🌍 A CERN for AI ? 🤖 👉 A few months ago, the European Group of Chief Scientific Advisors proposed a bold idea: creating a European research organization for artificial intelligence, modeled on the renowned CERN 🏛️. The European Commission quickly embraced the concept, and earlier this month, the Draghi Report reinforced the call for decisive EU action on AI, warning that "the risk for Europe is to be totally dependent on AI models designed and developed abroad." 🚨 🤔 In an earlier reflection, I explored whether a CERN for AI truly makes sense, given the multi-dimensional nature of AI's development and deployment needs. 👉 While CERN has undoubtedly been a global success in advancing nuclear research, it is, in many ways, a product of another era 🌐. Founded in 1954, CERN represented a singular institutional model—one that centralized cutting-edge research in a single location and under one governance structure. However, today's challenges in AI—and more broadly in the era of global digital governance—are far more complex. In our interconnected world, no single institution, no matter how well-funded or groundbreaking, can effectively manage the scale and diversity of AI development alone. 🤔 What’s the alternative? ➡️ Drawing inspiration from Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom's theory of "polycentric governance" 🏛️🔗, I suggest we must look beyond a singular European AI institution. ➡️ Instead, we should consider polycentric governance—a model where multiple autonomous, but overlapping, centers collaborate to manage shared resources and advance scientific progress. ➡️ This model encourages distributed collaboration, giving access to diverse actors across geographies and sectors. Such a model could ensure that the best minds, data, and resources from around Europe and the world are contributing to AI innovation in ways that are sustainable and responsible for all 🌱. ✍️ Eager to hear your and other POVs 💻 Toward a Polycentric or Distributed Approach to Artificial Intelligence & Science: https://lnkd.in/ezXxaX_Z 💻 Draghi Report - The future of European competitiveness (Part 2): https://lnkd.in/eg7Tzw3a (Jean-Claude Burgelman, Francesca Bria, David Osimo, Andrea Renda) #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Europe #CERNforAI #PolycentricGovernance #ElinorOstrom #Innovation #DigitalGovernance #Collaboration #AIResearch #EU #Draghireport
(A) there are many relevant EU inititives already (B) AI is much less about customized infra than CERN (C) this shoukd be a born PPP. My two cents: AI (totally overhyped btw) is not -just- about the algorithms, it is much more about high quality substrates to train models on. Violating copyrights, massive energy waste and prevention of good looking hallucinations by restricting outputs to conceptual models are the major challenges. I would not advise EC to be a copycat and ‘hesitate’ where others ‘innovate’ with our fatally slow ‘everyone should agree first’ approach once more. Distributed, high quality and well controlled data access to train any model and restricting the silicon valley moguls to grab whatever is out there should definitely be an element of whatever Europe decides (deciding is exactly where we always lose from US and Asian initiatives).
Coming from a distributed AI/social simulation background, I share a lot of similar ideas to yours. A polycentric & multi-disciplinarity approach to AI is definitively needed and tools from Collective Intelligence and Complex Systems Modelling might help to shape this approach. This is what we are trying to do at United Nations University Institute in Macau Regarding the compute needs, you might be interested to have a look to the ICAIN (International Computation and AI model): https://icain.ch/ They are trying to build an interesting model for sharing ressources with people from Global South. Happy to connect with you to discuss more in depth.
Are you trying to re-invent the university? Maybe what it is needed is a laboratory where the resources for AI research could be shared, which seems to be the barrier to entry to this technology, pooling hardware, data repositories and places where people can discuss face to face.
Relevant perspective, thank you Stefaan Verhulst, PhD! The next interesting question is how we can actively build a (European/global) science and capacity development network based on the very features of a polycentric governance system. We wrote about it wrt the polycentric climate governance nexus a couple of years ago, but applying it concretely to AI and emerging tech makes good sense, especially against the background of recent proposals from the 🇺🇳 Global Digital Compact and its implementation. https://direct.mit.edu/glep/article/17/2/45/14882/A-Polycentric-Approach-to-Global-Climate
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Sounds like you're calling for a European research programme. We could call it Horizon Europe, maybe?
Couldn't agree more Stefaan Verhulst, PhD, the framing of the AI CERN as a silver bullet is flawed. Elinor Ostrom to the rescue
Sounds a lot like semi-open science; open science, but on a European level.
Professor Emeritus Free University of Brussels; director Frontiers Planet Prize; Editor In Chief Frontiers Policy Lab
3moCouldn’t disagree more … the idea of a distributed effort sounds good, is intellectually attractive but will inevitably lead in Europe, to a distribution of resources. This approach has failed for all big Tech projects in Europe….