The US and UK approach to regulating AI is a “winning strategy,” according to former Google chief Eric Schmidt, while the EU is lagging through its "strong" regulation and a lack of integrated markets. Speaking in Paris after the AI Action Summit, the billionaire tech investor said of Europe that "the system doesn't work right. They can't build big enough companies. The markets are not integrated.”
The US and UK approach to regulating AI is a “winning strategy,” according to former Google chief Eric Schmidt, while the EU is lagging through its "strong" regulation and a lack of integrated markets.Speaking in Paris after the AI Action Summit, Schmidt said the UK government seems to want to do US-style regulation in a consultative way. “It looks to me like the pairing of the US and the UK is a winning strategy. And it looks to me like the Europeans, because of Brussels, are being held behind,” Schmidt said in a BBC interview this morning.
The US and UK were notable in not signing the final declaration of the Paris summit. US Vice President JD Vance told the event that foreign regulators are “tightening the screws” on US companies (see here). The UK government has said it didn’t agree with all of the declaration, that there were some national security concerns and that it didn’t serve the national interest (see here).
Schmidt, a billionaire who was Google's chief executive for a decade from 2001 and more recently has funded and helped lead AI and other tech ventures, said he spent “at least 10 years to try to get Europe to up to the bar” and praised the talent pool, but he said "the system doesn't work right. They can't build big enough companies. The markets are not integrated.”
This is only partly due to Europe's business environment, he said. The rest is down to EU policy makers promising a uniform market but not delivering, and for regulating in a “particularly strong way.”
The result of this is that an AI-driven future, which Schmidt said he sees as the most important advance since electricity, is not going to be “invented in Europe, and that's to Europe's disservice.” Europe could do it, he said, “but it's chosen not to do it. And I'm really quite brutal on this.”
The UK, as the birthplace of AI venture DeepMind — bought by Google in 2014 — should take the company’s achievements as a point of national pride, Schmidt said.
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