Since the war in Ukraine, it has become clear: “AI support is part of the new economy of war.” This is what Nico Lange, senior fellow at the Munich Security Conference, said on Thursday at the FAZ AI conference in Frankfurt.
“The result is: I can use cheap instruments to attack the enemy’s more expensive instruments.” This has helped Ukraine in warfare so far, but is also a potential risk in connection with terrorist organizations. If the enemy integrates artificial intelligence into drones, AI support will also be needed for defense in the future in order to identify threats and combat them effectively.
Developing and using AI technologies in German defense is therefore not just an economic question: “We will live more unsafely if we do not tackle this technology issue now and with force,” Lange makes clear.
AI can be creative
The conference dealt with the topic of artificial intelligence at various levels on Thursday. Also a guest was the artist and photographer Boris Eldagsen, who entered the Sony World Photography Awards in 2023 with an AI-generated image and won a prize. However, he rejected this because, in his opinion, AI should not compete with photography.
Lawyer and Noerr partner Marieke Merkle presented which legal challenges there are already solutions to in connection with AI and what they look like. “I can encourage you to have the courage to interpret some things in a more positive way,” she says with regard to the sometimes vague regulations of the European Union’s AI regulation.
Opportunities for Europe
Speaking about Germany’s position in international AI competition, Thorsten Dittmar, head of the AI Factory at Deutsche Bahn AG, said: “If we want to scale, we have to create a market for it.”
At the conference he spoke about the Datahub Europe initiative, an AI project by German IT and media companies, which also includes the FAZ. The initiators are the Schwarz Group, Schwarz Digits and Deutsche Bahn AG. The aim of the initiative is to create a digital platform on which data from industrial and media companies can be brought together and processed. This data should then be optimized for processing by algorithms. A market must be created for systems that are trained according to European law, says Dittmar. “We’re rolling up our sleeves and trying to tackle this together with partners.”
“Not a statistical parrot”
Hamidreza Hosseini, founder and managing director of the AI company Ecodynamics, explained the basics of AI and prompting at the conference. “AI models are not statistical parrots – they do much more than just calculate the probability of the next word.”
In a prompt engineering masterclass, he showed how the best results can be extracted from AI. Through his good contacts with Sam Altman and the Open AI team, he knows the secrets of AI. In seconds he can create competitor analyses, viral LinkedIn posts or the outline for a complex ISO 9001 manual. His advice is: “Use the models not only for productivity, but also for growth.” Making AI the basis of new business models is central to this. “The time for trying things out is actually already over. Do it!” And he urges Europe to hurry up.
The AI conference is part of the series of Frankfurt General Conferences, which take place regularly on various topics from economics, politics and finance. You can find an overview of upcoming events on the Website of the Frankfurt General Conferences.
