Europe’s bid to compete with the United States and China to stay at the forefront of artificial research has received a boost from AI founder Peter Sarlin and the Finnish government.
The Silo AI co-founder sold his startup to US chip giant AMD for $665 million in July and has now created a foundation to fund up to 15 AI researchers across Europe. Sarlin’s initial PS Foundation grant amounted to more than $10 million and is linked to the Finnish government’s allocation of a $10 million annual budget for a new AI research laboratory.
More than $80 billion has been invested in AI research in the last year, most of it in private startups rather than universities. That has helped drive a migration of talent from Europe’s universities and startups to international competitors with greater financial power. Sarlin hopes to change that. “I am concerned about Europe’s competitiveness,” he told Forbes . “Everyone expects a leap in productivity through AI, if that is going to benefit Europe, then Europe needs to have its own technology platforms.”
In recent years, European AI researchers have made some notable achievements. Deepmind’s Demis Hassabis and John Jumper won this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry for their research on protein folding; the large language models of the French company Mistral can compete directly with those of its American rivals; and the text-to-image generator Latent Diffusion, which helped spark public interest in generative AI, emerged from two German research universities. “Europe is doing very well in AI, but not in its commercialization,” Sarlin said. “We have the talent, the computing and the data.”
Finnish Science Minister Sari Multala said a Forbes that part of Sarlin’s donation will be used to establish a second branch of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) at Aalto University, Finland, as a first step in connecting the continent’s AI researchers. The first was created in 2022 at Stuttgart’s University of Tübingen with a $115 million donation from Hans-Werner Hector, one of the billionaire founders of German software giant SAP, following calls from some leading AI researchers. of Europe for a public sector AI laboratory with the same level of funding from the Max Planck Institute in Germany.
“We are a small country with a small linguistic group that is not spoken in any other country. It is very important that there are advances in artificial intelligence based on Finland, on our culture, on our legislation and on our language,” Multala told Forbes .
While Sarlin’s project will undoubtedly give a boost to Europe’s university AI labs, it is dwarfed by the massive flows of money going into private sector AI research. Venture capital fund Accel estimated that $80 billion has been invested in artificial intelligence startups this year alone. Sarlin thinks it’s a good start. “My background is in research and I have benefited a lot from free education in Finland. “This is my way of giving back,” he said.
This article was originally published by Forbes US.
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