Let's Accelerate, Please.
How can we decelerate if we haven't even begun racing? Everyone is interpreting the call from the American 'labs' (read: for-profit companies) in their own way. Marketing, regulatory capture, a true warning to heed. One way or another, young Europeans like me don't play a role in the future they are discussing. That scares me, and it scares me more that so few of us are speaking up about it.
Sure, call it doomerism. Name the nuances and counters: the American data centre buildout that doesn't seem economically secure, the real architectural limits in LLMs, and that we shouldn't listen to every tech bro suddenly turned policy writer.
I too cringe whenever someone puts a percentage and a year on human extinction; nobody can predict the future. But I think it's important that we do realise what fuels this extreme tone and the fast-paced, risky choices around AI in America and China: the belief that this is a zero-sum game, where winning is everything. We can disagree with their strategies and still take them seriously. It's unwise to completely rule out recursive self-improvement being close, or the science-fiction scenarios the companies are actively building toward. In these futures, our comfortable European lives, with democratic values, social security, culture, and beautiful cities all around us to enjoy, are not a given. Right now we aren't in a position to defend any of that. The numbers show how horribly behind we are, and that has to change.
Meanwhile I see way too many people my age busy with templatable 'digital transformations' and workflow automations, building an AI wrapper-app chasing a quick exit, or leaving the EU for wherever they think will actually let them build the real breakthroughs. I urge you to reconsider the role you could play in the AI race. It poses many a problem that we, the younger generations, have the most influence on. We work with this technology every day, pick up on change the fastest, and see where it's heading before most others do. A change needs to come from us; if too many of us sit idly by, the progress we urgently need won't happen.
If you care about European values and our way of life, and think they're worth getting behind, don't just wait and see how things turn out. Opportunity is right at your doorstep:
- Help build green datacenters and sustainable compute: Leafcloud and AQ Compute are proof it works.
- Push for stronger, more efficient models, whether that's EBMs, World Models, or whatever comes next; Wayve and AMI Labs are already working on this.
- Bring AI into the physical world: Europe has deep robotics and industrial know-how to build on; Neura Robotics and PhysicsX are two of the places doing it.
- Describe the AI safety world you want, and actually push for it, the way SAIN and Apollo Research do.
- Take it to your local government and Brussels; the Talos Fellowship is one real way in.
Don't let boomers or out of touch people tell you we don't have the work ethic, but most importantly, don't tell yourself you're not technical enough, or that you don't have it in you to make a meaningful dent in the AI revolution. You don't have to know everything from the start; most people in the AI space don't even understand what gradient descent is nowadays. Find the place where you can make an impact, and if you can't find it, start something of your own with a highly ambitious vision.
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