There was a smack of desperation about the call from scientists around Europe to set up a hub to compete with the US and China over AI. It seems that this proposed Ellis Institute, detailed in an open letter, may be motivated by the wrong reasons – to stem an already flowing drain of talent to US firms (primarily), rather than representing a coherent strategy to be a world leader in AI. The European Commission itself was also rather nonplussed, having been setting out its own plans for AI some of which sounded reasonable if confused and inadequate in scale to meet the challenge from east and west. To some extent, in the case of AI, like other fields of…