPlayz

@dch 100%, to open a small business in Romania you either go through a paid service or you do it yourself and run around the city to like 3 or 4 govt agencies because they couldn't possibly handle this entirely online.

You often get berated at from a tired, overworked minimum wage woman in her 60s that your paperwork is missing something or you ticked the wrong box or whatever.

@dch
in reply to dch

mastodon - Link to source

SK53

@dch @alextecplayz Some years ago, pre-Brexit, I had a long taxi ride in the Val d'Aosta. The driver and his brother imported fancy stone from Switzerland and had needed a EC incorporated company. They registered in England and made a yearly visit to their accountants in Windsor. By all accounts this was the least bureaucratic approach available to them, and they were very pleased with the arrangement.
@dch @AlexTECPlayz
in reply to European Commission

mastodon - Link to source

ProScience 🇪🇺

Your dishonest AF AI propaganda fails to mention that you're recklessly abolishing our rights as citizens *and* authors/creators, shamelessly selling our data to fascists that seek to destroy democracy and freedom, and at the same time fuel GHG emissions.

You traitors will be prosecuted for your crimes.

This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to European Commission

mastodon - Link to source

Raphael Albert

Please make a screenshot of all the comments and send it to your superior. Ask them to send it to their superiors, until it reaches those in charge.

Here are people who know a thing or two about tech begging you to stop your PR and listen for once!

We can't afford to fall for every snake oil grift US Big Tech throws at us! We need the EU and those in charge to be really smart now, because as others have written, there's a lot at stake! Dare to resist the hype, for all our sakes!

in reply to پویان Pouyan

mastodon - Link to source

European Commission

Hi @i! AI Factories are hubs for innovation, bringing together computing power, data, and talent to create advanced AI models. They connect universities, industries, and supercomputing centers to develop AI solutions for areas like health, climate, and manufacturing. You can find more information here: link.europa.eu/8xyx8t

AI Factories

AI Factories leverage the supercomputing capacity of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking to develop trustworthy cutting-edge generative AI models.
Shaping Europe’s digital future
@پویان Pouyan
in reply to European Commission

ActivityPub - Link to source

Bussphomet

You lot even type like useless bots..

Do us a favor
Go find a busy intersection and walk into it.

Shit like this almost makes me wish you lost the second world war, but then again I am sure the Axis would have loved AI to spy on its own people and herd them like fucking cattle so you're no goddamn different.

This entry was edited (6 days ago)
in reply to European Commission

mastodon - Link to source

Life of Maino 🇪🇺

please, please, please with sugar on top: don't do this. I can see every day at work what AI is doing and long story short: it is nothing good. I'd rather see a unified European Health Insurance or unified European retirement fonds. One social system for all member states. That would be something to be proud of, not wasting our ressources on AI.
in reply to jess :3

mastodon - Link to source

European Commission

Hi @peachymist! Artificial intelligence already plays a crucial role in our daily lives, and as AI develops, it holds even greater potential to improve the lives of EU citizens: enhancing disease prevention, reducing traffic fatalities, anticipating cyber threats, and much more. That's why we are proposing rules and actions for AI, enabling us to harness its full potential and maximise its benefits.
@jess :3
in reply to European Commission

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Plan-A

 — (0.0.0.0)

@European Commission @jess :3 No matter what you explain them and that it exists for decades ago they will hate those 2 letters A and I .. and part of it is very true but we don't want chat control , age verification or other privacy infringing new 'Law's' as AI exists since decades you turn around the subject to tell us what we knew already (I use a LLM myself, self made and running local host) those AI you implement reduce privacy. I won't give my medical records to your systems as all systems can be hacked and one day our data will be everywhere it already happens as I speak.
You are not ready to implement it by far but to start learn about it would be a more pleasant message and always leave the decisions to the people.

You impose things people loath.

So a good education starting from yourself about subjects and then make information to the people and let them decide is shortly said.

That money should be used to help the weakest of society and we want no new laws without vote of all the people of EU

This is no democracy but vote to some people and they make a coalition that is not of them the majority but ok it's not Right but you act as fascists.
Read Mussolini's book and discover the resemblances.

