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Alek Tarkowski @alek.bsky.social · Jul 10

„So reform the system if you must, establish grants for creators, tax Big Tech developers up to the gills and give the money to creators; anything but the assumption that the traditional remuneration system has any hope of surviving”

- @technollama.bsky.social on the #copyright AI singularity

How AI is breaking traditional remuneration models

It’s been a busy few weeks in the AI and copyright beat, and while I’ve been following all of the developments closely, I haven’t had the time to react to everything in the blog. …

www.technollama.co.uk

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Alek Tarkowski @alek.bsky.social · Jun 25

“Europe will need to do more than come up with new wrappings for the same chips” - good piece by @lionellaurent.bsky.social for Bloomberg on European AI sovereignty - and NVIDIA as the main beneficiary of this effort #publicAI

www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

Nvidia’s ‘Sovereign’ AI Could Win a Prize for Irony

The global scramble for chips risks entrenching new tech dependencies in Europe.

www.bloomberg.com

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Alek Tarkowski @alek.bsky.social · Jun 12

New piece from my co-director Zuza Warso. Good overview of EU’s current take on digital sovereignty and public infrastructures

Open Future @openfuture.bsky.social · Jun 10

🇪🇺 The EU's new digital policies are ambitious—but without substantial investment in public infrastructure and alternatives to Big Tech, they will remain merely aspirational.

Read Zuzanna Warso's analysis of recent EU digital policy developments: openfuture.eu/blog/europe-...

Europe Talks Digital Sovereignty – Open Future

The EU takes steps toward digital sovereignty with new policies, but success requires substantial investment in public digital infrastructure.

openfuture.eu

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Alek Tarkowski @alek.bsky.social · Jun 12

there’s so much uncertainty about legal status of training on data that a fully open licensed dataset creates a pathway that might feel like more legally secure for some actors

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Alek Tarkowski @alek.bsky.social · Jun 12

Mike, I agree. At @openfuture.bsky.social we commissioned a study on copyleft and derivation in AI dev, and I expected more follow-up conversations.

I also agree with @stellaathena.bsky.social that this is more a model-building, rather than dataset-building issue

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Reposted by Alek Tarkowski

Matt Muir @mattmuir.bsky.social · Jun 2

For the past few years, me, Kris at Naive and Matt at Reddit have been running the Tiny Awards, celebrating the good bits of the web. THEY ARE BACK IN 2025 AND NOMINATIONS ARE OPEN! Please tell your friends and share the link, as a small act of resistence to everything being shit: tinyawards.net

Tiny Awards

This is the home of the Tiny Awards, which, since 2023, has celebrated the best of the small, poetic, creative, handmade web.

tinyawards.net

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Alek Tarkowski @alek.bsky.social · Jun 7

“Making for the web is easy, but most of us have forgotten how – ceding our digital agency to platforms and corporate landlords.”

@kleinkleinklein.bsky.social + @sachajudd.com on building the Good Internet, out of the cozy web bits. Good stuff.

zine.kleinkleinklein.com/p/good-inter...

How to Build the Good Internet

Stepping out of the dark forest and reclaiming a social, handmade and cozy web

zine.kleinkleinklein.com

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Reposted by Alek Tarkowski

Open Future @openfuture.bsky.social · May 9

🤖 Join us May 20 for a discussion on Public AI. We will present a new white paper, commissioned by @bertelsmannst.bsky.social, with authors @felice.bsky.social and @alek.bsky.social, as well as industry experts.

📅 15:00 CEST | Free online event

openfuture.eu/event/online...

Online event on Public AI - May 20, 15:00 CEST

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Alek Tarkowski @alek.bsky.social · Apr 12

There is so much talk about re-industrialization; but our collective imagination of “industry” is stuck in the previous era: we see steelmills, coal mines, car factories. And forget that they are today full of researchers, chips, and robots.

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Alek Tarkowski @alek.bsky.social · Apr 12

“Europe Must Build: a Strategic Reset” by @nicolascolin.bsky.social, great piece that has faith in Europe’s tech capacity.
Colin proposes “decentralized coordination” as mode of operations suited for EU’s diversity

Useful for thinking about #publicAI in Europe.

www.driftsignal.com/p/building-i...

Europe Must Build: A Strategic Reset

Drift Signal #253

www.driftsignal.com

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Alek Tarkowski @alek.bsky.social · Apr 11

And environmental sustainability can't be an afterthought. The Action Plan acknowledges some energy and water concerns but a more robust framework is needed to limit AI’s environmental impact.

greenscreen.network/en/blog/with...

Within Bounds: Limiting AI's environmental impact

Joint statement from civil society for the AI Action Summit Signed by over 130+ organizations. If you share our concerns and demands that AI systems be made compatible with our planetary boundaries, a...

greenscreen.network

Alek Tarkowski @alek.bsky.social · Apr 11

Who will orchestrate this complex plan? We need an agency with capacity to coordinate AI deployment across sectors while ensuring compliance with digital rights. Definitely more than just an “observatory” proposed in the Action Plan.

