Absolutely not, even if Europe was given all of the compute in the world. The issues are much much worse. Starting at "data privacy", continuing with the "EU AI Act" and just an overall mindset of regulation and German angst. Many structures in the EU actively prevent and fight against innovation. Oftentimes more subtle but the consequences stay the same. If you ever had to use one of the "sovereign" AI provides such as StackIT, OVH and the-like, I feel with you. It is just so bad in terms of product and performance, there is no comparison at all with Hyperscalers, and it shows. Eventually, it's a cultural and structural problem along the way and the future here looks horrible.
We can debate the details and implementation but EU legislature is, at least in spirit, trying to protect human rights. What does it say about progress that the same laws that protect human rights also stifle innovation?
> EU legislature is, at least in spirit, trying to protect human rights. What does it say about progress that the same laws that protect human rights also stifle innovation?
As you said, in spirit. In fact the EU’s AI Act is not really human rights legislation. (It exempts military and national-security uses.) Where it comes close, e.g. in seeking to ban facial recognition or social scoring, it does so clumsily.
So in practice, the EU has passed a series of laws that essentially make AI a monopoly of military and intelligence-community interests while forcing its consumers to use foreign products. Not exactly a win.
> EU cannot legislate on national security matters
Sure. Legally, makes sense. Practically, if you want to do all those things the legislation purports to be doing for human rights, you just have to get the right general or spy or police chief on your side. That makes the whole scheme a bit of a boondoggle. Lots of friction. Remarkably little tangible benefit.
> Sure. Legally, makes sense. Practically, if you want to do all those things...
If you had just owned up to how you were mistaken about EU legislative limits - confidently stated - I probably would have taken everything else in your initial comment at face value.
Your doubling down into unfalsifiable territory has me thinking your arguments are feelings-based with post-facto justifications.
> how you were mistaken about EU legislative limits
I’m not making any legal arguments. The fact that the EU can’t legislate on those issues doesn’t change that its AI Act has those loopholes.
> unfalsifiable territory
No, I’m not. If the AI Act constrained any actual risks, that would falsify my assertion. I’m saying it in practice doesn’t. Those capabilities are still being built, just not in Europe. And they’ll still be sold to Europe, just to its governments to use however they want, not to its people.
The EU doesn’t have the power to write AI legislation for human rights purposes. It does have the power to throw gum into its AI industry’s works. It did what it could. Which is very little of the former (by constraining B2C and B2B, sort of). It did a lot of the latter.
Congress can’t do a lot of things. Passing something stupid and then complaining that the reason it isn’t competently written is because of Constitutional limits doesn’t absolve the stupid bill.
I’m not an expert on EU law or AI. But I do make capital-allocation decisions around this stuff, and I know enough to know that as currently configured the only main AI business to do in the EU is in selling it things that kill or surveil.
I read their post in the way they intended. Regardless of whether they can, the fact that they fail to cover all the bases makes the legislation almost useless.
> What does it say about progress that the same laws that protect human rights also stifle innovation?
Innovative methods to destroy human life are "stifled" by measures intended to preserve human life. What to you mean by "progress" -- the betterment of the human condition, or the enrichment of the few and powerful?
Europe isn't a dystopia because it could import American innovation. There's a reason Germany car manufacturers were never going to electrify by themselves.
It's just a very obvious point, evidenced by where most companies end up being created. Europe's main innovation failure is a failure to recognise the value in taking a risk, and instead to reward people who don't from the people who do. But that still makes it a good place to do bread and better work - old school fabrication of cheap, old-process chips is a good example.
EU legislature is an actual corpus of laws. It’s imperfect, but it’s arguably better than having a guy that can block a model or threat companies because they crossed him.
The US has a guy who occasionally can screw things up for a few weeks, but who will be gone in a while.
You have it upside down: the innovation and the stuff is the valuable thing, the laws are there to help us organize ourselves a bit after the fact. They're always a secondary concern to the extent that the vast majority of civilization is working with one another, doing material things wherein the law usually is there as a backstop.
There are some ugly things here and there but by and large - 'cookie settings' has not materially improved people's lives - and not nearly as much as the innovations on the web themselves.
Doing is primacy, regulating is always secondary, with only a few exceptions.
The EU is in really really bad shape on industrial issues on a continental scale - 'too many regulations' is actually not a root cause (it's a big drag, but not root), but it's also not for the most part some kind of advantage.
You see the same thing play out with defence and other things.
Having to beg the US for help with Ukraine, for Patriot munitions, Starlink, advanced intel, for 5th Gen gear, mid range ballistic missiles - it's an existentially disempowering posture.