@European Commission @jess :3
in reply to Eugen Rochko

mastodon - Link to source

Bret Carmichael

@Gargron @peachymist I understand the sentiment, but it’s militarily and economically untenable. Europe’s militaries would fall behind. Most economic sectors, where not already a victim of Baumol’s cost disease, would become victims of Baumol’s cost disease. The genie is out of the bottle, and to put it back in would require unanimous participation, including bad actors.
@Eugen Rochko @jess :3
in reply to Eugen Rochko

mastodon - Link to source

Marcin Czachurski

@Gargron @peachymist I’m afraid I can’t agree with you here. Europe is not a separate planet, isolated from the rest of the world. If we, as Europe, do not adopt and develop the most advanced solutions, we will simply lose our competitiveness - both in terms of products and the workforce.

We can already see this very clearly in the automotive industry. If we turn away from innovation, Europe risks falling into a deep economic crisis instead of strengthening its position.

@Eugen Rochko @jess :3
in reply to Eugen Rochko

mastodon - Link to source

Marcin Czachurski

@Gargron @peachymist AI will undoubtedly change how we build software. In some ways it will help, in others it will harm. But this has already begun and cannot be stopped. Europe cannot simply opt out, or companies will move to Asia or the US, leaving us with rising unemployment. We must build something better: ethical, competitive AI. Europe has the talent and resources to do it. 😉
@Eugen Rochko @jess :3
in reply to Eugen Rochko

mastodon - Link to source

datatofu

@Gargron @mczachurski @peachymist to further the discussion, please provide some clarity as to what AI is, or at least the definition by which you abide. Then, please elaborate on your points that Al 1) deskills workers 2) makes access to information and knowledqe harder 3) concentrates wealth within big tech. Such that any country would be MORE competetive without Al.
@Eugen Rochko @jess :3 @Marcin Czachurski
in reply to Eugen Rochko

mastodon - Link to source

Marcin Czachurski

@Gargron @peachymist 1) Work will shift: less manual coding, more reviewing, directing, and managing AI agents. 2) AI adds tools; it does not remove search engines or other ways of accessing knowledge. 3) Wealth is concentrated for now, but that is temporary - smaller local models are already emerging, even on phones.

You cannot be more competitive if you refuse to offer the services the market demands.

@Eugen Rochko @jess :3
in reply to European Commission

mastodon - Link to source

The_Universality

And how exactly do you plan your budgets for all those that are replaced with AI?

Also thank you for supporting AI, I really love speaking to AI instead of human on Customer Support.
It works exactly how one would expect - it doesn't.

Yes, we shall innovate in AI, but not fund its adoption in industry. That's on those who use it.

Use the money for defense and moving from Microslop's & Google's products to Open-Source

This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to European Commission

mastodon - Link to source

JulesJones

Read. The. Room.

A *lot* of the people on Mastodon are creators who have had their intellectual property stolen to feed the generative AI models, with at least one of the billionaires involved openly admitting/bragging that his business model would not be profitable if they had to pay fair royalties for that intellectual property.

A lot of people on Mastodon are deeply concerned about the environmental damage, AI hallucinations, theft of personal/corporate data, and sundry other issues.

There are forms of analytical AI that are useful (e.g. analysis of medical images) and do not involve any of the above. You do not appear to be referring to such analytical models.

in reply to JulesJones

snac - Link to source

OCTADE

"A lot of the people on Mastodon are creators who have had their intellectual property stolen to feed the generative AI models, with at least one of the billionaires involved openly admitting/bragging that his business model would not be profitable if they had to pay fair royalties for that intellectual property."


For several years I have held back from publishing most of my writings and papers and algorithms due to this AI theft machine. I am holding out hope for the bubble to burst or for court rulings that favor creators who litigate over their IP being stolen by these evil tech lords.

AI hoovering has caused a massive chilling effect on my speech and code because once I put it out there the tech bros can steal it and deny me credit or payment, making it trivial for others to steal my work as well.

in reply to European Commission

mastodon - Link to source

huiiii!!!

