Societies have been racing, chasing the “next great thing” to prosper. From the Gold Fever and Oil Booms shaping the last two centuries, to the emergence of modern computing with the Dot.Com rise of early 2000s, economies and countries have innovated and competed at unprecedented speeds. Yet the race for artificial intelligence development is measured in seconds rather than months, and open source might be at the heart of this competitive edge for the United States, China, and the European Union.
During the Paris AI Summit this week, Mark Surman, the Chair of Mozilla Foundation reaffirmed the importance of open source to spearhead AI development saying, “Small companies, governments, they all need to make AI safe. All having a toolkit, a Lego Box, to do that freely, cheaply, in a robust way, that’s going to help everybody go faster.” . And European Union has been waking up to the economic and innovation needs – French President Emanuel Macron announced private sector investments of €109 billion in its artificial intelligence sector.
With the roll-out of Cyber Resilience Act, AI Act, Data Act, European Union has presented itself as the actor calling for trustworthiness practices and ethical development of AI. This places Europe at odds with the practices of U.S. and China. Recently, the release of DeepSeek R1 caused commotion on the global tech scene, as the new AI model was more cost-effective, energy-efficient, and accessible than Open AI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude. And unlike others, DeepSeek is based on open source. So what is Europe's plan to remain competitive in the digital sphere?
Europe throws their hat in the OpenAI race
Instead of one single lanugage model source, Europe shifted focus on smaller, more sustainable models. Recently, a consortium of 20 European research institutions, companies, and EuroHPC centres has launched OpenEuroLLM, an initiative to develop open source, multilingual large language models (LLMs). Coordinated by Jan Hajič (Charles University, Czechia) and co-led by Peter Sarlin (AMD Silo AI, Finland), the project aims to provide transparent and compliant AI models for commercial and public sector applications.
The project seeks to align with Europe’s regulatory framework while ensuring that AI development remains accessible and adaptable to various needs. By collaborating with organizations such as LAION, OpenML, and open-sci, OpenEuroLLM plans to release models that support linguistic diversity and can be fine-tuned for specific industry and government use cases.
What can Open Source AI do for Europe: main takeaways from EOSA latest webinar
During the first European Open Source Academy’s webinar , the audience dived into the latest updates of European regulation of Open Source AI, technological developments and its financial, regulatory, and environmental impact. Speakers included :
- Johan Linåker, Senior Researcher at RISE - Sweden,
- Sachiko Muto, Chair of Open Forum Europe and Senior Researcher at RISE- Sweden,
- Nicholas Gates, Policy Advisor at Open Forum Europe,
- Sebastian Raible, EU Government Affairs Director at APELL,
- Cailean Osborne, Senior Researcher at the Linux Foundation.
While the conversation usually involves making Open Source as either a force of good, or of more dubious activities, speakers agreed open source should be defined as a gradient, from fully closed to completely open solutions, instead of being perceived in binaries. The gradient approach helps in categorising machine learning models and recommending licenses.
Instead of focusing on the competition, the European Union has to focus on utilising the strength of its digital infrastructures and strong research institutions and leveraging Europe’s existing HPC network. By developing smaller environmentally-friendly models, it aligns more closely with the Green agenda of European Union. The speakers called for a greater collaboration and interconnection of SMEs, governmental administration and developers.
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