Human rights won't matter in the areas where the Russians have conquerd or destroyed. Again, here EU/Euro governance issues loom large.
'Do the thing' then as you go along, think about some guardrails or whatever, but the 'do the thing' is the hard part that deserves most of the focus.
Exactly. Europe makes the process and bureaucracy the end itself rather than understanding that they are one part of a means to an end, of actual innovation. People don't call Europe a mausoleum for nothing.
Exactly, it’s quite funny that everyone equate US and US legal system to Trump. The founding fathers created a constitution that can whit-stand and survive people like Trump and still the Republic would thrive. Trump would be gone in few years but US would still be there like it has been for the past 250 years for the people by the people.
On the other hand EU started as an economic union and has rotten into a behemoth that tries to control every aspect of Europeans. It was not created by the people for the people, rather a bunch of bureaucrats to exert their power and establish authority. At the start EU has done a lot of good things as an economic union, but at its current form, it does more harm for the growth of Europe rather than helping
The founding fathers created a document that was already struggling with modern realities prior to Trump. 250 years is not a particularly impressive amount of time for a country to not fall apart.
A country that is a thousand years old is obviously going to have to change its constitution.
European countries have gone from massive societal changes to massive societal changes (for example from monarchies to republics).
The USA is a new country, and its constitutional rigidity causes a lot of social and political problems that most likely will lead to big changes in the future.
Yes, some countries in Europe remained monarchies for 1500 years or longer. They didn't really have a constituion back then because they were not republics.
They really did have constitutions back then. Substantial constitutions. With many many many documents over hundreds of years.
A constitution, or supreme law, is the aggregate of fundamental principles or established precedents that constitute the legal basis of a polity, organization or other type of entity, and commonly determines how that entity is to be governed. [0]
Their entire history of implementing and applying principles of Roman Law and other creeds was their ever growing constitution.
> The USA is a new country, and its constitutional rigidity
and general loudness on the matter of "what is a constitution and why ours is the first and the greatest" has caused much confusion given they have such a short and barely evolved one.
>250 years is not a particularly impressive amount of time for a country to not fall apart.
250 years is older than almost every country in Europe (by that I mean current borders and form of government, not the ancient historical ones).
Most were monarchies or various forms of dictatorship till only a few decades ago and finally settled on their current borders only after WW2 or the fall of the USSR or the Yugoslav wars.
For example Spain had its first democratic elections in 1977 and then the UK was dealing with "The Troubles" sectarian conflict in northern Ireland. Europe always was a powder keg around forms of governance, culture, religion and sects. All that is not something that goes away overnight just because EU membership happened.
In contrast, 250 years of continuous governance and conflict free stability is super impressive by that standard.
Care to elaborate on concrete examples on where it struggled? 250 years is quite impressive even if you don't believe it or not because only a handful of countries in the whole world has an older constitution.
As a humorous illustration of the point (of the presence of what is now low relevance content in the constitution.)
Let's try to figure out where the 3rd amendment might actually have significance in the future. Maybe in space habitats? Or could forced installation of government AI in systems be considered a 3rd amendment violation?
"250 years is not a particularly impressive amount of time for a country to not fall apart." ?
Sure it is, it's very impressive.
What other nations have lasted that long?
Chinese Dynasties usually collapse within that range.
Aside from the UK, maybe Sweden (?) which have been fairly contiguous, most nations are more short-lived. France is on it's 5th Republic in the same time-frame.
America is way more than the gong show in charge right now.
Most of the 'tests' of it's integrity are due to really just that one guy.
But you're right to point out inherent problems with the Union.
Because EU is not a 'right wing flag waving' entity, we don't really think about it in terms of 'nationalism', but the EU has among the loudest, most clearly visceral and virulent nationalist supporters.
You can say anything you want about national governments but critique of the EU is met with a lot of rancour.
I've worked for EU bodies, it's full of well meaning people and it has tremendous value as an economic unions, but as a political entity it has existential flaws, too many to name, and it is absolutely an elitist project and it absolutely has a 'regulate first' attitude, which is quite upside down.
'Doing The Stuff' matters 10x more than 'Talking About The Stuff'.
> The US has a guy who occasionally can screw things up for a few weeks, but who will be gone in a while.
We have all just realized that the American Constitution is the jurisprudential analogue of the Albanian virus (https://github.com/AriBjornOlafsson/Albanian-Virus). I wouldn’t take it for granted that what has happened up to now, before this new twist, will continue to happen in a world where being Trump’s friend is enough to change the NASDAQ listing rules.
You can protect human rights without stifling progress. It's not a "pick one of the above" situation.