Make Europe a science continent instead!
AI as in "we scan you and all your data without you being able to prevent this" is horrible, nobody wants that.
AI as a mathematical algorithm can be helpful in lots of applications - as any other algorithm. But this doesn't need pushing AI methods, just a solid funding of science! Scientists will use the method with the best results for their applications!

No to AI slop, surveillance & abuse, yes to a right to privacy & digital security!

in reply to Tero Hänninen

mastodon - Link to source

Wulfy—Speaker to the machines

@cstross @0xtero

The costs and farms are stupendously overblown and conflated.
There is bad faith on both sides of the argument

The WAAAAH DATACENTRES mob conveniently ignores the current data centres ~50% of which are iclouds, AWS, dropbox, office365 and yes, mastodon, same issues, but oh these are the "good" data centres 🙄

Also while growth projection are nasty...model distilation and algo improvement MAY reduce the load significantly. Tech improves. Have you tested the water pressure tank on your steam car?
Its a safety issue.

Placing AI Data centres in orbit removes the heat, carbon and energy issue, but forest folk aren't happy about that either (Not a big fan of that either but for different reasons than you)
There is a small test inference engine up there already since December BTW.

Copyright and artist exploitation?
Oh yes, did you delete you pirated MP3 and MP4s? 🙄 Same folks who 4 years ago were chanting "Information wants to be free" are now guardians of corporate copyright.

So, yeah.
Ai is useful, x10 is real if you actually git gud.
#aislop #ai #llm #luddites #neoluddites

#ai #llm #aislop #luddites #neoluddites @Charlie Stross @Tero Hänninen
in reply to Wulfy—Speaker to the machines

mastodon - Link to source

mahadevank

@n_dimension @cstross @0xtero I don't trust you wulfy - and I don't like the tone of your arguments, seems exactly like tech bros who talk down to others.

But anyways, if you distill the model, there's no need for a data center, so who cares.

Might just need one or two data centers for training purposes.

Regarding putting things into orbit - the costs would be silly at best unless you do all kinds of jugglery like ship the model with 100 other useful things

Last comment /ignore

@Charlie Stross @Wulfy—Speaker to the machines @Tero Hänninen
in reply to Wulfy—Speaker to the machines

mastodon - Link to source

Jax UK

@n_dimension @cstross @0xtero

Having some data centres then exploding to have many many data centres in a short space in time is an issue and is causing horrible issues for many communities. You can't justify it by saying we already have some. That's like saying we already have some pollution so why not cause a lot more pollution, no problem cos we already have some!

Also you do understand that pirating an MP3 and plagiarism are 2 completely different things right?

@Charlie Stross @Wulfy—Speaker to the machines @Tero Hänninen
in reply to European Commission

mastodon - Link to source

CatAClock

Full press here btw: ec.europa.eu/commission/pressc…
Not sure why yall made multiple link jumps.

The "AI Skills Academy" looks to be describing training people on working with Neural Networks. What they will do once they leave the slopcademy is a question left to the people I guess.

What's interesting is the "support AI adoption", which is what the "AI Omnibus" is supporting. Why? No, I'm serious. Why? Is the company test-bed the USA not enough to see that this is a bad direction to take?

Commission sets course for Europe\'s AI leadership with an ambitious AI Continent Action Plan

To become a global leader in artificial intelligence (AI) is the objective of the AI Continent Action Plan launched today.
European Commission - European Commission
in reply to European Commission

mastodon - Link to source

Janeishly

No, seriously. Take a stand on this nonsense. It's built on stolen work and hidden labour, it's burning up our already scarce resources at a terrifying rate, it's really really bad for people's brains and even if it worked (which it doesn't) it would put billions of people out of work in a really short timescale. Who's going to pay taxes then? How does society cope when you wipe out the incomes of a huge tranche of its working population and give them... nothing in return?

We don't need this stuff, and we're certainly not ready for it, even IF it worked.

in reply to European Commission

mastodon - Link to source

Angela Scholder

Curious to hear how building our digital sovereignty from American BigTech is going!

Turning off all Big Tech solutions being used by all governments and vital infrastructure in Europe would have us descend into total chaos!

However, the EU Commission is apparently more concerned with FOMO in missing the race to the abyss with AI slop!

