A new Dutch government agency set up to achieve \u200bstrategic innovation will work with its German counterpart to pursue breakthroughs in AI computer chip design, it said on Wednesday, as part of European efforts to reduce reliance on US expertise.<\/p>\n
The National Agency \u200bfor Disruptive Innovation, or NADI for short, was set up this month with \u20ac500 million of government money \u2060as a Dutch equivalent of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.<\/p>\n
Popularly known \u200cas \u200cDARPA, \u200bthat agency was set up in 1958 in response to the Soviet Union\u2019s Sputnik launch and played a role in the \u2060technologies that led to the \u200binternet, stealth aircraft and GPS.<\/p>\n
Co-founder of NADI, Jelle Prins, said that a partnership with Germany on chips was \u200cnatural, given the strong ecosystem around equipment \u200bmaker ASML in the Netherlands, and German strengths in research and manufacturing.<\/p>\n
In the \u2060project, NADI and German counterpart, \u2060SPRIND, will commit \u20ac40 million \u200bover 20 months to groups of small teams using AI to accelerate the design of chips for training and \u201cinference\u201d, or running, AI models.<\/p>\n
Prins said Nvidia chips are powerful but inefficient for inference tasks, comparing them to \u201cdoing your shopping with a truck\u201d rather than a trolley.<\/p>\n
In Europe, France established its defence innovation agency AID in 2018, Germany set up SPRIND \u200cin 2019 and Britain \u2060launched ARIA in 2023.<\/p>\n
France\u2019s AID backed development of remote-controlled munitions capable of destroying armoured targets at a 50-km distance that are entering procurement by \u200cthe French military.<\/p>\n
SPRIND is separately running a \u20ac125 million challenge aimed at creating three European frontier-AI labs.<\/p>\n
SPRIND\u2019s head \u200bof challenges, Jano Costard, told Reuters the goal with chips \u200bwas to achieve \u201cseveral orders of magnitude acceleration\u201d in a design process that currently takes years. – Reuters<\/p>\n
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