Prince Constantijn is a special envoy to Techleap, a Dutch startup accelerator.
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AMSTERDAM — Europe risks falling behind the United States and China in artificial intelligence as it focuses on regulating the technology, according to Prince Constantijn of the Netherlands.
“Our ambition seems to be limited to being good regulators,” Constantijn told CNBC in an interview on the sidelines of the Money 20/20 fintech conference in Amsterdam earlier this month.
Prince Constantijn is the third and youngest son of the former Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands and the younger brother of the reigning King of the Netherlands Willem-Alexander.
He is a special envoy of the Dutch startup accelerator Techleap, where he helps local startups quickly expand internationally by improving their access to capital, market, talent and technology.
“We’ve seen it in the data space (with GDPR), we’ve seen it now in the platform space, and now with the AI space,” Constantijn added.
European Union regulators have taken a strict approach to artificial intelligence, with formal regulations limiting how developers and companies can apply the technology in certain scenarios.
The bloc gave final approval last month to the EU’s groundbreaking AI law.
Officials are concerned about how quickly technology is advancing and the risks it poses in terms of job losses, privacy and algorithmic bias.
The law takes a risk-based approach to artificial intelligence, meaning that different applications of the technology are treated differently depending on their level of risk.
For generative AI applications, the EU AI law sets out clear transparency requirements and copyright rules.
All generative AI systems should be able to prevent illegal production, disclose whether content is produced by AI, and publish summaries of copyrighted data used for training purposes.
But EU AI law requires even stricter scrutiny of high-impact, general-purpose AI models that could pose “systemic risk,” like OpenAI’s GPT-4, including in-depth assessments and mandatory reporting of any “serious incident”.
Prince Constantijn said he was “really concerned” that Europe was focusing more on regulating AI than trying to become an innovative leader in the field.
“It’s good to have guardrails. We want to bring clarity to the market, predictability and all that,” he told CNBC earlier this month on the sidelines of Money 20/ 20. “But it’s very difficult to do that in such a rapidly changing space.”
“There are big risks of getting it wrong, and as we saw in the case of genetically modified organisms, it didn’t stop development. It just stopped Europe from developing it, and now we are consumers of the product, rather than producers able to influence the market as it develops.
Between 1994 and 2004, the EU had imposed an effective moratorium on new approvals of genetically modified crops due to the perceived health risks associated with them.
The bloc then drew up strict rules for GMOs, citing the need to protect citizens’ health and the environment. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences says genetically modified crops are safe for human consumption and the environment.
Constantijn added that Europe is making it “quite difficult” to innovate in AI due to “big restrictions on data,” especially when it comes to sectors like health and science. medical.
Additionally, the U.S. market is “a much larger, unified market” with more fluid capital, Constantijn said. On these points, he added: “Europe scores rather poorly.”
“Where we get good results, I think, is through talent,” he said. “We’re getting good results when it comes to the technology itself.”
Moreover, when it comes to developing applications using AI, “Europe will certainly be competitive”, Constantijn stressed. He added, however, that “the underlying data infrastructure and IT infrastructure is something that we will continue to depend on large platforms to provide.”
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