Fraunhofer IAIS: Declaration by leading European research institutions, technology organizations and AI companies supports AI sovereignty in Europe

The declaration was signed by committed stakeholders from science and industry who are working on the development of a European AI ecosystem. Their message to national and European decision-makers in politics, industry and investors: What we need now is a “New Wave of European AI” – with long-term and coordinated (funding) structures as well as a clear strategic direction and coordination of all political measures.

“Europe is at a turning point. We have the talent, the research and the industrial base to become a global leader in artificial intelligence. However, this will only succeed if we join forces and actively shape the ongoing transformation,” explains Jörg Bienert, Chairman of the Board of the German AI Association and co-initiator.

Dr. Nicolas Flores-Herr, Team Leader Foundation Models & GenAI Systems at Fraunhofer IAIS and also co-initiator, emphasizes the relevance of networking the European AI ecosystem for the preservation of European values: “The leading European developers of open source foundation models are committed to ensuring that AI innovation in Europe remains open, collaborative and globally competitive. We believe in a future where AI is trustworthy, transparent and democratic.”

The declaration identifies four central fields of action and principles of cooperation: 

• Open exchange of research results, models and datasets for the development of competitive foundation models
• Joint projects that combine excellence from research with industrial application
• A common open source basis for AI development according to European quality standards
• Active co-design of AI computing infrastructure, funding policy and regulation for sustainable competitiveness through open source 

Learning from each other: International workshop brings together top-class scientists
The “1st International Workshop on Pretraining and Posttraining of Open Source Sovereign Foundation Models”, which also took place in Berlin on November 17, showed how to bring international scientists together. Over 80 AI model developers exchanged ideas, learned from each other and advanced the European LLM movement hands-on. The international meeting was initiated by Jörg Bienert and Dr. Nicolas Flores-Herr, with the support of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy.

Join forces: What’s next?

The initiative will continue to network, learn from each other and work towards a coordinated AI movement in Europe. Current signals from politicians also indicate that awareness of the need to join forces in AI model development is growing. Federal Digital Minister Karsten Wildberger, for example, took up the approach of greater cooperation in his speech at the summit on European digital sovereignty.

At Fraunhofer IAIS, we continue to drive this mission forward in various projects and initiatives. One example: In the SOOFI “Sovereign Open Source Foundation Models” project funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, we are working with scientists from leading German research institutions as well as two start-ups and the German AI Association. This gives us the opportunity to continue researching the development of sovereign European models and to use the results to contribute to the industrial use of AI.

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Further links

👉 www.iais.fraunhofer.de 

Photo: Tobias Koch