Yeah, I'm not against AI research fundamentally, I just think they are (i) investing in the wrong kind of AI research and (ii) investing more in AI than desirable given the numerous other challenges which are under-funded in comparison. I'm going to argue this in a bit more detail:

(ii)

According to this article referenced by OP's article the EU is going to spend about 35% of 200 billion, so 70 billion, for AI. Imagine they'd invest just 1 percent of that into FOSS. The German sovereign tech fund, which is hugely successful, has a budget of around 20 million euro per year. That's literally nothing for a government. With 1% of the 70 billion, the EU could invest 700 million euro in digital sovereignty, which is more than SUSE's 2022 revenue and more than double the Linux Foundation's 2024 budget (around 290 million USD). Additionally, leading robotics company KUKA (meanwhile bought by a chinese firm) had just 4.4 billion USD revenue in 2022. All of the above ventures would provide better returns in terms of (a) improving labor productivity and (b) sovereignty versus USA's big tech and Chinese manufacturing. These 500k NVIDIA GPUs will become outdated within a few years, meanwhile it's still unclear if and how they will facilitate any benefit at all to EU citizens.

(i)

Now, IMO there are also decent ways to invest in AI: Invest in academic research and invest in under-developed areas of machine learning. Not every machine learning problem is an LLM problem. Today's transformer-based LLMs are only a small subset of the thinkable architectures of neural networks, let alone machine learning in general. Robotics (e.g. controlling robot arms in a more dynamic manner), medicine (e.g. protein folding), infrastructure (e.g. predicting failures, optimized planning) or economics (e.g. coordinating production processes to optimize cost/emissions/latency/fault tolerance) are all very concrete, high-value targets for research funding. Regulations like the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive are currently very expensive for small to medium size companies due to the bureaucratic overhead, but a EU-driven standard for digital and automated tracking of supply chain metrics could reduce the running cost to near-zero if implemented well. Companies like SAP (34 billion USD revenue in 2024), which is a leading company in enterprise resource planning, have the potential to co-develop and implement such standards to provide affordable yet precise enforcement of regulations. Also, if the EU defines such a standard, it will likely also be adopted by global suppliers because they need it to sell to EU customers. This would of in turn give EU software and cloud companies a huge advantage globally.

To summarize, both better AI and non-AI investments compared to the EU's planned AI/LLM training datacenters.

Sorry for the long post, but I feel it is neccessary to properly make my point. Am I making any sense? 🙃