The Minister of the Economy describes the center as a central place where knowledge and expertise in the field of artificial intelligence will be concentrated.
He believes that the center will be a driving force for technological development in Latvia and beyond. It will be a knowledge base where both public institutions and private companies can turn for advice.
Valainis said that if today we ask what we can do in the field of artificial intelligence to improve our productivity, the main question is who to turn to. The answers, of course, can be found on the Internet. However, development will be more active if there is an institution that is competent to give the right direction, involving university specialists who can inform about the services that are already available in the world.
"We see self-driving cars driving around San Francisco now, and there are not five or 10, but thousands of cars without drivers. It is technology, it is solutions that have made this happen. There is not a single country in Europe where this is happening. So it is not only a Latvian challenge, it is a common challenge for the European Union. But we can also be pioneers in this field and come up with some more open proposals on how to change this situation," said the Economics Minister.
Why does the world's biggest technology giant want to establish an artificial intelligence center in Latvia? That was one of the first questions journalists asked the Meta's spokeswoman, who said the company was also looking at other countries. They believe that artificial intelligence should be developed not only in Latvia but in the European Union as a whole.
"No technology has more potential to boost Europe's competitiveness than AI, and Europe cannot afford to miss out on this opportunity. That is why we need an innovation-driven approach in Europe so that the European perspective can be incorporated into open-source AI models.
"In order to provide Europeans with the same level of state-of-the-art AI technology as the rest of the world, we had to take the difficult decision not to release our open source multimodal big language model to the European Union, because the European Data Authority regulators asked us to stop its training on European users' public data. We would not want to release models that lack the cultural and historical richness of relatively small countries and languages such as Latvian," said Vitnija Saldava, Head of Regional Public Policy at Meta.
The center could be set up within two months. Valainis did not want to name the exact funding needed for the project but said that it was planned to be created from the existing state budget. It remains to be seen how many people will work in the beginning. The Minister does not think it will be a big expense. Asked where the nearest such center to Latvia was, Valainis replied that they had looked at examples in Japan.
