Prince Constantijn is a special envoy for Techleap, a Dutch startup accelerator.
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AMSTERDAM – Europe is at risk of falling behind the United States and China in artificial intelligence as it focuses on regulating the technology, according to Prince Constantijn of the Netherlands.
“Our ambitions seem to be limited to being good regulators,” Constantijn told CNBC in an interview on the sidelines of the Money 20/20 fintech conference in Amsterdam earlier this month.
Prince Constantijn is the third and youngest son of the former Queen of the Netherlands Beatrix and the younger brother of the reigning King of the Netherlands Willem-Alexander.
He is a special representative of the Dutch startup accelerator Techleap, where he works to help local startups grow quickly internationally by improving their access to capital, markets, talent and technology.
“We saw this in the data space [with GDPR]“We’ve seen this now in the platform space and now in the AI space,” Constantijn added.
European Union regulators are taking a tough approach to artificial intelligence, with formal regulations limiting how developers and companies can apply the technology in certain scenarios.
The bloc last month gave final approval to the EU AI Act, a groundbreaking AI law.
Officials are concerned about how quickly technology is evolving and the risks it poses in terms of job displacement, privacy and algorithmic bias.
The law takes a risk-based approach to artificial intelligence, meaning that different applications of the technology are treated differently depending on the level of risk.
The EU AI law sets clear transparency requirements and copyright rules for generative AI applications.
All generative AI systems would need to make it possible to prevent illegal spending, disclose whether content was produced by AI, and publish summaries of proprietary data for training purposes.
But the EU AI law requires even stricter scrutiny for high-impact general-purpose AI models that could pose a “systemic risk,” such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 — including thorough assessments and mandatory reporting of all “serious incidents.”
Prince Constantijn said he was “really concerned” that Europe’s focus had been more on regulating AI than on trying to take a leadership role in innovation in the field.
“It’s good to have guard rails. We want to bring clarity to the market, predictability and all that,” he told CNBC on the sidelines of Money 20/20 earlier this month. “But that’s very difficult in such a fast-moving environment.”
“There are big risks in getting it wrong, and as we’ve seen with genetically modified organisms, it hasn’t stopped development. It has only prevented Europe from developing it and now we are consumers of the product and no longer producers able to influence market development.”
Between 1994 and 2004, the EU imposed an effective moratorium on the new approval of genetically modified plants because of the associated health risks.
The bloc subsequently developed strict rules on GMOs, citing the need to protect citizens’ health and the environment. The U.S. National Academies of Sciences says genetically modified crops are safe for both human consumption and the environment.
Constantijn added that Europe is finding it “quite difficult” to drive innovation in AI because of “severe data limitations,” particularly in areas such as healthcare and medical science.
Additionally, the U.S. market is “a much larger and unified market” with more free-flowing capital, Constantijn said. On these points he added: “Europe is doing pretty badly.”
“Where we score well, I think, is because of talent,” he said. “We score points with the technology itself.”
And when it comes to developing applications that use AI, “Europe will definitely be competitive,” noted Constantijn. Still, he added that “the underlying data and IT infrastructure is something we will continue to rely on large platforms for.”
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2024-06-26 05:28:47
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