The Federal government wants to do more for artificial intelligence (AI) – a piece of good news. The recently introduced strategy paper points in the right direction. In international comparison, but the planned efforts seem half-hearted: Only three billion euros will flow, spread over a long period of time – up to 2025.

Germany should take, instead, China and the United States as a benchmark. The Chinese economy is not only good three times larger than the German, their current account surplus to just over half the size. China aims to have a 150 billion-Dollar AI industry. Germany should disproportionately go along with it. How else wants to take over the government expressly desired global leadership role in the AI economy?

This article dates back to the TIME no 48/2018. Here you can read the entire issue.

Also on smaller local AI efforts of the foreign competition, the Federal government provides no convincing answers. Alone at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (a single US University) is now invested about a billion dollars in KI. In the city of Beijing, a KI-Park for two billion dollars. In the case of the closed meeting of the CDU/CSU in September, the then group Chairman Volker Kauder took my proposal to invest a similar sum for a KI-Campus in an attractive major German city. However, in the presented strategy paper of such plans for local German sites are missing completely.

Jürgen Schmidhuber

a German computer scientist, is the co-founder and Chief Scientist of the company NNAISENSE, which wants to create the first practical General purpose AI, and scientific Director of the Swiss research Institute for AI by the name of IDSIA.

Furthermore, China and the USA focus on “new” AI: machine Learning and especially so-called deep neural networks (Deep Learning). In order to keep track of these things, should encourage the Federal government has no ancient structures that have little to contributed to the “new” AI.

The strengthening of the German venture capital market the paper presents good ideas, but little money. The new KfW Capital to facilitate by 2020, with 200 million Euro per year the Start-ups life. This is a fraction of the corresponding spending of China or the giant state-owned venture capital investor by the name of the Pentagon in the USA, has drawn many companies. As long as no major private European venture exists providers of capital, would be a lush state, but the civil Fund is particularly advisable.

Promising support for the middle class by “AI coach”. Small and medium-sized companies are often world market leaders in their field, can afford but are not experts in machine Learning. To subsidize the stay of such professionals for a limited time, the company could make more profitable and grow faster.

the creation of 100 new KI-chairs is useful. But can occupy only one worthy of keeping pace with the salaries in the United States and China. A Million dollars per year are there for top researchers is quite possible. Currently, German universities are only allowed a fraction of offer.

the good news is that the KI-paper-responsive PR for “enhancing the Image of Germany in the area of AI in the world”. Many people do not know that AI developments are from Germany, the self-driving cars to the basic learner artificial neural networks for the AI to three billion Smartphones. You would spread the message of “The modern KI comes from Germany” by appropriate PR, could also inspire the Locals.