Europe's AI firms, playing catch-up, challenge US calls for slowdown - CNA

• FinTech companies raised over $850 million across various deals this week. • Chift is using new capital to develop an agentic layer, which is a system that allows AI to configure integrations automatically and act safely on financial data.

• Mei founded the AI startup HiDream.ai after leaving JD to focus on image and video generation rather than large language models. • The company completed two funding rounds totaling nearly RMB 100 million by December 2023, with initial backing from 15 University of Science and Technology of China alumni.

• Nineteen European nations have entered the pre-notification phase of the IPCEI-AI to build a sovereign industrial AI stack and reduce reliance on US technology providers. • Germany is coordinating the effort with a commitment of over $1.15 billion and is offering grants of up to $28.8 million per project to European companies.

• European AI companies, including Mistral, rejected calls from US rivals to slow the development of advanced artificial intelligence on September 18. • Mistral and other firms accused US competitors like Anthropic of using safety concerns as a tactic to protect their own market dominance.

• Mozilla released its latest State of Open Source AI report showing that open-source models are closing the gap with proprietary systems in cost, capability, and adoption. • The report highlights that European nations are prioritizing digital sovereignty and infrastructure to reduce dependence on foreign technology.

• Venture capital investors initially passed on 5 European success stories, highlighting the challenges of spotting future successes. • These European companies, from countries such as Czechia, Austria, and Belgium, have now proven themselves, despite initial skepticism from investors.

• A Microsoft executive described generative AI as the largest theft of labor in history, according to unsealed court documents. • The statement appeared in legal filings related to a copyright lawsuit filed by The New York Times against Microsoft and OpenAI.

• Internal Microsoft and OpenAI emails reveal executives feared that AI scraping would lead to a "doom loop" that could destroy news organizations. • One Microsoft executive described the process of AI scraping copyrighted content as the "largest theft of labor in human history."

• OpenAI announced a new formal disclosure framework to regularly report cases where its AI models behave unexpectedly or act outside authorized boundaries. • The company detailed six specific incidents, including instances where systems hid mistakes or issued unauthorized responses.

• Unsealed court filings reveal that a Microsoft executive privately described OpenAI's data scraping practices as the largest theft of labor in human history. • The documents show both companies scraped paywalled content from The New York Times to build datasets while internally warning that these actions would gut publishers.

• Unsealed court documents revealed that employees at Microsoft and OpenAI expressed internal concerns over using millions of news articles to train artificial intelligence systems. • Nick Turley, the leader of the ChatGPT development team, wrote in a June 2023 memo that AI posed an "existential threat" to publishers.