The EU can and should reform many parts of its sclerotic laws and bureaucracies. Whether it can do so before it becomes a subservient puppet state which serves as a battleground for competing powers remains to be seen.
That's a bit like arguing that the USSR was, in spirit, trying to defend workers' rights, and therefore we should not have opposed it. At some point, the gap between what something claims to be "in spirit" and what it actually is in practice becomes too large to ignore.
> EU legislature is, at least in spirit, trying to protect human rights
Protect human rights as defined by EU legislature, obviously. And privacy in public places, for example, doesn't seem to be an undebatable human right.
Heck, I hate street views disfigured by huge privacy blobs.
Why shouldn't I? Your garden is not of a particular interest to me. It's just one of millions of gardens that I might look at as a part of scenery, or to get my bearings if I happen to be in the area. You'd be better off fighting street views in general, unless you are OK with the Streisand effect.
I prefer not to have views of my home permanently archived and made available to anyone in the world, unless they can present a reasonable need for it. City planners? Go ahead. Local people for navigation purposes? Go ahead. But some random bloke from another continent? That's clearly too far.
Services like Street View should have distance-based friction to preserve privacy. The further you are, the less (or at lower quality) should be available, to keep it proportional with the effort required to inspect the place in the real world.
Street View is one of the most amazing technologies ever invented. It brings humanity closer together. No longer do you need to get a visa and get on a plane to see what the world is like in a particular place. You can just look on street view. Throughout history people have given up their lives for that kind of world knowledge.
Your inclination to ruin one of humanity's greatest achievements with distance-based blurring to protect the privacy of what is already visible at street level is just sad.
At the expense of the overall economic health of everyone. See the rents in San Francisco for examples compared to places where countries actually build, like Singapore and China.
If that's good long-term for the people in SF who've already invested their time and money there, shouldn't be any other way. It's also not some zero-sum game where voting against development always benefits them at the cost of others; sometimes they want development.
> Services like Street View should have distance-based friction to preserve privacy. The further you are, the less (or at lower quality) should be available, to keep it proportional with the effort required to inspect the place in the real world.
How would the website validate how far I am from your neighborhood? What if I am your neighbor but I am traveling this week? Can I still check Street View of my neighborhood? This is how we get websites to require ID-based verification for everything.
There's not a lot I can do about that, but it doesn't really matter since random YouTube videos don't index my house into a globally available map view
this is true, but in practice the EU and its local governments have a giant issue with incompetence when it comes to the specifics of regulation. it's overregulated and sometimes even in such ways that it doesn't even achieve the protection it seeks to generate, so a net loss in both directions.
> We can debate the details and implementation but EU legislature is, at least in spirit, trying to protect human rights
That's an unfounded assertion. Of course, politicians will claim this to be the case. I don't see how patronising citizens protects their human rights, though.
It's certainly a good question. On the idealistic side it's the right choice, people should have the right to have a say in their own data since it's implicitly copyrighted. GDPR has done wonders to prevent careless personal data leaks that are so common in the US, and other kinds of abuse.
In a more practical view though I'm not sure if it'll do anything to stop job replacement from automation as such. Most corporations seem all to eager to make deals with OAI or Anthropic here anyway, and if not that it'll be Chinese ones.
There is a question of "representation", like if a model cannot be trained on the data of one specific country with a specific language, then it does not learn it and the people of that country are now at a disadvantage when trying to leverage the result. Maybe that's a good thing, maybe not, depending on the perspective of how the model is being applied relative to the average person. If it's something that makes their job easier then it's a negative, if it's used by the government to automate scanning all chats then it would be beneficial for it to suck. For widespread languages that doesn't apply of course, so the UK and Spain might as well be exempt.
In general I think it's good for the EU to try and slow down adoption of bleeding edge tech so the US population with its lack of regulations can act as guinea pigs and absorb most of the early damage until we figure out what is the best approach when we get around to adopting it. Even if that means missing out on potential early upsides too. An old example is lots of late adopters going straight to gigabit fiber instead of being stuck on copper DSL.
> GDPR has done wonders to prevent careless personal data leaks that are so common in the US, and other kinds of abuse.
Has it? I still have to see evidence of that. What GDPR definitely has achieved, though, is people engaging in pointless busywork out of fear some busybody is trying to have them fined for being in violation of GDPR.
> In a more practical view though I'm not sure if it'll do anything to stop job replacement from automation as such.
Again, I fail to see how automating jobs is supposed to be something negative. If a job can be automated that means humans ultimately can engage in more worthwhile endeavours. Most modern jobs would have been completely alien to someone from the 19th century. The same applies conversely. How many farriers do you know personally?
