EU plans to 'mobilize' €200B to invest in AI to catch up with US and China European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen says the EU will top up a continental AI push to hit €200 billion ($207 billion). The funding comes as Europe looks over its shoulder nervously at the US's $500 billion Stargate Project and new Chinese AI contender DeepSeek. The €150 billion ($155 billion) in the European AI …
That should be "fewer" - immigrants can be counted.
But why is there a competition between EU/US/China to get best AI (for some unknown value of best)? And it's not really AI. As has been said many times before the 'large language model', currently marketed as AI, is just a statistical engine working on already known (plundered) data - an inference (deduction) engine if you like. The induction side of inference is marked by what are colloquially known as hallucinations.
Leavers did not want fewer immigrants, they wanted fewer unskilled immigrants.
Both Farage and Boris said they expected the number of skilled immigrants to increase. Farage gave the example of Indian doctors working in the NHS in the 70s as an example of the immigration the UK wanted - its pretty visible its happening again, except this time its African doctors.
The reactionary "nationalists" have an international movement with think-tanks using government funding to tell citizens of one nation or the other to liberate themselves from the nanny state.
Meanwhile, the internationalist "liberal" governments are all racing each other to beat each other to buy more foreign components to trump other nations at being an LLM host.
It's a self-parody at this point.
The Commission yesterday decided to withdraw its long-stalled ePrivacy Regulation and the Artificial Intelligence Liability Directive (AILD), long feared by the tech sector as it would have made it much easier for people to sue companies over damages caused by AI tech.
I find the very concept of "derisking" a cynical, speculative, multi-billion-Euro mega-corpo investment into a technology bubble optimised and designed to automate humanity in order to facilitate mundanity to be, in a word: abhorrent.
Out there – outside my house – on the streets, there's the run up to the German elections going on and I find a lot of that campaigning to be abhorrent, too. One poster reads: "freedom will not vote for itself," as if slavery is humanity's default state and not forced upon us by evil lords. Another says that the party behind it does not care about the climate disaster, only for people, as if people do not breath air or eat food or walk about beneath our atmosphere.
There is a striking common trend, however: every party – even the conservative CSU/CDU union – appears to be trying their damnedest to appeal to those with an appetite for drastic change. This includes those same parties who designed, built and instituted the status quo. They all perceive that people are not happy and are becoming ever more unhappy with the erosion of their safety, their freedoms, their prosperity and their way of life – even their menus for dinner as the cost of living creeps ever upwards.
I revile the AfD and abhor their dog-whistle politics. I don't get a vote. I live here. I pay taxes. I have lived and paid taxes in three "democracies", on three distinct continents, and I'm the most useless alternative-universe version of Jason Fucking Borne: no lack of citizenships and passports have I, just no vote that means anything at all. I would vote against the AfD as strongly as I would vote against the CSU/CDU or the FDP – or the Tories, in Britain, were I there.
But when I read that *my* tax money is being put up to "derisk" these corporations and their frivolous bets on an AI horse, I can absolutely understand why the people out there vote for an alternative.
If you can't decide whether to buy futures in AI or short-sell the obvious bubble, what do you do? You spend the tax-payer's money on it and take your cut under the table, of course!
One more rich opportunity for companies that provide nothing of value.
Isn't it nice to be part of the First World, with money to waste ?
Meanwhile, we have an industry in tatters, and people who have to choose between feeding themselves and staying warm.
Yeah. AI. That's really a priority.
Let's be honest: most money spent on AI would
a) do little to benefit the taxpayers it was taken from
b) go to feed a former ally, who's broken all vows of fealty.
Sounds as if it was proposed by OpenAI, another self-serving "intelligence".
BTW: when I asked DeepSeek (run locally, fresh start) on what was the equivalent of Paris in Germany, 70% of the answer was waxing on about how China was all about World peace... when I asked, why it had mentioned China, it was at a bit of a loss to explain its bias...
Not quite after a fresh start, when I asked who Marie-Antoinette's mother was (Maria-Theresa, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and queen of Austria), it contended that she had "no biological mother", and that she somehow died in obscurity decades after being executed...
It's much easier to see how AI would make mistakes in life-and-death situations than how it's to benefit humans.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
