Two words were missing in action in the budget day speeches of Minister for Finance Jack Chambers and his designated driver, Minister for Public Expenditure, NDP Delivery and Reform Paschal Donohoe: artificial intelligence.
This is likely a good sign. Generative AI in particular – in other words, large language models (LLMs) from ChatGPT onwards – have been the locus of intense hype, propelling a raft of tech companies with a fair chance of profiting from the upside to wild new stock market valuations.
That much of the business model of LLMs hangs on the wholesale theft of intellectual property doesn’t seem to bother too many people beyond the relatively powerless creative community. It certainly doesn’t seem to be on the radar of too many politicians. Sure, it would be nice to think that both regulators’ concerns and investors’ second thoughts might mount in line with the various lawsuits, but that’s far from guaranteed.
To date, there has been little evidence of any checks and balances. The EU’s AI Act is a regrettably confused mess. In the US, a proposed Californian AI safety law, dubbed an anti-deepfake bill, has been blocked by state governor Gavin Newsom amid intense pressure from technology companies reluctant to comply with even cursory governmental oversight, or concede the principle that they should.
In the UK though, one of the first things Keir Starmer did after becoming prime minister was pull the plug on a £1.3 billion (€1.55 billion) investment in AI drawn up by Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives; he’s made up for it since with plenty of AI rhetoric, lest anyone think the UK less innovative than AI-friendly governments in France and Germany.
Last week, Starmer suggested that London “stands on the foothills of a productivity revolution, powered by AI”, which makes AI sound like the magic remedy for economic stagnation. The cliched phrase “game-changer”, meanwhile, is often invoked.
In this context, it is a blessed relief that Budget 2025 was, as it turns out, more about AIB than AI, and that rather than resorting to buzzwords, there was a sensible announcement that €1.5 billion would be released from the National Training Fund between now and 2030 to boost skills development across sectors.
There will naturally be an AI-inflection to this. But there is a difference between recognising the need to support upskilling and lazily thinking that generative AI – and the Big Tech companies behind it – is the easy answer to everything.
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