Madrid, May 31, 2024.- The Minister for Digital Transformation and Public Function, José Luis Escrivá, defended during his speech at the XXVII Spain-United States Forum “the development of an Artificial Intelligence focused on humans and oriented towards their rights, that is transparent and open”, and has put as examples of good practices in this regard the European Regulation of Artificial Intelligence (AI), whose negotiation culminated during the Spanish Presidency of the Council of the European Union, and the recently approved Strategy of Artificial Intelligence 2024.
The Forum, which is held annually and which welcomes each of the two countries, has been held this time in Santa Fe (USA) and has been dedicated to some of the main challenges and opportunities of this historic moment: AI, cybercrime and ecological transition. The minister’s words, which have closed the debate on the evolution of AI, have also underlined “the importance of bilateral forums such as this, together with international institutions such as the OECD, UNESCO or the G20, in the necessary task of ensuring global minimum standards on AI to avoid fragmented approaches and regulatory gaps, increasing transparency and inclusiveness on a global scale.”
Escrivá has urged countries to “prepare for the challenge of AI”, uniquely in four areas: supercomputing, data centers, corpus and language models, and talent, and has emphasized that Spain’s Artificial Intelligence Strategy 2024 responds to all these challenges with measures designed to “promote innovation and, at the same time, develop a responsible, transparent, open and reliable AI”. The minister stressed the importance of Spanish on a global scale but also in a very special way in the United States, and stressed in this sense that “the family of ALIA language models, which we promote from the Government of Spain, will be trained with a higher percentage of Spanish and co-official languages than the models currently available, to provide a useful tool to the public and private sector of the countries and territories in which our languages are spoken”.
Meetings with technology companies
In addition to his participation in the United States-Spain Forum, the Minister and the Secretary of State for Digitization and Artificial Intelligence, Mayte Ledo, have held different meetings with the main American technology companies. Thus, the ministerial delegation met with the management teams of Cisco, Intel, Google, Microsoft and Amazon at their respective global headquarters in Silicon Valley (California) and Seattle (Washington).
Among the issues that have been addressed in these meetings are the possibilities of collaboration in areas such as responsible AI and its implementation, multimodal AI, cloud storage and technological sovereignty, cybersecurity, semiconductors, data centers and sustainability standards, edge computing and talent capture.