> In general I think it's good for the EU to try and slow down adoption of bleeding edge tech so the US population with its lack of regulations can act as guinea pigs and absorb most of the early damage until we figure out what is the best approach when we get around to adopting it.
Quite frankly, by that point there might be not be enough left of the EU to make such a (very) late adoption possible or even relevant at all. We're talking about a timescale of just a few years for a revolution that'll dwarf the Industrial Revolution (which took an entire century, give or take). Up until now, the benefits by far outweigh the downsides and if we're talking about catastrophic damage (essentially, the SkyNet scenario), EU regulation certainly won't stop a US AI from killing Europeans.
> An old example is lots of late adopters going straight to gigabit fiber instead of being stuck on copper DSL.
That's actually a very good example of how overly cautious behaviour in European countries leads to those countries being left behind. Up until very recently, for example, Germany's last mile Internet infrastructure was largely DSL-based (perhaps, still is; at least they're trying to make more use of fibre optics now).
Hmm well the practical point of GDPR is twofold from where I see it: the process being too convoluted and risky turns off some corporations from storing data entirely (maybe it's not complicated enough yet in that regard), and the deletion requests where I can send anyone holding my data an email saying they have to delete it all. I do it sometimes, maybe it's just a placebo and half I secretly hope it is because once someone inevitably whistleblows it, they'll be appropriately fined in the billions like Google gets regularly.
> If a job can be automated that means humans ultimately can engage in more worthwhile endeavours
Yeah if that were actually the case. Seems like the plan is to just automate everything we can in broad strokes, then wait if anything happens to turns up to occupy that portion of the workforce. Nobody seems to have any idea what to do with vast amounts of unemployed people who aren't qualified to do anything anymore.
I think the very possible end result is that there won't be any immediate new jobs in a meaningful volume in the time span when they're needed. As you say, the timeline can be very short, and in the US it certainly will be. The idealistic future is that UBI gets implemented, automation gets taxed and redistributed, so the economy continues to work. But that's a fantasy with the current ring wing wave across the world where any kind of social service is seen as communist money burning for some reason, pocketing that extra wealth through corruption will be the priority. We've seen this again and again in countries where most of the income is dug from the ground in some form, which is economically the same as a few companies making it all through automation. The end result is usually not great for the population. With the AI Act being very anti-authoritarian, banning credits cores, facial recognition, etc. it's a step in the right direction to compensate.
The likely result is probably gonna be some kind of army service and an increase of international tensions to justify a draft when we realize there's only so many extra Wolt drivers a population needs, and then those will go to Starship too. With a war economy you can do pretty much anything to maintain stability, the numbers are made up and the protests don't matter.
If a delay in adoption can help bridge this intermediate gap without complete chaos, millions will suffer a lot less.
> the process being too convoluted and risky turns off some corporations from storing data entirely (maybe it's not complicated enough yet in that regard)
This is a common misconception by people who never had to deal with GDPR in a business capacity (including the politicians who have caused this mess). Corporations either simply don't care or they have their legal department deal with this. It's the small companies and self-employed solo entrepreneurs that suffer.
As for the economic ramifications, there will certainly be a massive short-term upheaval. However, going all Luddite - or even just slowing down the process locally - won't help. Regulation doesn't generate wealth, after all (although EU politicians would like you to believe that), and for something like UBI we need massive wealth generation.
> What does it say about progress that the same laws that protect human rights also stifle innovation?
Perhaps it merely says that certain good positive things stifle other good, positive things?
Having 24 languages is a good, positive thing for the EU's cultural distinctiveness, respect for citizens' heritage, and the fairness of the nexus of power not excluding speakers of any country's language.
And yet it's a major barrier to cross-border trade, military cooperation, popular support of closer political ties, and the prospects of any EU companies growing large enough to counterbalance the amazons and facebooks of the world.
A ban on cracking eggs serves the interests of eggs, while stifling the omelette industry.
And yet the EU legislature seems to be actively hostile to some human rights, such as the right to free expression and the right to keep and bear arms. How do you account for that discrepancy?
European countries have higher freedom of press than the US. Bearing arms is not a human right in Europe, different culture.
Europe has more human rights protections than the US and stronger enforcement of them, even against the state, by many metrics. Freedom of expression ends where other human rights begin, is protecting hate speech and Holocaust denial really something worthwhile?
So are you claiming that human rights are subjective and not universal? Or that it's acceptable for the EU to violate human rights if the USA is worse in some ways?
Belarus is a European country. How is freedom of the press doing there?
I don’t know why you think the American definition of human rights is universal?
It is. Look at the freedom of press index for example. And as the US doesn’t accept foreign courts, there is not really a legal apparatus against the state outside of the US, which many European countries do have.
