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\n Founder of French left-wing party La France Insoumise and presidential candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon visits the VivaTech technology startups and innovation fair at the Paris Expo Porte de Versailles, in Paris on Friday. | AFP photo
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Europe risks \u2018total technological irrelevance\u2019 if it fails to develop sovereign capabilities, the head of Canadian AI startup Cohere warned Thursday on the sidelines of the Vivatech trade fair in Paris.<\/p>\n
Aidan Gomez spoke to AFP the day after a G7 meeting in Evian, eastern France, where he and other AI luminaries including OpenAI\u2019s Sam Altman and Anthropic\u2019s Dario Amodei were invited to join leaders of the world\u2019s top industrial nations.<\/p>\n
Without tech built on home soil, \u2018your data, your productivity, your critical industries, your ability to defend yourself, it will be what others allow,\u2019 Gomez said.<\/p>\n
Vivatech has been overshadowed by European tech sovereignty concerns, after Anthropic withdrew access entirely to its most powerful models, Mythos and Fable, in response to a White House order that they be kept out of foreign hands.<\/p>\n
\u2018It\u2019s like everyone got cold water splashed on their face,\u2019 Gomez said.<\/p>\n
He has striven to place Cohere as a sovereign alternative in both the European and Asian markets.<\/p>\n
The 2019-founded company builds AI models for businesses and governments, shunning the consumer applications explored by its giant American rivals.<\/p>\n
Instead, its offerings focus on concrete applications in health, finance, energy and national security.<\/p>\n
Truly sovereign capability requires \u2018a set of technical guarantees,\u2019 Gomez said: \u2018infrastructure that you control, that is run by a sovereign entity… meaning a company and champion within your nation.\u2019<\/p>\n
As global tech firms scramble to respond to governments\u2019 urgent quest to escape US or Chinese reach, many are offering solutions of their own marketed as \u2018sovereign\u2019.<\/p>\n
But \u2018there\u2019s so much sovereignty washing, where solutions that are no at all contributing to diversification or resilience are being painted in that light,\u2019 Gomez said.<\/p>\n
Cohere does not operate its own data centres, planning instead to deploy its software on infrastructure owned by local companies like France\u2019s Mistral or Germany\u2019s Deutsche Telekom.<\/p>\n
Those AI models \u2018require enormous resources\u2019 to develop, Gomez said. \u2018Each country can\u2019t build its own model, that\u2019s the reality we have to face.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018What we need are a number of champions distributed across democracies and then democracies collaborating together to build those champions up,\u2019 he urged.<\/p>\n
Cohere sees Europe as a natural sphere of expansion in that light, as a \u2018democratic stronghold\u2019 against the tech prowess of autocracies such as China.<\/p>\n
The Canadian company last month announced it was buying German startup Aleph Alpha with backing from both governments.<\/p>\n
With dual headquarters in Toronto and Berlin, the merged entity is valued at around $20 billion.<\/p>\n
Since then it has also snapped up Canadian-German biomedical startup Reliant AI.<\/p>\n
And it signed partnerships in May with Spanish firms Indra, a defence specialist, and Multiverse computing, which develops AI software.<\/p>\n
Canada and Europe have a \u2018historic alignment (and) values alignment,\u2019 said Gomez, whose mother is British and father is Spanish.<\/p>\n
He himself lives in London, where Cohere recently beefed up its offices.<\/p>\n
The company now numbers around 700 staff and is preparing a new fundraising round.<\/p>\n
Europe is Cohere\u2019s second-largest region for revenue behind North America, Gomez said.<\/p>\n
\u2018We\u2019re seeing a rapid uptake\u2019 of AI in Europe, the CEO said.<\/p>\n
He added that he puts no stock in calls for a pause in AI development to properly weigh the technology\u2019s dangers, issued in early June by American giants including OpenAI and Anthropic.<\/p>\n
\u2018I think no-one is going to pause. It\u2019s a very silly posture. It\u2019s not realistic,\u2019 he said.<\/p>\n
\u2018If anything, Canada and Europe have to go much, much faster.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Founder of French left-wing party La France Insoumise and presidential candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon visits…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":75505,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3006,3005,3003,3000,3002,2999,4,3004,3001,2997,2998],"class_list":["post-75504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-europe","tag-bangla-online-news","tag-bangladesh-latest-news","tag-bangladesh-news","tag-bangladesh-newspaper","tag-bangladeshi-newspapers","tag-daily-new-age","tag-europe","tag-latest-bangladesh-news","tag-most-popular-outspoken-english-daily-newpaper-in-bangladesh","tag-new-age","tag-the-new-age"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75504"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75504\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75505"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}