Tending Europe's Tech Tree of Tomorrow — Together!

Good local time, friends. I wish I could be with you in Brussels tonight for the launch of the Arq Foundation, but the twin tyrannies of geography and scheduling keep us apart. Rest assured, we could not be closer at heart.

My sincere thanks to Max Reddel and his colleagues for founding Arq. Its mission is clear: Help Europe keep its agency, build resilience and flourish in the Age of AI. I am proud to serve on Arq’s advisory council, alongside Professor Yoshua Bengio.

A tree is only as healthy as its soil. Here, that soil is the people. The trust they have in one another, as well as the investment they make in life-shaping decisions.

This is why Arq’s launch meets Europe at the right moment. Case in point. Henna Virkkunen, executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, security and democracy at the European Commission, said during a recent debate in the European Parliament on digital sovereignty that Europe must develop, control and scale the critical technologies, infrastructure, services and data that its economy, security and society depend upon. That is soil work, not slogan work.

Democratic renewal is where my own work lives. A story the public helps write not just survives, it thrives. A story the public is just told, does not. My work grows, like a tree, from the bottom up, and begins with a seed, listening. For Arq, that matters because AI sovereignty is not only a supply-chain question. If Europeans cannot help shape the systems used in public services, schools and cities, resilience stays a slogan shaped in isolation from the people, not with them.

Around 2015, ride-hailing apps were tearing Taiwan asunder. But instead of a shouting match, we opened vTaiwan, using an open tool called Polis. Polis has no reply button, so there is nothing to fight over. People offer short statements. Everyone votes agree or disagree. This surfaces the statements that win support across the divide, letting society see where it already agrees.

Behind the noise, people found the uncommon ground: ride-hailing app partners and taxi drivers earning a fair living, passengers staying safe. Those shared findings became rules most sides could live with. For Arq, the lesson is not the policy Taiwan formulated, but rather the method. Before society procures, regulates, audits or exits an AI provider, it needs a civic way to hear stakeholders and find terms they can co-exist with. Broad listening, not just broadcasting.

This precept is at the heart of our Taiwan Model-inspired Civic AI and 6-Pack of Care framework: AI that helps a community hear itself more clearly.

But listening needs somewhere to happen. The tools that let a public hear itself run on somebody’s supercomputers. If those can be switched off from outside, so can the conversation.

This is why I urge Arq to make rock-solid resilience research commitments. One, keep it open, so others can build on it and two, grow a supercomputing network of Europe’s own.

The continent is already creating dense frontier clusters. Europe should also weave a resilience layer beneath them, a civic network of workstations and local servers, federated across cities, libraries, universities and trusted civil-society institutions.

Today it will not replace the clusters that train frontier models. But it can train models of its own, smaller and shared, the way a public writes its own rules rather than receiving them from elsewhere. Its value is inference, fine-tuning, safety evaluation, continuity of public service and collective training at civic scale, so Europeans help author the models they will use.

This is compute Europe owns, not compute Europe rents: a civic commons for Europeans to steer and share.

Safety and participation are two roots of the same tree. The advisory council helps tend one, watching for the harm a powerful system can do. The other is tended by this room, by everyone widening who gets a say. A single root cannot hold the tree alone.

So, an invitation: Three ways to help this tree take hold. To the builders and open-source maintainers: Take the resilience research and employ it. To the universities, cities and EuroHPC-linked institutions: Bring your machines into this network and help that first seed grow. And to the procurers and rule-writers: When public money buys AI, demand continuity plans, portable data, provider exit rights and local fallback so that no single supplier can switch off a public service.

Europe is already choosing its shape. The tech tree is still young. From a civic garden in Taiwan to a room of visionary friends in Belgium, let us tend Europe’s tech tree of tomorrow — together!

Thank you for the kind attention. Live long and … prosper.