OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and a host of other major tech companies have found common ground in F/ai, a new startup accelerator based out of Paris. The largest western AI labs are taking a break from sniping at one another to partner on a new accelerator program for European startups building applications on top of their models. Paris-based incubator Station F will run the program, named F/ai. On Tuesday, Station F announced it had partnered with Meta, Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, OpenAI and Mistral, which it says marks the first time the firms are all participating in a single accelerator. Other partners include cloud and semiconductor companies AWS, AMD, Qualcomm, and OVH Cloud.

Rückert's focus, though, is on more proactive AI applications that can make decisions on their own and control processes. Such AI agents, she believes, will give industry a boost comparable to the erstwhile advances triggered by smartphones and the internet. If a machine breaks down, the agent will check if the same problem has already been experienced in a different Bosch factory, examines handbooks and scans shift logs – before then proposing a possible solution within seconds. For more complex tasks, several agents can be combined, which then communicate with each other. Comprehensive use of such tools, says Rückert, can translate into millions in savings for individual factories.

This article was co-published with Understanding AI, a newsletter that explores how A.I. works and how it's changing our world. When Silicon Valley executives testify before Congress, they normally get raked over the coals. But OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's Tuesday appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee went differently. Senators asked Altman probing questions and listened respectfully to his answers. Afterward, the committee's chairman, Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut praised Altman.

When it comes to AI based innovation, companies the world over are vying for competitive advantage. However, when it comes to gaining the upper hand, many have written off European companies solely on the basis of stricter privacy laws. But is this really the case? Or could a privacy focused attitude be the secret to winning the AI race? Michael Ingrassia, president and general counsel at Truata tells us more.

On Monday 8th April 2019, the European Commission's High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence (AI HLEG) revealed ethics guidelines aimed at forming best practices for creating "trustworthy AI." In fact, many argue this issue of trust in the AI system is one of the main hurdles the technology must overcome for more widespread implementation. A Forbes survey found that nearly 42% of respondents "could not cite a single example of AI that they trust"; in another survey, when respondents were asked what emotion best described their feeling towards AI, "Interested" was the most common response (45%), but it was closely followed by "concerned" (40.5%), "skeptical" (40.1%), "unsure" (39.1%), and "suspicious" (29.8%). The Commission's guidelines are a new roadmap for businesses to align their AI systems. While these guidelines are not policy, it is easy to imagine that they will serve as the building blocks for such regulations.

Europe a century ago was a global powerhouse of innovation, but it has started to lose its edge: today, despite some notable exceptions, many innovative companies are found elsewhere. Europe is falling behind in growing sectors as well as in areas of innovation such as genomics, quantum computing, and artificial intelligence, where it is being outpaced by the United States and China. A discussion paper from the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), suggests five paths that could help the continent regain its competitive edge. The paper, Innovation in Europe: Changing the game to regain a competitive edge (PDF--395KB), focuses on ways that Europe could seek to build on its strengths rather than trying to play catch-up, given that it is hindered by fragmentation and lack of scale. This article is a condensed version of the original paper, which draws from MGI research as well as from a recent collaboration with the World Economic Forum. Given Europe's relatively high wage costs and low reliance on natural resources, innovation remains of fundamental importance for the continent's economic and social system. European companies still account for one-quarter of total industrial R&D in the world, but over the past ten years US companies have continued to increase their share, reinforcing their leadership position.

On many metrics, the European economy and its businesses have been grappling for years to capture the full potential of current and previous generations of digital tools. It is now more than time to double down on Europe's efforts to succeed in digital transformation, especially when a new set of digital technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), are becoming more technically pervasive. On average, Europe's digital gap with the world's leaders is now being compounded by an emerging gap with the world's leaders in its development and corporate use of AI technologies. Without faster and more comprehensive engagement in AI, that gap could widen, especially for those European countries with relatively low AI-readiness. The potential to deliver on AI and catch up against the most AI-ready countries such as the United States and emerging leaders like China are large.

Europe's average digital gap with the world's leaders is now being compounded by an emerging gap in artificial intelligence. On many metrics, the European economy and its businesses have been grappling for years to capture the full potential of current and previous generations of digital tools. It is now more than time to double down on Europe's efforts to succeed in digital transformation, especially when a new set of digital technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), are becoming more technically pervasive. On average, Europe's digital gap with the world's leaders is now being compounded by an emerging gap with the world's leaders in its development and corporate use of AI technologies. Without faster and more comprehensive engagement in AI, that gap could widen, especially for those European countries with relatively low AI-readiness.

Several European companies have trained artificial intelligence to detect signs of breast cancer in scans. Several European companies have trained artificial intelligence (AI) to detect signs of breast cancer, in an effort to help hospitals contend with a shortage of radiologists. The U.K.'s Kheiron Medical, the latest company to announce it will use AI algorithms to try to diagnose breast cancer, launched a trial on historic scans at a National Health Service trust in Leeds. Kheiron's algorithms were trained on 500,000 scans from hospitals in Hungary. The company submitted its findings for peer review after concluding its technology beat the average performance of a human radiologist when tested against 3,500 scans.

Artificial intelligence is without question one of the most captivating and influential corners of the technology world today, but it's also one of the noisiest. To wrap our heads around the complicated mashup of subjects that coalesce to make coverage of the AI beat possible, we write the AI Weekly. The Weekly is our sandbox of sorts, a place to let the most important topics that emerge in AI circles ruminate, stretch out, and find clarity. With an approach like that, naturally there's a fair amount of conceptual insights that have emerged throughout the year. So instead of another newsletter that dives deep into the topic of the day, this week we're looking back at some favorites from the past year.