Nextcloud has announced a collaboration with a number of major European players in the cloud storage industry to leverage access to their upcoming on-premise ‘artificial intelligence (AI) as a service’ features, promising GDPR compliance in a cottage industry fraught with privacy concerns.
Claiming that demand for AI functionality is high amongst its customers, OVHCloud’s AI Product Marketing Manager Germain Masse revealed such integrations will be made available later in 2024.
While Nextcloud customers will have to wait months for the integrations to go live, they’ll be folded into the latest version of the Nextcloud Assistant, available now for users of Nextcloud Hub 7 and available at launch for the company’s upcoming Hub 8 release, for which they provide no timeframe.
AI’s role in administrating the future
With Nextcloud concerned that US firms like ChatGPT developer OpenAI have a considerable head start over their EU counterparts such as Mistral and Aleph Alpha, Masse highlighted the importance of ‘reliable, trustworthy and local’ AI tools and services, that are compliant with European data protection law, being made available in the territory.
Because large language models (LLMs) produced and distributed in the US don’t have to commit to compliance with laws such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the present ability for European firms to leverage US AI solutions whilst sending and receiving data overseas is extremely limited.
Addressing this problem through homegrown services given that senior government figures in Europe believe that artificial intelligence is the next step in ‘the administration of the future’.
Nextcloud cites the Minister of Digitisation and Head of the State Chancellery of the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, Dirk Schrödter, as saying that such a future “will work in an automated, algortihmized, cloudified and data-based way,” and that “to make this vision of the future a reality, we must provide the appropriate tools.”