Belarus is not part of the EU, nor did it sign many of the international human rights
It does matter, for example for all countries that signed the ECHR. And most European countries even have more rights guaranteed by the state and by EU.
You are trying to move goalposts instead of trying to counter my arguments
> What does it say about progress that the same laws that protect human rights also stifle innovation?
Claiming that GDPR and the EU AI Act "protect human rights" is very, very far-fetched. How does the training of, say, Claude or GPT-X models, hurt human rights?
I didn't "forget". I never agreed that I had some natural right to exclude anyone from or demand payment for using bits of information I "made".
It's not also actually "getting paid for your work" when you're talking about copyright. It's "collecting rent for your property".
Once upon a time, artists and writers got conned into thinking that was a good deal for them, forgoing payment for work in return for a dangling promise of rent extraction. The vast majority of them were wrong.
It might or might not be legal, but who's getting paid when ChatGPT uses knowledge from a phpbb forum from 2008? Is that human person well taken care of in today's society? I use ChatGPT too, but if ChatGPT's coming for all jobs, don't the humans that fed the machine have a right to not be lost and forgotten?
no its not. its about mass surveillance and mass population control. regulating, watching, punishing and jailing the taxpayers while letting millions of people enter illegally and destroy the society from both sides.
europe is huxley nightmarish utopia worst parts without any of the bright ones.
You can only make money if you produce value. If you stop producing value because your old industries decline/collapse and you miss out on new industries, your wealth will trend towards that of a third world country.
Maybe. I would contend that wealth accumulation over the long term is a function of the strength of local institutions e.g educational, judiciary etc. This is effectively the thesis of ‘Why nations fail’. Europes relative decline will only continue if the institutions of the US (and others) continue to be robust and healthy. I am not sure if this can be relied on into the future.
The current question is whether being the minor partner in a relationship with the US or China makes for a better & more free society.
Westphalian norms are falling apart and countries will need to make hard tradeoffs about how to build enough economic heft to maintain their cultural values.
The thing that nobody talks about is how many EU citizens already are working on frontier models, just inside US companies. That’s why the prohibition was so crippling for Anthropic.
And, btw, the bang per buck that I got from OVH was better than EC2.
> The thing that nobody talks about is how many EU citizens already are working on frontier models, just inside US companies
Why don't you ask yourself: how come those brilliant European minds couldn't find a job that pays well enough at home? Why could they in the US? There are many more Chinese and Indian, and other internationals working for US companies, outnumbering Europeans. It's not like Europe was intentionally targeted by US companies.
Real GDP has grown 84% in the US since 2000 [0]. EU grown 40-45% in the same span. The two regions were basically had the same economic output in 2000. Europe has been left behind economically.
Living in Europe is nice (I love Europe by the way), but the question is why EU can't compete with the US and increasingly China. Sooner or later that'd affect your living standard as well. Look at how much China has caught up with the West in terms of quality of life.
This questions are discussed a lot. I just refer to the draghi report and also in the start up field the underdeveloped financial market in the EU. Finance markets have a negative vibe (rich people, greed, causing huge problems like 2008, antisemitism) so most politicians didn't care.
> The two regions were basically had the same economic output in 2000. Europe has been left behind economically.
Which basically coincides with the introduction of the Euro currency. The dumbest currency ever created: a common currency for countries with different fiscal laws/different tax rates and different economic outputs. Since then one the Eurozone state already (partially) defaulted on its public debt: Greece.
My beloved EU is fucked. And not just because of that ultra-poorly and very probably short-lived currency that the Euro is: the EU is a socialist construction, by socialists, for socialists.
In 25 years of introducing the Euro they manage to kill the first industry of the most important economy of the EU: the car industry in Germany.
> Sooner or later that'd affect your living standard as well.
Oh but the EU is making sure the standard of living falls really quick.
For as if the EU wasn't falling into poverty quickly enough, politicians are at hard at work at importing millions upons millions of very poor people from africa and the middle-east. For the most part totally unemployable people (a politicians in Germany talked about 93% migrants without a job, that cannot speak the language and unemployable and used the term "a lost generation").
In my native city, Brussels ("head" of the EU), a recent report from a Belgian university estimates that 5% of the population of the city are undocumented migrants: undocumented means they aren't working. It's impossible to work without a shitload of paperwork in the EU. One out of every 20 people is an unemployable, unaccounted, undocumented, migrant. Let that sink in.
The EU is fucked way more than people imagine.
And anyone who thinks that the millions and tens of millions of migrants coming without any education are going to be the ones that shall save the EU economically is totally delusional.
