Ireland should work to become a world leader in AI development and regulation, a leading industry spokesperson has said. 

On The Anton Savage Show, Galvia AI founder and CEO John Clancy said the EU should invest ‘tens of billions’ into AI research and development. 

“This week, the EU announced 1.4 billion of investment in all different types of AI,” he said. 

 "To put that into context, OpenAI burned through 1.4 billion this year already with one company.  

“We are not taking it seriously enough – we need to take tens of billions across the EU [and] build a proper framework.” 

Opportunity for Ireland

Mr Clancy said that most AI development is currently taking place in the US, which he described as an ‘unregulated part of the world’. 

“We need to take it here,” he said. 

“There's an opportunity for Ireland [to] centre it here.  

“We're already lead on tech, why don't we lead on the regulation?  

“Don't see it as a negative thing, see it as a positive thing – and that way we'll bring everybody along together.” 

Politics

Development and regulation is needed to prevent AI from interfering in the political sphere, according to Mr Clancy. 

“You could create a script of a conversation for one particular candidate,” he said.  

“You can then feed that script to a large language model.  

“You can say – ‘I want it in the voice of Kamala Harris or Donald Trump’ – or whoever your preferred candidate is.  

“Then you can overlay that with them actually saying it, put them in a location where you want them to be saying it, and get it out there. 

“By the time it's brought down, it could already have done the damage.” 

While he does not believe the technology will ‘take over the planet’, Mr Clancy said we should accept that AI is not going away anytime soon. 

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