Artificial Intelligence - Research in Germany

Sunny California seems to be the global pacemaker of major innovations in the IT and high–tech industries: The Internet giants Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon, like many other tech companies, have their headquarters in Silicon Valley. The innovative start–up scene in the Bay Area is at the forefront of developments in artificial intelligence (AI) – closely followed by China. And where do we stand? How does the German economy manage to keep up in the race? Germany & Silicon Valley: Shaping a shared digital future" in Mountain View, leading voices from politics, business and science have conducted a global assessment of the current situation. We participated in the conference with the project "FutureWork360". The aim of the project is to use virtual reality to make our innovation laboratories accessible worldwide on an Internet platform and thereby promoting international networking. For three days, the Computer History Museum – not far from Google's headquarters – was transformed into a forum for the exchange of knowledge on AI. Leaders from the digital economy, research and politics came together to discuss how Germany and the Silicon Valley can work together to harness the tremendous opportunities of AI, robotics and other new digital technologies while effectively addressing the social, economic and political challenges they present. Because we are in the midst of a huge social upheaval – we are walking into a future in which AI–controlled machines think, make decisions and perform tasks, which we once thought were clearly "human". The USA is the breeding ground of digital talent among all countries with about 3000 PhD students per year in the field of AI (for comparison: in Germany there are about 170). Furthermore, five of the top ten and 134 of the 500 most powerful commercially available supercomputers are currently located in the US. The largest number of AI start–ups also gather there. Three–quarters of all internationally enforced AI patents were filed by US players, compared to only two percent from the German counterparts. The figures show how urgent it is for Europeans, and especially Germans, to catch up in the key technology of artificial intelligence. Christoph Keese, CEO of Axel Springer hy GmbH, summarizes the situation in his words: "We must finally wake up and stop investing so little in AI.