I raised my kid in english, only every going to british school and now british college, and wife is working towards acquiring a new citizenship. Thankfully we've also got family in Japan (a country notoriously hard to get in), so we've got that option too.
We moved to a new country four times already, but now we're planning to leave the sinking ship that the EU is.
There's no future in the EU: the only way forward is that major european cities are going to keep turning ever more into slums.
The UK, for example, is outside the EU and arguably Europes strongest AI hub birthing DeepMind, Stability and others. Home to top universities etc.
I think compute is certainly our weakest point but it should be possible to train a frontier-ish model on Isambard-AI if you supplement it with other London based commercial compute for post-training.
Imo useful long-term innovation comes about during the conflict of fighting for and against the rate of technological change, and whatever proves inherently better is what's left after the dust settles. There's a point at which there's so much opposition that nothing innovative happens for too long, but uncontested innovation isn't something most people want either. If the future is uncompetitive but lagging behind the U.S and China, I'd struggle to see the problem
Political landscape of the US right now will change in few years like it has been changing for the last 250 years. USA does not equate to its current political situation. But EU would keep on rotting from inside and I would eat my hat if Mistral doesn’t go out of business in next 5 years
It’s an interesting contrast that you claim that the USA does not equate to its current political situation, whereas conversely the EU is ‘rotting’ from the inside. Do you think this is a balanced and reasonable claim?
it is a reasonable claim. Trump would be gone in few years and the constitution guarantees it. What does EU has? more bureaucrats? EU doesn't even has a constitution and yet it interfere with the politics of sovereign nations till they bend the knee to Brussels
There is a constant change in politicians and parties and views among people (hello 2022!) about policy topics inside the EU all the time. Do you seriously think politics in the EU stays the same?
It absolutely has. It's always more regulation, more bureaucracy and more red tapes. They are just creating more barriers to keep themselves employed and to expand the reach of their authority.
They have been discussing that for years, but still nothing happened. At the rate of the bureaucracy it would take few more years to even draft the laws to ease GDPR
You are not up to date, this is already in legislation process and needs the vote of the parlaiment, highly likely it will come. There is also a simplification package and a migration pact. A lot is happening right now
> I would eat my hat if Mistral doesn’t go out of business in next 5 years
Hope you're hungry. The Mistral are going to what most great European companies are good at - regulatory arbitrage. They're going to insert themselves everywhere within EU (French govt, etc) and extract value that way whilst delivering subpar services to what open weight Chinese models can deliver. Honestly they'll probably be profitable before most other AI providers are simply because there's very little pressure to improve models.
It could be true that French government might use it, but I hardly think Germans or Italians or any other government would trust Mistral or use it. Even though they are part of EU, they still don’t trust each other completely when it comes to national security and sharing intelligence. I can easily imagine BND fine tuning some Chinese model or still relying on American models
There will always be a place for domestically sourced AI I think. Even if Mistral models suck theyll get enough defense revenue that they wont go out of business
You cannot be seriously comparing Mistral to Intel. Intel might be falling behind right now, but they were pioneers in 90s and 2000s. When has Mistral ever been a pioneer on anything?
Do you think that companies and States will use "usable" models from Mistral (who has left the race anyway), or frontiers/near frontier ? It's akin to say that walking a good enough means of transportation and we don't need anything else. One day the guys in charriots will remind you of the dire reality.
> And YannLeCun decided to build in Europe as well
AMI has offices across the world. Fact is, companies often have at least an office where the CEO lives. Same when Musk kicked up a stink about 'leaving California'. It wasn't really anything of substance.
You can grumble about the way things are but Europe being so far behind a technological race with important geopolitical ramifications means that you guys are cutting off your nose to spite your face. Have fun with zero of European regulations impacting frontier development and then eventually having to depend on it.
I am dying to know what the important geopolitical consequences are of not having a ChatGPT lolol
Oh gods our politicians will have to read their own emails, and write them too! We may never recover. Clearly there is no path forward apart from mass surveillance.
You are totally right, reading emails and vibe coding saas apps is all we can do. Omg why didn’t we think of that? Someone get the pentagon on the phone and cancel the drone warfare technology they’re already using and proving out in the battlefield with Palintir. Someone also call the NSA: we don’t need to hack nor do we need surveillance and spying nor do we need robust defenses against all of this. Ah!! Also the president, we can surely cede the market benefits to other countries that’s totally fine.
LLMs are a “nice to have” blows my mind. LLMs power autonomous drones that kill real people in real wars. Coding agents are the primary way people code. That and we get a GPT4->5 jump every 18 months. Are we on the same planet?
Why are we missing the point here: LLMs are of major geopolitical significance. Autonomous drones kill children, now what? Would you rather have a home grown frontier model capability to defend yourself? Or would you prefer to rely on the good graces of tech CEOs?
