State of Play: Race for Artificial Intelligence (AI)In April 2018, France pledged to spend $1.5 billion on AI development. A group of international tech companies and venture capitalists invested almost $1.4 billion in the UK's AI development industry immediately afterwards. The Canadian government announced $125 million in investment for AI research in March 2017. Russia is spending an estimated $12.5 million on AI.The United States and China currently dominate the world of AI, but have taken very different approaches to get there. While the US academic system has generated and accelerated the research that has made today's AI possible, the Chinese government has pledged billions in funding and offered its full support to the technology.
The German government announced in spring 2018 that it would present a national AI strategy. When it comes to AI, Germany lags behind other countries. US tech companies are investing billions in AI, as is the Chinese government. Now Berlin is developing a strategy for Germany and at the December 2018 Digital Summit of the German government in Nuremberg, it was announced that the German government has earmarked around €3 billion for AI research and development as Europe's economic powerhouse seeks to close a gap in software-driven innovation between itself, America and Asia.
The sum to be spent by 2025 is intended to help produce intelligent systems, cars, refrigerators, etc. instead of building them. The German Research Centre for AI (DFKI), with locations in Saarbrücken, Kaiserslautern, Bremen and Berlin, supports the idea of promoting small and medium-sized enterprises and getting them to deal with the topic of AI. Compared to China, however, with investments of 128 billion, the German amount is small.
Switzerland, as one of the most innovative countries in the world, has been focusing on AI for a long time. A whole range of companies from the banking, insurance, telecoms and industrial sectors are investing in AI projects. AI will not remain hype, the digital transformation with AI and upcoming core technologies offer economic, practical and competitive business cases that can definitely be realised in the economy. The infrastructure for this is already being prepared: Faster data lines are being laid, competence centres are being created and additional professors are being hired across Europe.
Whether it's called "AI the new space race" or "AI's gold rush", AI remains an unstoppable human development. Its origins go back to 1936, when the British mathematician Alan Turing proved that a universal computing machine can solve any problem, provided it can be represented by an algorithm and is fundamentally solvable. As far as cognitive processes can be algorithmised, i.e. broken down into finite, well-defined individual steps, they can be executed on a machine.
