First Vice President and Minister of Economy and Digital Transformation Nadia Calvinho (i) and Minister of Territorial Policy and Spanish Government Spokesperson Isabel Rodríguez (d) arriving at the press conference following the Moncloa Council of Ministers meeting, May 23, 2023, in Madrid (Spain) The Government today approved the Parity Representation Law in the second round to send it to the Congress of Deputies. This law will also affect the constitutional organs of the state, i.e. the Constitutional Court, the General Council of the Judiciary, the Council of State, the Accounts Chamber, the Financial Council, so that they have equal representation. MAY 23, 2023; MADRID; COUNCIL OF MINISTERS; PARITY LAW Eduardo Parra / Europa Press 05/23/2023
The government wants to take advantage of the Spanish Presidency of the Council of the EU, which will take place between July and December this year, to position the country as a reference community in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). And it was decided to launch the maximum possible number of initiatives to achieve this goal. So far, 478 million euros have been allocated for initiatives related to the development of this technology. The amount is part of a 600 million European fund package that Moncloa has already announced it will spend until 2025, but which has accelerated during this election year.
“It is very important that Spain is at the forefront and is one of the benchmarks in Europe in terms of artificial intelligence,” First Vice President and Economy Minister Nadia Calvinho said on Tuesday. “And the Presidency of the Council of the EU comes at an important moment to conclude negotiations on certain regulatory texts, among which stands out the European regulation of AI, which will mark the European orientation in the field of AI in the coming years,” he stressed.
The Vice President also stressed that Pedro Sanchez raised the issue in a meeting with US President Joe Biden; that the problem is very urgent, since businessmen are proposing a moratorium on the development of this technology, and that on Sunday one of the country’s leading experts on this issue, Asunción Gomez Perez, takes office as an academician of the RAE. At the same time, he pointed out that “adequate regulation is needed to ensure the safety and proper use of these technologies for the benefit of society.”
artificial intelligence It has been in fashion for several years, but its popularity has risen even more if possible these last months. The proliferation of technologies that write any type of text that is asked of them, such as the free GPT chat or others that generate drawings or photographs from real life, has pushed this sector into the center of debate among important ethical, and also because of the reluctance even of those who promoted them in the first place.
At the beginning of the month, the one who counted “godfather” of artificial intelligence Geoffrey Hinton resigned as VP of Engineering at Google, deploring his life’s work and warning of the dangers associated with it if not properly regulated. On the same Monday, the CEO of the company that created Chat CGPT (OpenAI) was in Spain. Sam Altmanand, like many other experts in the industry, assured that with AI “you need to be as careful as with nuclear weapons.”
Million souls for the development of AI: from the field to the Spanish language
The projects for which the government has already allocated a budget are very different. Eat to boost artificial intelligence chair and others for research and dissemination of its applications in specific areas (17 million), as well as others related to agricultural production, health research and energy transition related to artificial intelligence (50 million). The largest element approved so far (260 million) aims to develop AI projects in cooperation with autonomous communities and in various fields, an initiative dubbed Retech.
The government also insists on attract small and medium businesses (SME) in this whole process, and in this sense, another line will subsidize industrial research projects to implement AI in the company (105 million). According to the Ministry of Economy, 217 companies will benefit from this initiative, of which 75% are SMEs. In the same vein, the Executive Branch will shortly approve sandbox or a testbed seeking to analyze the impact that future European AI regulation will have on SMEs, for which he seeks your cooperation.
For public assistance, With the aim of attracting international talent and promoting national talent, the call for the Spanish AI Network of Excellence (32 million) will be published before the summer. In addition, a plan was approved to promote AI tools in Spanish — “to make AI think in Spanish and the rest of the official languages,” according to Calvinho — an initiative promoted by the Royal Academy of Languages (RAE). Similarly, an AI Development Observatory in Spanish will be established (1.3 million) and projects in official languages will be funded to create technology in all state languages (7.5 million).
Another series of initiatives has no allocated budget, for example, AI stamp, a national seal that can be carried by the systems and algorithms of companies “that use AI in an ethical, non-discriminatory and trustworthy way.” The government intends for the seal to demonstrate “that they are reliable to their customers and users.” On the other hand, it should also be remembered that in La Coruña, the creation of a Spanish agency for the supervision of AI has already begun, and in Seville, among other things, the European Center for Algorithmic Transfer will be established.
Source: El Independiente