This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to European Commission

mastodon - Link to source

David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)

I don’t know if this account is actually monitored, or just a publishing place, but you may have noticed that this post has received almost overwhelmingly negative responses.

You could disregard this as Mastodon bias, but keep in mind that the biggest bias on Mastodon is that people who understand and built core parts of the information technology that you use every day are massively over represented. This is probably the only place you will get a lot of replies from people who both understand technology and do not have a financial incentive to hype things to get large amounts of government funding.

EDIT: I should add, I used machine learning during my PhD and there are a lot of problems for which it is a really good fit. But, in the current climate, it’s generally safe to interpret ‘AI’ as meaning ‘machine learning applied to a problem where machine learning is the wrong solution’. It isn’t a technology, it’s a branding term, and it’s a branding term used almost exclusively for things that have no social benefit.

This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)

mastodon - Link to source

Andreas K

@david_chisnall
And speaking as an AI positive person, in the sense one can do really nice this with it, when used responsibly by competent people, not when used as a hype buzz word.

WTF are "AI factories"?

"Skills academy"? Aren't university curricula not enough?

And if it's such a great help for industry, why does it need subsidies for adoption?
@EUCommission

@European Commission @David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)
in reply to Andreas K

mastodon - Link to source

Process "Tedious" Parsnip

Sensitive content

@European Commission @Andreas K @David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)
in reply to Process "Tedious" Parsnip

mastodon - Link to source

Nicole Parsons

@ProcessParsnip @yacc143 @david_chisnall
AI is getting subsidized because the fossil fuel industry habitually expects subsidies.

That's who funds these energy wasting AI initiatives; the fossil fuel industry.

The most corrupt industry on the planet wants to keep its grift, desperately.

$3 billion dollars ** per day ** are drained from the economies of democracy and sent to enrich thugs like Trump's donors, Putin & #PrinceBonesaw

theguardian.com/environment/20…

Revealed: oil sector’s ‘staggering’ $3bn-a-day profits for last 50 years

Vast sums provide power to ‘buy every politician’ and delay action on climate crisis, says expert
Damian Carrington (the Guardian)
#princebonesaw @Andreas K @David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*) @Process "Tedious" Parsnip
in reply to David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)

mastodon - Link to source

Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷

@david_chisnall
I’m resolutely against the crazy rush to enshittify everything with AI.
A quick CV: I’m 71; I was on the team that built the BBC micro, I helped to build the early internet with email used by UK government and schools, and I’ve worked on smart homes and smart cities. Never have I been more scared of where technology is heading than I am now with the growth of AI
@David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)

⁂ Fish Id Wardrobe reshared this.

in reply to Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷

mastodon - Link to source

AlisonW ♿🏳️‍🌈♾️

@KimSJ @david_chisnall Seconding that. My cv includes writing first screen based word processor for Olivetti, an email service for Sperry Univac, using arpanet and designing / building networks before there was tcp/ip. This rush to Artificial Insanity is dangerous and just another way to market expensive toys.
@David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*) @Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷
in reply to AlisonW ♿🏳️‍🌈♾️

mastodon - Link to source

M Schommer

@AlisonW @KimSJ @david_chisnall
I doubt the people behind @EUCommission have ever heard about Sperrymicro Univetti Arpatcp. Today before lunch they've burned more processing power on their LLM mind-replacements that all Univacs combined ever had (and that on a Saturday).
@European Commission @David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*) @Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 @AlisonW ♿🏳️‍🌈♾️
in reply to David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)

mastodon - Link to source

Simon Rolfmore

@david_chisnall

> in the current climate, it’s generally safe to interpret ‘AI’ as meaning ‘machine learning applied to a problem where machine learning is the wrong solution’

This is a superb observation, thank you. It articulates something I’ve felt for a while.

@David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)

reshared this

in reply to David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)

mastodon - Link to source

Violet Madder

@david_chisnall
The way "AI" is currently being designed and deployed, it's machine learning applied to a problem where somebody wants to generate a vast flood of bullshit, drowning out legitimate communications.

It's a weapon.

