Should Europe leave frontier AI to the Americans and the Chinese? The idea has gained ground in Eur...

Arthur Mensch on X: "Should Europe leave frontier AI to the Americans and the Chinese? The idea has gained ground in Europe. It is a fundamental mistake. Build or surrender: for now, the choice is still ours. Full article below. https://t.co/v1biuiXoYe" / X

Arthur Mensch

@arthurmensch

Should Europe leave frontier AI to the Americans and the Chinese? The idea has gained ground in Europe. It is a fundamental mistake. Build or surrender: for now, the choice is still ours. Full article below.

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Build or surrender

4 min read

An idea has gained ground in Europe: we should leave frontier AI models to the Americans and the Chinese. It is advocated by serious people, whose reasoning has its logic. A frontier model costs hundreds of millions of euros per generation, and soon billions. Better, they argue, to follow the internet playbook, where value was created at the application layer, and to focus our efforts on what Europe does well: its industrial data, its small and medium-sized businesses, its domain expertise. For everything else, they say, open models released by others should be enough.

This is a fundamental mistake. It will end up costing Europe what remains of its place in the world and lock it into a regime of economic dependence unprecedented in the history of civilizations.

The Cloud and software value has gone elsewhere

Europe followed the internet playbook. We developed the applications and left the platforms to others. Twenty years later, the value has gone elsewhere. European companies pay more than €260 billion every year to American cloud and software providers. Europe has become the continent that consumes what others build.

Whoever controls the model sets the terms

AI is not the internet. The internet ran on open protocols that nobody owned. Closed AI models, by contrast, have an owner. What an application or an agent can do is decided by the model, and whoever controls the model sets the terms: they change the price, restrict uses, withdraw a version. Every decision made upstream is imposed on the entire chain. Those who build on top bear the consequences, with no say in the matter.

The risk is anything but theoretical. Last June, an American lab suspended access to its most advanced models. Access was restored. But the decision was not made in Europe, nor for European reasons. Nobody asked for our opinion.

A vital matter of security and progress

Some will reply that open models solve the problem. That is partly true. An open model can be downloaded, self-hosted, and audited. But without actively contributing to the ecosystem, you cannot choose what gets released, nor when, nor under what license the next version will ship. Dependence on others, even on their openness, is still dependence.

Building frontier AI systems is becoming a vital matter of security. Models are now taking on a central role in cyber defense and in protecting critical infrastructure. A state must be able to audit the systems it uses, adapt them to its needs, and be certain it will still have access to them tomorrow. With a model designed and controlled elsewhere, none of these three conditions is guaranteed over time.

欧洲基础研究也面临着同样的问题。前沿模型如今已成为各领域科研进步不可或缺的工具，但它们正被某些公司独占使用，这些公司有强烈动机保护其研究优势，不愿共享访问权限。使用人工智能进行人工智能研究，既加速了我们自身的发展，也加快了竞争对手的进步，这凸显出非常显著的阈值效应。

将研究与部署对立的陷阱

因此，将前沿人工智能研究与工业人工智能部署对立起来是一种陷阱。当然，欧洲的部分增长将来自为工业定制的人工智能。但这需要建立一个属于欧洲的人工智能产业，而不是接受一个我们只是租户的产业。从我们的客户身上可以看到这一点：对于最苛刻的应用场景，掌握模型不是一种奢侈，而是前提条件。你不能仅仅通过导入模型就学会如何有效地修改和使用它。

构建前沿人工智能所需条件

欧洲拥有构建这些系统的能力。Black Forest Labs 和 ElevenLabs 两家欧洲公司，正在其领域内生产最佳模型。在 Mistral，我们的研究人员和工程师分布在巴黎、伦敦、慕尼黑、巴塞罗那、华沙以及美国，我们在美国出口产品。尽管资源有限，我们训练的通用推理模型如今已跻身最佳开源模型之列，与多个应用领域的世界顶级专用模型齐名。

此外，我们确切知道如何提升自身表现。我们计划在未来一年内将计算能力提升六倍，这建立在我们对方法和运营所获得的信心基础上。拥有更多资本，我们可以加速前进，我们也将筹集这些资金。

打破悲观主义

缩小差距首要任务是打破悲观主义。我们不断被告知游戏已经结束，欧洲已经失败。这种说法对领先者有利。它无需真实就能生效：只要我们相信它即可。在 Mistral，这种说法已经持续三年针对我们，而我们也在过去三年中不断证明它错误。

如果欧洲屈服，人工智能将继续在别处被构建，我们将只能接触到收费高达数万亿欧元的二流出口版本。这将抹杀任何增长或权力的前景。甚至可能阻止我们作为一个社会继续团结在一起。

建造或投降：目前，选择权仍在我们手中。

联合创始人兼首席执行官

@MistralAI

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