EU and Japan Look To Partner On AI and Chips

The European Union (EU) is seeking closer cooperation with Japan in areas such as artificial intelligence to reduce reliance on China. CNBC reports: EU Commissioner Thierry Breton is meeting with the Japanese government on Monday, and artificial intelligence will be "very high" on his agenda, he said in a video posted on Twitter on Sunday. "I will engage with [the] Japanese government ... on how we can organize our digital space, including AI based on our shared value," Breton said.

Breton also said there will be an EU-Japan Digital Partnership council, to discuss areas including quantum and high-performance computing. The EU held a similar council with South Korea last week, in which the two sides agreed to cooperate on technologies such as AI and cybersecurity. Partnerships with key Asian countries with strong technology sectors come as the EU looks to "de-risk" from China -- a different approach from that of the U.S., which has sought to decouple its economy from Beijing. Part of that EU strategy involves deepening the relationship with allied countries around technology.

Breton told Reuters on Monday that the bloc and Japan will cooperate in the area of semiconductors. Japan is a key country in the semiconductor supply chain, and Tokyo has been looking to strengthen its domestic industry. Last week, a fund backed by the Japanese government proposed to buy domestic chipmaking firm JSR for around 903.9 billion yen ($6.3 billion). The EU has also been looking to strengthen its own semiconductor industry across the bloc.

Totally makes sense

[ZipNada]

Its a good move on the part of the EU, and I can see how it will benefit Japan too. They both need to do this in order to remain relevant in the face of massive national investments elsewhere - the US in particular.

'Partnerships with key Asian countries with strong technology sectors come as the EU looks to "de-risk" from China'

I think it serves to isolate China further, and in my view this is well deserved. China has an awful lot of hostility going on recently and is in no way trustworthy. Now we see that they are already trying to leverage their advantage in minerals and metals, very threatening.

Two non-player playing pretend

[Anonymous Coward]

To develop AI you need huge amounts of data. American companies like FAANG got data, Chinese companies like BAT got data. How much data do EU & Japan companies have on hand? They don't have any company comparable to FAANG or BAT in terms of data size, even if you put EU & Japanese companies together.

The only result of this partnership is more public money being funnelled to private hands, while pretending to develop AI.

Re:

[VeryFluffyBunny]

My prediction: In a future stage, LLMs are going to go specialised, i.e. taking narrower, more specific samples of language (discourse) for their corpora, e.g. academic corpora, business corpora, & narrative & theatrical corpora, & British vs American vs English as an international language (EIL) corpora. I reckon the development will follow more or less a similar trajectory to corpus linguistics a few decades ago but I suspect it'll all happen a lot faster.

The interwebs pipes in general are

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

That could be a huge advantage for the EU. AI models not trained by copyright infringement and stolen personal data could be valuable. Merely coming from a country that doesn't have strong copyright protects and privacy laws could be a major obstacle to adoption.

What about the UK?

[Epeeist]

Every one knows that the UK is a world-beater at AI. At least that's what the Prime Minister tells us...

Al's chips are the best in town.

[VeryFluffyBunny]

Come & get while they're still crunchy. For those of you who speak British, they're re-branded as Allan's crisps. As to why they'd want to make them all the way over in Japan & then ship them here is a mystery to me.