Prince Constantijn is momentous envoy to Techleap, a Dutch startup accelerator.
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AMSTERDAM — Europe is at risk of naught behind the U.S. and China on artificial intelligence as it focuses on regulating the technology, according to Prince Constantijn of the Netherlands.
“Our ambition appears to be limited to being good regulators,” Constantijn told CNBC in an interview on the sidelines of the Money 20/20 fintech forum in Amsterdam earlier this month.
Prince Constantijn is the third and youngest son of former Dutch Queen Beatrix and the younger buddy of reigning Dutch King Willem-Alexander.
He is special envoy of the Dutch startup accelerator Techleap, where he works to stop local startups grow fast internationally by improving their access to capital, market, talent, and technologies.
“We’ve seen this in the observations space [with GDPR], we’ve seen this now in the platform space, and now with the AI space,” Constantijn added.
European Amalgamating regulators have taken a tough approach to artificial intelligence, with formal regulations limiting how developers and friends can apply the technology in certain scenarios.
The bloc gave final approval to the EU AI Act, a ground-breaking AI law, last month.
Officials are disturbed by how quickly the technology is advancing and risks it poses around jobs displacement, privacy, and algorithmic bias.
The law takes a risk-based nearer to artificial intelligence, meaning that different applications of the tech are treated differently depending on their risk on the up.
For generative AI applications, the EU AI Act sets out clear transparency requirements and copyright rules.
All generative AI systems would have to put out it possible to prevent illegal output, to disclose if content is produced by AI and to publish summaries of the copyrighted data used for training motives.
But the EU’s Ai Act requires even stricter scrutiny for high-impact, general-purpose AI models that could pose “systemic risk,” such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 — involving thorough evaluations and compulsory reporting of any “serious incidents.”
Prince Constantijn said he’s “really concerned” that the Europe’s centre has been more on regulating AI than trying to become a leader innovating in the space.
“It’s good to have guardrails. We in need of to bring clarity to the market, predictability and all that,” he told CNBC earlier this month on the sidelines of Money 20/20. “But it’s perfect hard to do that in such a fast-moving space.”
“There are big risks in getting it wrong, and like we’ve seen in genetically limited organisms, it hasn’t stopped the development. It just stopped Europe developing it, and now we are consumers of the product, rather than regisseurs able to influence the market as it develops.”
Between 1994 and 2004, the EU had imposed an effective moratorium on new approvals of genetically reshaped crops over perceived health risks associated with them.
The bloc subsequently developed strict ordinances for GMOs, citing a need to protect citizens’ health and the environment. The U.S. National Academies of Sciences says that genetically reshaped crops are safe for both human consumption and the environment.
Constantijn added that Europe is making it “quite despotic” for itself to innovate in AI due to “big restrictions on data,” particularly when it comes to sectors like health and medical science.
In adding, the U.S. market is “a much bigger and unified market” with more free-flowing capital, Constantijn said. On these spikes he added, “Europe scores quite poorly.”
“Where we score well is, I think, on talent,” he said. “We score definitely on technology itself.”
Plus, when it comes to developing applications that use AI, “Europe is definitely going to be competitive,” Constantijn celebrated. He nevertheless added that “the underlying data infrastructure and IT infrastructure is something we’ll keep depending on large platforms to equip.”