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Alek Tarkowski @alek.bsky.social · Apr 11

And more resources should go to projects like DARE at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, which develops alternative, open chip architectures for AI training.

eurohpc-ju.europa.eu/research-inn...

DARE

The DARE project aims to develop cutting-edge HPC hardware and software based on RISC-V, an open instruction set architecture poised to power exascale and post-exascale supercomputers.

eurohpc-ju.europa.eu

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Alek Tarkowski @alek.bsky.social · Apr 11

Stronger data governance is needed, ensuring access but with sufficient guardrails.

The upcoming Data Union Strategy and proposed Data Labs are promising starts, but we need a proper Knowledge Commons to address what Stefaan Verhulst calls a "data winter."

sverhulst.medium.com/are-we-enter...

Are we entering a “Data Winter”?

The urgent need to prevent further decline in opening up data for reuse in the public interest

sverhulst.medium.com

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Alek Tarkowski @alek.bsky.social · Apr 11

A major gap: no commitment to developing a flagship, state-of-the-art, open-source European frontier model. EU-based labs have proven they can build small models. It's time to pool their resources into a model that embodies European values at scale.

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Alek Tarkowski @alek.bsky.social · Apr 11

The EU correctly aims to reduce dependency on dominant commercial players with investments in compute. But success will require more than just mobilising funding for ever bigger amounts of GPUs.

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Alek Tarkowski @alek.bsky.social · Apr 11

Is joining a race the right goal for a public policy? A stronger vision of purposeful AI deployment is needed if it is to do more than just boost commercial AI development.

#publicAI

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Alek Tarkowski @alek.bsky.social · Apr 11

The European Commission published the AI Continent Action Plan, with the aim of building a European approach that is innovative and competitive in the "race for leadership in AI".

Here’s my analysis: ttps://openfuture.eu/blog/from-ai-factories-to-public-value/

#ai #publicAI #europe

From AI Factories to Public Value – Open Future

The AI Continent Action Plan needs a stronger vision of purposeful AI deployment if it wants to achieve more than just boost commercial AI development.

openfuture.eu

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Alek Tarkowski @alek.bsky.social · Apr 3

That’s a very interesting idea, and I agree that we need some form of regulation to force AI companies to reciprocate. Yet it’s hard to imagine such code just for Wikimedia - so how broad do you make it? Very quickly you probably have to consider a web-wide tax.

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Alek Tarkowski @alek.bsky.social · Apr 2

Still, the paper offers a positive vision, but little clarity on how to get there, if all the big labs are stuck in the transformer / diffusion paradigms.

(Upcoming #publicAI paper that Im writing argues that research into alternative paradigms should be key to any public intervention)

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Alek Tarkowski @alek.bsky.social · Apr 2

And it’s interesting to see #interoperability (not often discussed in the #AI space) as a key principle for model plurality.

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Alek Tarkowski @alek.bsky.social · Apr 2

“Algo decision making systems are “leviathans”, harmful not for their arbitrariness or opacity, but systemacity of decisions"

- @christinalu.bsky.social on need for plural #AI model ontologies (sounds technical, but has big consequences for human #commons)

www.combinationsmag.com/model-plural...

Model Plurality

Current research in “plural alignment” concentrates on making AI models amenable to diverse human values. But plurality is not simply a safeguard against bias or an engine of efficiency: it’s a key in...

www.combinationsmag.com

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Alek Tarkowski @alek.bsky.social · Mar 20

Strong piece from @dacemoglumit.bsky.social on the AI opportunity
- public interest AI will be built only if societies don't leave it just to the developers and engineers, and also
- EU needs to build alternatives to the "Silicon Valley model"
www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/a...

Will We Squander the AI Opportunity? | by Daron Acemoglu - Project Syndicate

Daron Acemoglu worries that the technology is on track to disempower, rather than complement, most of humanity.

www.project-syndicate.org

Alek Tarkowski @alek.bsky.social · Mar 19

Against this backdrop, @wikipedia.org stands out as a unique, global platform and civic initiative. High time to think of it as much more than an encyclopedia: a bulwark for XXI century, knowledge-based, democratic order. A collective good in a world of private tech empires.

Alek Tarkowski @alek.bsky.social · Mar 19

Good op-ed in NYT about the tech billionaries and companies they own, and how antithetical to democracy they are. good quotes from @himself.bsky.social who does some of the best thinking on this.
www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/o...

Opinion | It May Not Be Brainwashing, but It’s Not Democracy, Either (Gift Article)

How the federal government became “an outdated software system that must be replaced.”

www.nytimes.com

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