I think the EU would prefer wars not happen and that they never have to think about defending their borders or themselves. This is fantasy land, but the cafes and museums and old city squares are gorgeous.
Dont make the assumption that the laws and regulations in place respect human rights and are a 100% good. They also entrench EU bureaucratic power (and thus the power of the ministers) without regards to future technology.
State regs often fail to grapple with the future, and at best slow it down and at worst smother it.
The question was never do enough computers exist in Europe, but rather can Europe organize the capital and cross-company / cross-border relationships required to build a big model at scale. There the answer still looks iffy at best. This is where the US has, and continues to, thrive and where Europe can’t get out of its own way.
I don't believe Europe can build models that can compete with American ones.
1. In order to build competitive models, you need to offer competitive salaries and equity. Europe has very old and inadequate corporate law virtually everywhere but in UK. European labs cannot attract talent that can build such competitive models with the proper lack of incentives.
2. In order to build competitive models, you need gargantuan amounts of compute. And thus capital. How can you compete when big tech can just cough a handful of equity and raise $ 85 B like Alphabet is doing right now?
3. In order to have these datacenters financially feasible you need cheap energy. We don't have it. Some places like France have clean one, but it's still not cheap enough, you're still paying a 45-50% premium over some random South Carolina.
What Europe should do is to finally tackle its fundamental issues with corporate laws, startups and incentivize more money to flow into venture capital.
Essentially we need a bunch of Mistrals, but with more competition and better incentives.
There's plenty of brilliant European engineers and scientists that would gladly take some pay cut to work in Europe instead of US and could bring their expertise here, but you still need the right incentives.
You can do what frontier labs do today which is to properly license things that are copyrighted and use open source web crawls for things that don’t have copyright issues. You can then also commission new datasets (volume needed goes down when quality is high).
The European regulations are the thing that will kneecap anything meaningful coming out of Europe. Mind blowing to me that this is worth the tradeoff since Europe will be beholden to other frontier labs be it China or the US, so regulations accomplishing very little if anything on impacting actual AI development and losing vast amounts of leverage in the process.
> You can do what frontier labs do today which is to properly license things that are copyrighted and use open source web crawls for things that don’t have copyright issues. You can then also commission new datasets (volume needed goes down when quality is high).
It cost Anthropic $1.5 billion for training on libgen's 480k pirated ebooks.
Investors will cough up that money if you're already clearly a frontier lab with a model people are paying a lot of money for.
Tough to get that much cash without anything to show.
Regulations aside, Europe is extremely divided. There's constant resistance from individual states, disputes and far right extremism gaining traction. At this point, it seems like EU can barely agree to make any decision.
Well-meaning restrictions that threaten Europe's ability to compete sound like something that would eventually encourage far right extremism by impeaching the validity of the restrictions' philosophical underpinnings.
In my experience it doesn't take anything that ample to encourage far right extremism. It's enough to point at an existing problem and a convincing scapegoat. It works today not eventually and it works regardless of any reason or reality.
It's true though that multiple problems mean multiple propaganda seeds.
> 1. In order to build competitive models, you need to offer competitive salaries and equity.
FWIW, for the equity part there's a proposal expected to pass for next year: https://www.eu-inc.org/ (but it doesn't address taxes, cross-border employment, or anything significant so it's mostly moot). The main goal is to attract native VCs.
AFAIK it's designed by lawyers and old money, with little to no input from tech entrepreneurs.
The culture's still all wrong. If you have a startup that failed in SV, that's par for the course. Better luck next time! If you fail in the EU, that's the kiss of death. Your startup failed???
> If you fail in the EU, that's the kiss of death. Your startup failed???
As a native German, I wouldn't say this is the case: the opinions of people rather differ quite a bit on this topic (there also exist quite a lot of people who are nearer to the US-American mentality here).
What I would rather claim is some kind of kiss of death, is if your startup failed because you made stupid mistakes. People don't like such unresponsible people (many people say that startup founders also have responsibility for their employees).
This sentiment is so wrong, yet so bloody persistent. I know plenty of european entrepreneurs, myself included, that went through one or more screw ups. All the ones that stuck with entrepreneurship eventually landed a hit.
> you need to offer competitive salaries and equity
This has always been an argument for "peace time" underperformance of european tech sector but I don't buy this argument for critical national security needs. Historically countries never needed to top the compensation charts to get talent. What they do need is a clear mission and ambition. This is what is missing in Europe
Just as a reminder, Google DeepMind is right here in the UK, and there are hundreds, thousands of top AI researchers that are foundational to everything that the US is doing, as much, if more so than the Chinese contributions.
