The debate on AI is everywhere. GPT, Claude, and Ollama are becoming staples both in households and across industries. Yet living in Sweden, trying to stay up to date on the state of AI development here, I keep returning to the same uncomfortable observation: the discourse in Europe is still largely focused on small-scale application problems, safety regulation, and ethics. What’s missing is a serious, public, and strategic conversation about the global race for AGI — and what role, if any, Europe intends to play in it.
Observe and Control
While the United States and China aggressively ramp up pretraining capabilities, Europe seems to be in watchdog mode: observing, regulating, and moderating. Yes, I’m a fan of GDPR (really). Though sometimes blunt in its application, I deeply respect the effort and the intention behind it. But even GDPR came late to the party — trying to rein in personal data in 2016, a full decade after Facebook had already gone mainstream and most of us had long handed over the very data GDPR seeks to protect.
Now, with AI, we face something even more transformative, more volatile, and more potentially destabilizing. And again, the European Commission is trying to legislate its way into relevance. The AI Act is promising in some respects, and I do believe parts of the technocracy ”get it.” But legislation is slow. Political buy-in leads to watered-down middle grounds. And the timeline doesn’t inspire confidence.
Even if we optimistically assume that the EU achieves ”real,” sharp legislation twice as fast as it did for GDPR, that would still put us somewhere around 2028 or 2029. That’s half a decade after GPT-3 hit the mainstream, and right around the time some researchers — like Daniel Kokotaljo et al. at ai-2027.com — believe it will already be too late to meaningfully steer the trajectory of AGI development.
My Take
If AI development continues to accelerate beyond the EU’s ability to catch up, then even the most well-crafted legislation will be irrelevant to the trajectory of global AI. You can regulate implementation all you want, but if the engines of intelligence are being built elsewhere, you’re out of the game.
Even assuming European implementation is cautious and ethical, a plausibly fast, plausibly external rise of AGI (as described in Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom) would occur without our agency, oversight, or participation. We are surrendering one of the most important technological evolutions of our species — not because we chose peace over power, but because we chose policy over capability.
Or as Jan Stenbäck once put it:
”Politik slår pengar. Teknik slår politik.”
Well, right now? Tekniken springer. Och Europa haltar efter.
But it doesn’t have to end this way. Europe still holds cards — talent, capital, public trust, and (not least) a cohesive moral identity. What we lack in compute, we might still gain in coordination. In my next post, I’ll explore what it would take for Europe not just to regulate AI, but to help shape it.
Glossary (for the curious)
AGI (Artificial General Intelligence): An AI system with general cognitive abilities comparable to — or beyond — a human’s. Not narrow, not task-specific. It learns and reasons broadly.
Superintelligence: A hypothetical form of AI vastly more intelligent than humans across all domains. Often considered unpredictable and potentially uncontrollable.
Pretraining: The phase where a large AI model learns general patterns from vast datasets before being fine-tuned for specific tasks.
Alignment: The challenge of ensuring an AI system’s goals match human values and intentions — especially as the system becomes more capable. While not discussed in detail in this post, it underpins many of the concerns about the safe development and deployment of advanced AI.