Maximilian Gahntz’s Post

🇪🇺 Next Tuesday, EU leaders — Macron, Merz and many of the EU's digital ministers — are meeting in Berlin for the Summit on European Digital Sovereignty. This is part of European efforts to reduce technological dependencies and become more competitive amid the current geopolitical climate. 💌 Today, along with 44 signatories from industry, civil society and the open source community, we published an open letter calling on EU governments to make a commitment to openness as the foundation of these efforts. Specifically, we argue that open source AI and open source more generally — technology that is free to use, inspect, adapt, and share — can be Europe's strategic advantage and a catalyst for reduced dependency, technological progress and global collaboration without requiring blind trust in technologies built by the world's dominant tech companies. ➡️ We put forward 5 concrete steps that governments can take right now to strengthen the open source AI ecosystem: from mobilizing funding and leveraging public procurement to facilitating better access to computing power and public domain data for open source and public-interest research and development. You can find the letter below (and a link in the comments). And big thanks to the many, many people and organizations who contributed to and supported this effort, including the signatories: ADAPT Centre AlgorithmWatch APELL - Association Professionnelle Européenne du Logiciel Libre Bertelsmann Stiftung Black Forest Labs Common Crawl Foundation COMMUNIA Creative Commons Demos Digital Intimacy Coalition Ecosia Element - creators of Matrix EleutherAI Future of Tech Institute KI Bundesverband Hugging Face iconomy Innovate Europe Foundation (IE.F) Kyutai  LAION LINAGORA Metagov Mistral AI Nextcloud Open Future Foundation Open Knowledge Foundation Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland e. V. Open Markets Institute Open Source Business Alliance - Bundesverband für digitale Souveränität e.V. (OSBA) Open Source Initiative (OSI) Open-Xchange OpenMined pleias :probabl. Public AI PublicSpaces Red Hat Renaissance Numérique Code for NL Waag Futurelab Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. Wikimedia Europe Wikimédia France Xnet, Institute for Democratic Digitalisation