Something to look forward to: The most recent breakthroughs in AI models have been exploited to create questionable “artworks” and find intelligible patterns within an ocean of text snippets. Now, the two major institutions in the Western world are trying to use AI technology to improve society as a whole.

While private organizations are monetizing machine learning (ML) models to chew countless images and sell the result to their customers, the US and the EU have something different in mind. Washington and Brussels have just announced a new agreement to work together on common artificial intelligence models, employing ML algorithms across a wide range of fields.

As reported by Reuters, previous AI agreements between the United States and the European Union were limited to single issues and specific areas such as privacy. Conversely, the new collaboration will aim to use AI to improve agriculture, healthcare, emergency response, climate forecasting, energy distribution management and other critical industries.

The US Government and the European Commission (EU’s executive branch) will work on building new AI models, using the aforementioned ML algorithms to speed up the decision-making process by adopting a data-driven, logical approach.

According to a senior member of the US administration, the “magic” of this new approach resides in the fact that the new models will leave data “where it is.” The US-based data will stay in US data centers, while the EU data will continue to reside on the Old Continent’s servers. Thanks to AI, the senior official stated, the EU and US can build a common model capable of talking to both the European and US data “because the more data and the more diverse data, the better the model.”

The two Western governments want greater access to more detailed and data-driven AI models, bringing efficiency and safety to emergency response, electric grid management and “other benefits.” Concerning the electric grid, the US official highlights how the country is already collecting data points on energy usage, generation, and load balance in extreme weather conditions.

Many European countries are doing the same, the official said, and thanks to the new partnership, both data troves would be harnessed to create a common AI model to get better results for emergency response, grid operators and others.

The US-EU AI partnership should work in agreement with the stricter European privacy safeguards, as the two sides of the Atlantic have already started to search for a common ground thanks to a recently approved draft of the Data Privacy Framework. The new legislation will regulate safe and privacy-driven trans-Atlantic data flows.