This is the OPPOSITE of social benefit. They're poisoning the wells of information, jamming signals, devaluing labor, enclosing the digital commons, addicting vulnerable minds, and priming the economy for the biggest crash since 1929.

@David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)
in reply to European Commission

sharkey - Link to source

Cody

​:wojak_cursed:​ please reconsider your choices... There are many fields in which AI is ethical and useful, here are a few (of the many) where it isn't:
- Age verification
- Text generation
- Art generation
- Music generation
- Surveilance

Please refrain from making any implications that you are spending OUR tax payer money in those fields.

I understand corporate lobbyists are trying to convince you that this is what the European peoole want, but trust us, we are the technicians who run the technology you use. They do NOT want that.

in reply to Kahia, a.k.a The Anarchivist

mastodon - Link to source

European Commission

Hi @kahianyaaa! AI already plays a crucial role in our daily lives. As it develops, AI holds even greater potential to improve the lives of EU citizens: enhancing disease prevention, reducing traffic fatalities, anticipating cyber threats, and much more. That's why we are proposing rules and actions for AI, enabling us to harness its full potential and maximise its benefits.
@Kahia, a.k.a The Anarchivist
in reply to European Commission

mastodon - Link to source

https://mastodon.social/users/SecoasecasMouse

La IA ya sé ha usado para decidir cuantos miles de niños mueren y cuantos no en guerras. ¿Ya se usa la IA europea para decidir objetivos militares o cuanto falta para eso? El uso en medicina e investigación de LLMs es algo minoritario, y hasta ahora las IA's han matado más personas que las que ha salvado. ¿Cuanta agua habéis robado al consumo humano para eso, a cuanta gente le habéis cuadruplicado el precio de la electricidad y el agua potable, a cuantas habéis dejado sin trabajo?
in reply to European Commission

mastodon - Link to source

Djembro, RO, supports 🇺🇦🇬🇪

Could you please describe the measures you are taking to mitigate the adverse environmental impacts of AI?

Also, how are you mitigating the adverse impacts on workers? On intellectual property rights? On the arts? On the psycho-intellectual development of young people? On access to factual information?

in reply to European Commission

misskey - Link to source

Herr Irrtum! 🔊

I did read through those "let's show some actionism" buzzword PDFs and statements that sound like wishful thinking like "The race for leadership in AI is far from over."

You come up with this NOW?!

I see exactly nothing to address the problems to make AI different and better. On what material to train? How to get the consent of creators to train your AIs with? Or is copyright infringement for AI training now fine? Who will label and tag? Poor people in Africa again, right? Also copyright infringement when using generative AI (which actually is what you refer too). Not addressed.
Because you guys don't even have the insight.
You hear AI and think €€€, and that's it. But then.

The financial / economic side - how do get ram, storage, GPU/AI accelerators, even the material resources for it - for the totally unrealistic scenario you want to build those components here in Europe (we are 40 years behind in this sector).

Energy consumption? Realistic approach? Hello?

Did I mention I miss every realistic insight?

What you suddenly (by being 15 years behind) want to achieve now all at once, is repeating the same mistakes again. Trying to catch-up with China and the US to do exactly the same. I see nothing about trying a different, a better approach. Instead I see how you totally ignore the odds. Why even bother then?

The whole thing is doomed to fail clearly, if you start this as naive as you do.

in reply to European Commission

mastodon - Link to source

tschew

this is one of the worst decisions ever taken in the context of European research funding. You are pumping taxpayer money into machines for training useless models and the companies applying for computing time do not even have to undergo the kind of application procedure that peer-reviewed computational science has to go through. You have substantially reduced the amount of time available to European science and weakened us at a time where we could outperform the competition.
in reply to tschew

mastodon - Link to source

tschew

case in point: from the point of view of computational science the exascale supercomputer Jupiter Booster is not an exascale machine because only 30-45% of the computing time will be available to science via EuroHPC calls with another small part through national calls. The rest is given to "AI" through an application procedure which is laughable compared to what peer-reviewed computational science has to go through. eurohpc-ju.europa.eu/large-sca… vs eurohpc-ju.europa.eu/eurohpc-j…

