Tom’s view
There are apocalyptic scenarios, and there are apocalyptic scenarios.
Right now, Europe has just one AI firm, Mistral, anywhere near the frontier — and only a fraction of the 25 gigawatts of AI compute that the US has. If Europe doesn’t change course, it risks becoming an economic backwater, asset-stripped and descending into anarchy, according to Europe 2031, a research project I recently worked on with a group of tech policy thinkers and investors. It was inspired by AI Futures Project’s AI 2027 report, which warned of AI destroying humanity by the early 2030s.
As a pro-European, I found the whole experience pretty alarming. My fellow writers think Europe’s collapse would be a disaster, but they also think that there are far worse outcomes on the table, up to and including human extinction. (The US government, for its part, seems intent on pushing Anthropic, OpenAI, and other companies to win the global AI race, despite some political hiccups along the way.)
Some Europeans think that AI leaders are deploying catastrophic risks as a way to market their products: Our products are so powerful they could destroy the world, imagine what they could do for your B2B sales! But I think that undersells the powerful, and in many ways still untested, technology. As I wrote in my first book, back in 2019 — long before AI was a multibillion-dollar industry with products to sell — many of the most senior AI figures were already worried about the technology’s real-world implications. But that didn’t stop them from forging ahead. When people like Dario Amodei talk about “existential danger,” they mean it, just as they mean it when they say that a positive AI outcome could mean an end to climate change, poverty, and disease.
Who is right? I don’t know. But I do know that 100 years ago, it would have been wise to listen to the group of physicists who thought splitting the atom could lead to a devastating new weapon, rather than blindly trusting the ones who thought it was “merest moonshine.” If some of tech’s smartest minds are warning that the new technology they are creating comes with terrible risks, we should at least consider it a live possibility, even if it sounds like science fiction or hype. But that shouldn’t derail Europe from trying to develop a safe and secure AI industry of its own.
Notable
- Mistral’s CEO told CNBC in May the company is looking into designing its own chips as it seeks to cut down on token costs and wean off its reliance on Nvidia.