"People are not aware that 90% of ChatGPT's code comes from university research"
Cecilio Angulo, chair of the Catalan Association for Artificial Intelligence

From 9 to 11 April, the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) organized the AINA-2025 International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications, a leading event for researchers and professionals in fields such as artificial intelligence (AI), cybersecurity and distributed computing. One of the keynote speakers at the event was Cecilio Angulo, chair of the Catalan Association for Artificial Intelligence, PhD in applied mathematics and professor at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya.
Technology is evolving at such a pace that it seems an eternity since 2013, the year in which the AINA conference was held for the first time in Spain. How has the tech sector changed since then?
I would highlight the revolution in terms of artificial intelligence, which encompasses all sectors. So much so that for several years now, when you visit the Mobile World Congress, everything is AI, AI and more AI. And, deep down, it makes sense: ultimately, a mobile phone is still nothing more than a more portable computer than the one we normally use. Or, vice versa, a laptop is just a mobile phone with a bigger screen. It is a duality that is increasingly moving towards a single device. And during this period we've gone from making more or less eye-catching AI applications to a point where the technology blends into the background and you use AI without having to give it too much thought, so, it's already applied by default.
“Universities are rapidly achieving higher levels in technical solutions, which are much more developed and closer to the market”
And before that, there was the cloud revolution, right?
Right, it's another very important change in recent years. We've moved everything to the cloud and the web. In the old days, everyone wanted to have machines and more machines to be able to compute and work. Nowadays, we've gone beyond that. We've gone back to having little more than terminals and everything is done with a server. You don't know where it is or how it works. As long as it serves you, that's good enough. And I think that now we are on the brink of a third change that could also be very important and that I think will come at some point: quantum technology, which will play a major part in cybersecurity and making distributed systems more reliable.
Obviously, these changes have been reflected in the conference and the technology and research on display.
That's right, network technology has had to be modified with these new tools. We've moved from layers close to hardware to layers for sharing and networking that are at a higher level. I always say that any IT solution first needs energy, then you have to have hardware, then software, and now you have to have AI. Exactly the same thing happens with networks. We have gone from networks that connected and talked to each other through a predefined protocol to smarter systems, where you try to make them follow rules that allow you to work more flexibly.
Why is it important for conferences like AINA-2025 to be held in Barcelona?
First, it's important for them to take place, because being able to exchange knowledge from different points of view has always been key to scientific research. Holding them in Barcelona is a bonus, because local researchers and the local tech sector can be more involved. The research presented at these conferences is important, but ultimately the networking that you can do there is even more important. Being in contact with specialists from all over the world, to establish alliances or propose future joint projects, always helps you to improve. And if it takes place in Barcelona, people from our universities are always more likely to able to attend.
On a global level, how is research going on the technologies associated with advanced information networks and the applications related to them? Are there enough resources to do it?
Yes, there are plenty of resources, because there are big tech companies behind it, for example in the case of cloud research. Moreover, we're increasingly tending to work on smaller units, giving users easy and transparent access to servers. So, it doesn't matter whether your work is done using one server or another. The system has to respond, and it has to do it quickly enough for you not to notice. When I work with supercomputing, I don't know if the program I'm using is here, in Romania or in Turkey. What I want is for it to run fast and work properly and to reach the person our work is directed to.
In the race to develop all these resources, what is the role of universities, given the strength of private companies?
I work with AI, and I am more in touch with research in the upper layers of programming. What I see is that all these companies whose names are on everyone's lips are taking advantage of all the research that universities have done for many years, so it would be good to see what they will give in return. For example, people marvel at ChatGPT, but they don't know that more than 90% of the code written to make it work comes from university research. It's free code that universities have generated. I'm not denying the work done to make it productive, or the risk involved in bringing it to market and making it work. But it's undeniable that the base comes from universities and it's right to say so.
And can universities try to implement a more applied approach and focus less on basic or theoretical areas?
