The AI Gigafactories call is now open.

[moskitokoenig@dizl.de]

»This is a milestone for Europe in becoming an AI Continent.«
These days, I just find myself shaking my head more and more every day.

@HennaVirkkunen

[nickeast_indiewriter@mastodon.art]

@HennaVirkkunen Even if we disregard all the ethical issues of LLMs like theft, scams, and so much more.
Even then when the AI bubble collapses that'll be €30 billion down the drain.
This will go down as one of the worst decision anyone in the EU has ever made....

[j_bertolotti@mathstodon.xyz]

@HennaVirkkunen If only I could vote you out of your position I would. And the world would be a slightly better place.

[adora@critter.cafe]

@HennaVirkkunen Well fuck you.

[kbal@fedia.io]

Attempting to rebrand your AI datacentres as “gigafactories” is an impressively bad way to announce this mistake. They are not factories. They do not manufacture anything. They run software, and they soak up surplus investment capital and other resources which are for some reason in need of burning.

People of the recent past and the recent future alike would have a hard time understanding how anyone could think that “Europe becoming an AI Continent” is a phrase that could be taken seriously by anyone.

[cohentheblue@ohai.social]

@HennaVirkkunen Why. Is there actually a structured plan on how to measure for outcomes and test before building all that out?

Or is it just "they have money, let's sell all we can of our countries because obviously money is gonna feed us and make our society better!" /s

[marija_@mastodon.social]

@HennaVirkkunen Sovereignty without accountability becomes GovOS theater.

[stonebear2@hachyderm.io]

@ansuz @engineer @danielquinn @HennaVirkkunen

I have an idea here: We *do* need to get off the Amerikaanse bigtech cloud. Let's build datacentres, but let's design them so they're (a) _efficient_ and (b) _flexible_, so when we finally get 'round to actually building them (and may it be because AI collapses tomorrow, with all its inefficiency and theft and planet-harming), we can build for ordinary cloud load, sustainable power, and a general win-win for everybody, not just billionaires pushing AI.

[hazzcon@mastodon.sdf.org]

@HennaVirkkunen that is some strong bullshit right there. AI continent my ass.

[vanecx@mastodon.pirateparty.be]

@HennaVirkkunen What a waste of resources
Please invest that money in digital commons instead, we need more democratic spaces and practices

[research_ftw@sciences.social]

@HennaVirkkunen Wow, you mean the AI bubble that's about to pop and cost trillions on wasted pointless data centres?
You are a bit behind the times!

[david_chisnall@infosec.exchange]

@HennaVirkkunen

So, just to confirm: you observed the US become dominated by billionaires and exploitative companies who are throwing trillions or dollars at technology that provides marginal (at best) benefits to society and entrenches their power, and your reaction was 'the EU should do that too!'?

For comparison, the amount that you're burning on this is more than twice as much as you'd need for the EU to build a competitive range of memory-safe sovereign CPUs from microcontroller up to server class devices and port most open-source software to run on them. This would reduce the attack surface for all EU infrastructure significantly and provide strong sovereignty guarantees.

Can you share how you did a cost-benefit calculation and decided that chasing a big-tech fad was the best return on investment for the bloc?

[cohentheblue@ohai.social]

@vanecx @HennaVirkkunen Public money, public code.

[stx@mastodon.scot]

@HennaVirkkunen Green doesn't suit you btw, maybe a blood red would be a better look.

[jussi@sielun.romu.casa]

@HennaVirkkunen Henna Virkkunen, palokunnassa sytytyspuolella. Toivottavasti sujahtaa sopivasti euroja taskuun niin ei tarvitse tuntea omantunnontuskia.

[rupert@mastodon.nz]

@HennaVirkkunen Which Europeans did you ask if they *wanted* Europe to become an "AI continent"?
Because an overwhelming majority of us don't.

[hsza@social.tudbut.de]

@HennaVirkkunen do you hear yourself

[dataknightmare@mastodon.xyz]

@HennaVirkkunen

not a single person in your entourage with the know-how and the guts to tell you that mimicking the US in their descent into tech -fascism is the dumbest possible move?
Can you at least explain how this squandering of resources should be supposed to help EU industry at all?

[jt_rebelo@ciberlandia.pt]

@robelix being an EU financed project, they'll do the same they did in Web3/NFT/Blockchain: allow the projects to go forward while knowing fully well that it'll never bring anything to fruition.
@HennaVirkkunen

[radicalabacus@hachyderm.io]

@HennaVirkkunen the nuclear power station Romania had to shut down due to lack of water provides 1.3GW; 20% of the nation's electricity, or enough for 1 or 2 large AI data centers. These things are opportunities to send huge amounts of money out of the EU to import hardware that will be worthless within 3 years and will consume obscene amounts of power in the meantime