“A bill on artificial intelligence will arrive before Easter.” This was anticipated by Alessio Butti, undersecretary to the presidency of the Council for Innovation, at the opening of the seventeenth edition of the RomeCup at the University of Tor Vergata. Not a decree-law, he specified: “Despite there being various urgency requirements, we believe that the discussion in Parliament is an important moment of discussion, also thanks to the many hearings with experts in the sector”.
RomeCup 2024, Butti talks about the Italian path to AI: the bill, the funding and the role of LLMs
Italian artificial intelligence will have mixed control, divided between the Digital Agency and the National Cybersecurity Agency. “We have decided in agreement with some members of the opposition to indicate the two agencies that already operate in the presidency of the council, the Agency for Digital Italy and the Agency for National Cybersecurity. We indicated a combination because today there is no single entity up to the task, but we did not want to introduce a new body”, explained the undersecretary, answering a question from Riccardo Luna, host of the event and director of Italian Tech . Agid and ACN refer directly to the Presidency of the Council: “AI and the security strategy must be the responsibility of the highest political authority, and this also guarantees maximum transparency”.
500 Italian men and women who count in Artificial Intelligence by the Italian Tech editorial team 19 March 2024
Butti then recalled the one billion euro investment announced last week by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, pointing out how the figure is destined to multiply with other investments and a fund of 800 million for investments in innovative start-ups. “Until now we have been late in AI, but with this coup de tail, Italy climbs onto the podium of public investments at a European level”, she added.
“Technology is neither right-wing nor left-wing, even if the approaches and strategies can obviously be different. We focused on anthropocentric technology but which was not distant from Biden’s Executive order or other international approaches”. And this also means particular attention to privacy, data quality and security: “We need an Italian Large Language Model, our own generative AI model, a need felt by many companies and we have many projects, at least 5 universities and many others from private individuals, in development”. According to Butti, one of the needs that the creation of an Italian ChatGpt will be able to respond to is data security, because the current models are processed following different standards and incorporate linguistic and cultural prejudices different from ours and have different privacy policies. Finally, a message to students: “You will design our future, and for this we need STEM disciplines but also creativity”.
And again, on the AI Act recently approved by the EU: “It is essential to identify the system to regulate technology without harnessing it. We must consider it an older sister that can help us improve the condition of man on a global level, the dystopian scenario that is presented is not real: in the coming years in Europe there will be millions of jobs that no one will know how to fill”.
AI Special What Italy needs to be a protagonist in AI by Alessio Butti* 20 March 2024