Large Scale Access to AI factories

Large Scale access mode is for AI models and applications requiring more than 50,000 GPU hours for a maximum of one year.
The European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU)
This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to European Commission

mastodon - Link to source

https://norden.social/users/CIMB4

this post is making be ashamed to be a citizen of the european union when otherwise i was mostly a big fan of it.

i think "AI" is used as a marketing term by corrupt business people, selling overpriced general purpose tools that just don't deliver on any of their promises, meanhile undermining scientists developing machine learning algorithms with real usecases and measurable positive effects.

so as long as the EU is using scammers' terminology it is dead to me.

in reply to

mastodon - Link to source

https://norden.social/users/CIMB4

Large Language Models struggle with factuality, have a negative effect on their users' memory and problem solving ability and by being so general purpose are also unbelievably inefficient in terms of ressource usage. those aren fundamental issues with all LLMs, not something that can be iteratively improved. LLM companies are lying to you and they have to because they are hundreds of billions deep into a downward financial spiral from fraud and false promises.
in reply to European Commission

mastodon - Link to source

Faye

A more or less virtualised society to reference or even lead real life with… And you believe it to be a good idea? 😏 🧠🔨 #BrainMush It’ll be a proverbial straight jacket to control everything deemed detrimental to our current and flawed economic system. To many it’s a magic box of tricks to get what they want against better judgement and it will be a moloch of a Ponzi scheme money pit. An illusion of control at best. 🤷‍♀️
#brainmush
in reply to European Commission

mastodon - Link to source

Wasabi the Black Cat 😼

Here is a mild version. I think he does a reasonable job of explaining in a way a layperson can understand.

Unfortunately .... things are worse than he puts forward.

youtube.com/watch?v=ahRMR_9kqb…

Anthropic has crossed a line

KICKSTARTER FOR LABOR/ZERO: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/daveshap/labor-zeroUNIVERSAL HIGH INCOME: https://github.com/daveshap/UniversalHighIncome
David Shapiro (YouTube)
Unknown parent

mastodon - Link to source

European Commission

Hi @kobold! We work simultaneously on a wide range of priorities, including security and defence, economic competitiveness, democracy, and climate adaptation and environment, and we regularly share updates on them across our social media channels. You can read more about our priorities here: link.europa.eu/Yp6XqT

Priorities 2024-2029

Learn how the Commission is creating a faster, simpler, and more united EU by supporting its people and businesses through seven priority action areas.
European Commission
@kobold
Unknown parent

mastodon - Link to source

David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)

@davidsonsr @fuji
So what are these use cases? Replacing customer support with a chatbot that makes up policies, can't answer questions, and drives away customers? Meeting summary systems that invert the conclusion of the meeting? Note taking for doctors that fabricates conditions and cancels essential prescriptions?

Machine-learning systems work really nicely in situations where either the result can be checked instantly and cheaply, or where the cost of a wrong answer is vastly lower than the benefit of a correct answer. Very few natural-language processing tasks have this property.

LLMs have had hundreds of billions of dollars spent on them, and are not yet profitable. No company can offer them to customers at a price that customers are willing to pay and which covers the costs. And, even with that level of subsidy, it has made zero measurable impact on the GDP of the USA.

If a technology has failed to deliver anything of value to the economy after sinking a hundred billion, the rational thing to do is not say 'we must also throw money down this hole'. It is to say 'other countries, please keep wasting your economic potential! We will invest in things that actually deliver!' (Or, at least, in things that haven't yet been shown to not deliver).

@davidsonsr @fuji
in reply to Violet Madder

mastodon - Link to source

davidsonsr

@violetmadder @david_chisnall @fuji
AI has introduced a shift in how humans can interact with computers. All IT infrastructure was built with the restriction that computers could only be interfaced with through predefined rules, whereas AI can now allow us to give computers instructions through natural language. It's true that emerging technologies tend to see significant investments and at times economic bubbles, but that doesn't negate the effectiveness of AI as a technology.
@Violet Madder @David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*) @Michal Valasek
in reply to davidsonsr

mastodon - Link to source

David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)

@davidsonsr @violetmadder @fuji
Natural language interfaces are not new. They've been around in various forms for decades. Some ML techniques allow higher accuracy but they come with the same limitations as any attempt at this technology. First, the set of things that can be done is still defined by programming. The difference with LLM-based approaches is that, rather than failing when they are asked to do something that they can't do, they do something else. This is much worse, because it means that the systems are not reliable.

