Europe’s bid to compete with the United States and China to stay at the cutting edge of artificial research have got a boost from AI founder Peter Sarlin, and the Finnish government.
The Silo AI cofounder sold his startup to American chip giant AMD for $665 million in July and now has set up a foundation to fund up to 15 AI researchers across Europe. The initial grant from Sarlin’s Foundation PS was worth over $10 million and is linked with the Finnish government carving out a $10 million annual budget for a new AI research lab.
More than $80 billion has been invested in AI research over the last year, most of it to private startups rather than universities. That’s helped fuel a migration of talent from Europe’s universities and startups to international competitors with more financial firepower. Sarlin hopes to change that.“I’m concerned about Europe’s competitiveness,” he told Forbes. “Everyone is expecting a leap in productivity through AI, if that is to benefit Europe, then Europe needs to have its own technology platforms.”
Europe’s AI researchers have in recent years notched up some notable achievements. Deepmind’s Demis Hassabis and John Jumper won this year’s Nobel prize for chemistry for their protein folding research, French startup Mistral’s large language models can go head-to-head with American rivals, and the Latent Diffusion text-to-image generator that helped kick off public interest in generative AI emerged from two German research universities. “Europe is doing really well in AI but not in commercializing AI,” said Sarlin. “We have the talent, compute, and data.”
Finland’s Science minister Sari Multala told Forbes that some of Sarlin’s donation will be used to establish a second branch of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) at Aalto University, Finland as a first step in connecting the continent’s AI researchers. The first was created in 2022 at Stuttgart’s Tübingen University with a $115 million donation from Hans-Werner Hector, one of the billionaire founders of German software giant SAP, following calls from some of Europe’s leading AI researchers for a public-sector AI lab with the same level of funding of Germany’s Max Planck Institute.
“We are a small country with a small language group, which is not spoken in any other countries. It’s very important that there are AI developments based in Finland, in our culture, in our law, and in our language,” Multala told Forbes.
While Sarlin’s will certainly provide a boost to Europe’s university AI labs, it is dwarfed by the massive flows of money going into private sector AI research. VC fund Accel estimated that $80 billion has been invested into AI startups this year alone. Sarlin thinks it’s a good start. “My background is in research and I’ve benefited a lot from free education in Finland. This is my way to give back,” he said.
