Microsoft bets on Germany in €3.2B AI push
reuters.com
reuters.com
The example given by the health minister for how this might play out: Researchers find an interesting pattern in the data. They request the ministry to ask the matched people for permission to become participants in a study or direct access. If permission is given, the anonymization is lifted in part and a study could move forward. This alone would make Germany a pretty fascinating place for future AI research.
Doable to some extent, but would they really learn much that we haven't already told them, given our propensity to Google for symptoms and diseases?
Personally, my worry here, if I had some embarrassing medical history that I wouldn't want people to know about, would be some malicious party gaining access to de-anonymized data and using it to blackmail, or just simply making it public.
Edit: Come to think of it, insurance companies could probably have a field day with a data set like this.
I've been in Europe two decades and aside from health insurance being key to more than a few countries, private health insurance is relatively common in tandem with public health services.
Outside of those countries, it's still somewhat common to have private health insurance (not just dental), such as Mapfre or Regina Maria. Heck, even in Germany something like 1 out of 10 people have private health insurance (again, not just dental).
I'm not sure that getting caught using such data would be sufficiently bad news to be not worth it.
"Estimating the success of re-identifications in incomplete datasets using generative models" - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10933-3
"...We here propose a generative copula-based method that can accurately estimate the likelihood of a specific person to be correctly re-identified, even in a heavily incomplete dataset. On 210 populations, our method obtains AUC scores for predicting individual uniqueness ranging from 0.84 to 0.97, with low false-discovery rate. Using our model, we find that 99.98% of Americans would be correctly re-identified in any dataset using 15 demographic attributes. Our results suggest that even heavily sampled anonymized datasets are unlikely to satisfy the modern standards for anonymization ..."
https://systems.cs.columbia.edu/private-systems-class/papers...
It's well known within the sphere that anonymization is hard and deanonymization is trivial. The original Netflix prize around their recommender system also had issues with deanonymization.
And it's a legal challenge to make sure that everyone understands how and why they should opt out, even my grandma.
The problem is that data is not anonymized. And the companies using these data are using it for other purposes like selling targeted health data.
No. Unless you don't want medical treatment.
It will exponentially reduce time to cures for various diseases. The amount of red tape in academia and pharma to do simple data studies is wild...
If done with care this can have a big impact! Very exciting Germany is doing this!
Everyone outside of German has to face death and taxes. In Germany you face death, taxes and Rundfunkbeitrag.
Sounds like MS has just bought a relatively easy access to ~83m people's health data. For €3.2B.
That's €39 per person (tax included).
Not this again. The moment you transmit data to European based servers under control of US corporation you could just as well send it straight to the US. Same difference.
Nobody cares if AWS, Azure or GCP have EU datacenters. They are for most part understood as under US control.
That's wrong. For EU companies it makes a difference, since it allows them to be compliant. It may not be enough for you and me, but it is a huge legal (and also practical) difference. Generally I agree it is dumb to give these companies data (regardless where they are) and that includes already data from me as an end customer. They can't be trusted when it comes to data privacy or lawful use of my data.
Still there is a difference of data being used for company/business usage or for intelligence. Generally the trend to host data in the EU and having regulations on the EU level is a positive trend.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1346782/electricity-pric...
[2] https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/news/bloombergnef-corpo...
Regardless of that it's a myth anyway. Germany has a very competitive electricity market, and it basically works by having all the costs on the actual electricity bill (will not be 100% true in the coming years, but it was until now). Some other countries have cheaper electricity on paper, but cover the real costs with government money / taxes. France is the most obvious example as a neighbouring country.
In case of the network fees, residential customers directly subsidize industrial customers: network fees cover the network operation costs, so it's a zero-sum game where one party's reduction is another party's increase.
It's still somewhat expensive to operate electricity heavy industry in Germany, but much less outrageous than the residential prices that are usually used in for comparisons in the news.
I just checked and you can get a new contract in Germany for 25-30c per kWh. If you compare it to France, the price there is 24c per kWh, but at the same time the government fought tooth and nail last year to be able to fund repairs of the nuclear plants. They want to spend 20-25 billion per year of taxpayer money in the coming years. So do the math on what it actually costs. If you run a real company for profit you fund the future repairs through the price of the things you sell.
There is no such thing in Germany, or at least there wasn't until recently. There is a renewables surcharge but it was always on the electricity bill. Last year it was removed because of high electricity costs so it wasn't needed, and the current plan now is to finance it through taxes once the fund gets depleted. Personally I hope it gets put back on the bill because I like to know how much things truly cost.
They even backdated my contract change by a few months when I did that.
[0]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schuldenbremse_(Deutschland)
But they'll face competition too of course! I can't wait to see more development from European actors and projects like Mistral, TrustLLM, and also GPT-SW3 for the Nordics! There's much in motion on the European stage right now.
Interestingly, Tier 1 transit pricing is increasingly competitive and DE-CIX access is more expensive (relatively speaking) in recent years.
So installing GPUs in the existing German Azure datacenters (likely most of the money), and spending some of the time of their existing field teams to train customers to use it.
I think the "bet" is a bit emphatic there, Germany has had protective laws for their data for a long time, which is why they've had local datacenters for a long time.
It's a logical place to start massive deployment of GPUs in Europe if you don't want to exclude its largest economy from the party
[0] - https://www.privacyshield.gov/ps/participant?id=a2zt0000000K...
(dreiundzwanzig und mich)
Admittedly, this may be a bit besides the point. Still, I think the universality of your assertion is based mostly on thinking that the world is made only of a handful of "important" countries.
I do not know the details - I have worked with medical systems handling NHS data a bit but not the details of what is stored where and how it is transferred between systems. I do recall some news stories about GPs not cooperating with the NHSs push to a centralised system because of privacy concerns - articles on The Register IIRC.
But I highly doubt that they really care about privacy, but how easy would be to find another doctor.
Microsoft will neither get AGI from their own nor the OpenAI investment. The whole story of AGI is just a nice science-fiction story marketing pitch to relieve investors of their money. :-)
Anyone here who can tell how these change the surroundings (economically, ecologically, socially… any dimension is interesting)?
I have reservations about Germany’s 9-5/work-life balance culture being compatible with high performance in development.
Then, the action starts.
(When I worked in Germany, they practically locked the doors at 5.)