Natural language interfaces pop up periodically but typically go away because natural language is ambiguous. Computer languages are intentionally not like natural language because their requirement is to unambiguously convert programmer intent into a sequence of instructions for the computer. As soon as you introduce natural language, you introduce a requirement for interpretation and that both removes agency from the user (now they aren't the one providing this - 'agentic AI' systems are ones that aim to remove agency from the user) and introduces a large space of failure modes that the user cannot reason about.

@Violet Madder @davidsonsr @Michal Valasek
in reply to David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)

mastodon - Link to source

davidsonsr

@david_chisnall @violetmadder @fuji
The user doesn't need to be the one providing context. Software can instruct AI to reason about a piece of unknown information and then provide context for the program to consume. The AI becomes a cog that eliminates unknowns and converts it to instructions that the program can understand.

As far as I know this has never been possible before, and I don't know of any proto-solutions that could do this through natural language instructions.

@Violet Madder @David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*) @Michal Valasek
in reply to davidsonsr

mastodon - Link to source

Violet Madder

@davidsonsr @david_chisnall @fuji
Machines are not capable of "reasoning". Unknowns aren't "eliminated" but filled in with arbitrary BS, context defined by the people who wrote the thing (in the service of technofascist oligarchs out to destroy the usefulness of the internet).

The technology (machine learning) CAN be very good and very useful-- but not when it is implemented like this.

This is a bullshit generator.

I'm just going to keep on saying it: It's a weapon.

@David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*) @davidsonsr @Michal Valasek
in reply to Violet Madder

mastodon - Link to source

davidsonsr

@violetmadder @david_chisnall @fuji
A programmer can instruct an AI to handle an unknown piece of information according to an instruction given in natural language, and the AI has the capacity to follow that instruction with a high level of accuracy. Introducing additional AI for reviewing can increase the accuracy further, often to the point where the error margin is negligible. This is being done across companies today, with tasks that were previously done by humans.
@Violet Madder @David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*) @Michal Valasek
in reply to European Commission

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Plan-A

 — (0.0.0.0)

@European Commission ! billion and they ask us to work till nearly 70 years old and and only has Austerity for a lego army to fight an invisible enemy to us all. But for that they got a billion euro... shame on you EU! look at your streets with homeless people , healthcare and stupid poliltics never been elected by any majority.
You are no thing just gppd to maybe and I say maybe defend pwn terrritory , you can't handle world crisis, you are pro Zionist , you are racists as well and don't show me colored people you are racist about a religion while you don't exercise your own but praise it in the name of EU .
I wish we were pre EURO > life was 100 times better!
You angered everyone farmers till cleaners around , sacked a country to debth and you think you are the image of the world?
let us all get back to our own sovereign nations please.
Only united nations on Earth with a mix of languages and one part pay for the other and you are just a proxy army of the USA while they left us by now.

! billion for your AI but people loose their social revenues and social rights , healthcare is lowest point in history and your politics are a joke!
And we must work to death to finance your Lego army against no enemy but yourself.

EU must be broken down and get back to where we were before 2K before the euro.

You do no thing good to your people, nothing.

1 Billion could have saved many poor people to pay their bills as now , is that AI gonna solve this?

You are just thugz, thieves in my eyes. With authority that no one voted for.
People do not come to EU is a shithole.

Since EU .. life got more and more miserable.

Fuck EU and let me be in my own Country again as before.

@European Commission
Unknown parent

mastodon - Link to source

David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)

@michaelormsby
I find it's a pretty good filter. If something describes itself as machine learning (ML), then it's a good sign that someone has thought about the problem and concluded that an example-based inference system is a better fit than a rule-based system, and then built one. In contrast, if someone markets the thing as 'AI' then it's almost certainly a problem in search of a solution. And, even when the problem is real, probably not the best approach to solving it.
@michaelormsby
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