I think that if we look at who published research at AINA-2013 and who has done so at AINA-2025, we would be surprised to see how many people now work more regularly with companies. Universities are rapidly achieving higher levels in technical solutions, which are much more developed and closer to the market. At the same time, companies are increasingly interested in engaging with academia and quickly finding out what's cooking and what's working at a theoretical level, because they are investing very heavily in research and innovation and don't want to be left out of the game.
What is the level of this academic research in Spain and Catalonia?
The level is high, and the proof is that we always have large companies around here looking for partnerships with us and many people who have worked in them too. We have a lot of head-hunters looking for people to recruit for the private sector. What is the main difference between one and the other? The biggest is the investment you can devote to it. In the university environment, you can't consider creating solutions that are as universal, as robust and with as many users as those that can be created by private companies. But equally, within our field, I believe that we are at the forefront.
One of the hot topics right now is cybersecurity, which people talked about a lot at AINA-2025. Some analysts say this is where the next wars between states will be played out. At the same time, we are seeing major world powers associated with tech leaders. At the heart of the tech sector, how do you experience it? What's your view?
There are many ways of approaching it. The first: bear in mind that the first battlefield is here in our own country. We have recently seen some successful attacks very close to home that have captured very sensitive information. As you can imagine, other organizations suffer attacks like this every minute and we need to have the maximum capacity to respond. Although we are public institutions, the security solutions we have are our own and we make sure that nothing happens. So we're not doing badly.
You said there were several approaches…
Yes, the second has to do with who fights cyberattacks and who generates them. Having the ability to generate cyberattacks so we know how to stop them is not wrong. It's necessary, because every security solution you come up with must first be tested. What may be wrong is the intention behind a cyberattack. And preventing bad intentions is more of a humanistic and sociological question that is beyond me.
You and I think everyone else…
And I would also add a third element: cyberattacks, and the responses to them, can be carried out from many levels. Starting with the lowest, hardware, moving up to software, but lately we have also seen attacks involving concepts such as fake news, which can also be considered another type of cyberattack. It's a complicated issue with many levels where a lot of work will have to be done.
Another topic that's of great interest and that also received a lot of attention at the conference is the sustainability of all these advanced technologies. Which way is technology evolving? Can we expect technology that is powerful, advanced and also sustainable?
The question is what we consider sustainable. I would argue that the cleanest person is not the one who cleans the most, but the one who dirties the least. For example, in my field, that of AI, it is said that a ChatGPT prompt consumes thirty times more network and data centre resources than a Google search. Okay, that may be true. But people who use prompts for ChatGPT generally do so to produce something. Does anyone wonder what resources are used, for example, by all the millions of memes and photos of kittens that are sent every day on WhatsApp? Because you may use more resources sending these images of little value than I do with a productive prompt. You'd no doubt be surprised if you knew how much you consumed sending all those photos of last Saturday's barbecue. Everyone wants to reduce energy consumption to the minimum possible, that's obvious, but blaming high energy consumption on the use of this type of smarter solution is false and perverse. They consume more resources, obviously, but a bus also consumes more than a car and the solution is the bus, not 30 cars.
Another hot topic of the moment that we've already mentioned, but which is also your speciality: artificial intelligence. Are we aware of the moment we live in and how it is impacting us? Because you've been working on it for decades…
The issue here is not what you're doing, but how society perceives it. People are not aware of how much technology it takes to even have a normal phone call between two people. Imagine the number of people in the world and the wide range of communication channels we have. Satellites, underwater cables, networks, data centres, processing centres, etc. All this is invisible to people. Whereas, they're amazed at tools such as ChatGPT, which are very productive, but at the research level they're not that interesting. AI is not a new invention; I did my doctoral thesis on it thirty years ago. But then it was difficult to explain what I was doing and now people can visualize it much more easily and think it's amazing.
And the theory behind generative AI dates back ten years, it's not that advanced.
Exactly, but now there's a lot of pressure to make us recognize that we must transform the way in which knowledge is transmitted. The idea that everything is on the internet has been there for years. So why do we continue to explain all the things that are already on the internet? It's there. Now we need to separate what matters from what doesn't. AI is showing that society needs to catch up and make structural changes. We've been talking about it for years, but nothing gets done.
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