We need compute, yes, but we certainly aren't short of talent if we put our minds to it, and many of them are already here.
It is a good example that what Europe lacks is capital. And there is an rich get richer phenomenon where wealth flows to the USA, and successful European companies gets sold (and many talented Europeans ends up working for American companies). In many ways the dynamic is one of a colony.
The more I learn about modern economics, the less I feel I know. Right now, the sense I have is that the flow of money from Europe to the USA is more like using the US as a flag of convenience than a material loss of wealth, especially given how many "American" companies have European offices filled with European staff and how much money is made selling space for ads from European companies to European users.
Does it matter in which countries the offices with the staff who develop some of these models are? I think so, for a number of reasons too long to go into.
Re "US citizens only", the question I'd have right now for all the AI companies is: can any new better-or-as-good-as Fable AI model actually be released?
If not, stop development of better models. That's the single most expensive thing any of them are doing.
Export controls on software is somewhere between "hard" and "impossible", so "US citizens only" means something between "nobody" and "perhaps some government agents", but the latter don't pay enough to justify the cost.
> In order to build competitive models, you need to offer competitive salaries and equity. Europe has very old and inadequate corporate law virtually everywhere but in UK.
It is a fact that a much smaller amount of money is available in the EU for startup investments.
But in which sense it the corporate law inadequate? As far as I am aware the laws allow quite a lot of freedom in setting up the corporate governance for many forms of companies.
There's no stock option mechanisms available in most of EU.
You get someone you cannot tempt him with "do a great job and get X amount of equity".
In Italy it is not enforceable, even if you sign a contract.
With this, startups can only compete with bigger companies on salary, hard, and don't get equally motivated hires to get a piece of a company. You get people there for the paycheck.
It's also unfriendly to venture capitalists, for different reasons.
So corporate law is a major problem in most of EU, as it's unfriendly both to investors and employees.
Also, firing people is hard in EU. You hire the wrong person, you're stuck with it.
As per your points, Europe really can't compete, particularly when power is considered. However, frontier models that require city-sized data centres might not be all they are cracked up to be.
In China they seem to be nonchalantly doing a lot with AI for specific rather than 'ask me anything' tasks. To them, they are quite used to everyday applications that work well within limited domains, no vast data centre needed, just on-device. Hence the hype is no big deal.
Europe needs to think again about what can be done to make Europe attractive for software development, and I have seen no helpful encouragement from UK or European governments over the last few decades. No word of a lie, all we got in the UK was the BBC Micro, way back in the early 1980s, and since then tech has been culturally uncool.
This cultural aspect has not gone away, if a guy is a software engineer then he isn't going to get lucky with the lasses, they will run a mile.
What gets me is that the UK or places in Europe such as those places where finance matters, could have had active policing and law enforcement of data breaches and hacking, with sensible standards for storing customer data, making Europe the best place to host your data, purely for the legal protections. But we ended up with cookie notices and anti-slavery statements.
It seems unlikely at the moment. The writeup you have is quite interesting, but notably distributed compute for frontier is at least a bump in the road.
As other's have pointed out, if resources across Europe came together there could be a good amount of resources today to do so, but it is fragmented.
Project Glasswing, and most recently the blocking of Fable 5 potentially only for non-US citizens have sparked more attention in the political spheres regarding sovereignty/competitiveness of European AI.
There as also this great write-up which explains the trajectory Europe currently has when it comes to AI compute here: https://europe2031.ai/
So theoretically: yes, but there doesn't seem to be a big enough will to attempt to catch up with the trajectory of American hyper-scalers.
Sure, theoretically, if it could come to an agreement, and meanwhile the cross-border cooperation of even the inter-EU countries is at an abysmal rate, and currently, even during a goddamn land war with Russia, Germany and France can't come to an agreement to build a fighter jet ensemble (together).
You mean like they've been doing since the 1950s with the the largest physics laboratory in the world (CERN)? Or more to the point, the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) of which 27/27 EU member states participate?
Even at the smaller level the ethos and ambition is clear - take EURO-3C: the Horizon Europe project aimed at delivering a pan-European sovereign infrastructure that integrates Telco, Edge, Cloud, and AI capabilities under a federated model which has 70+ Euro-participants.
This is unfortunately the problem. The level of the public debate is abysmal, most politicians push unbelivably stupid shit about immigration and other identitarian nonsense, budget gets spent to ensure cheese and wine have the proper AOC certifications on them. Honestly up to a point I even understand it, many people don't see themselves as having a meaningful identity as EU citizens and you can't force it upon them.
Asking for sensible AI policy is like asking for a base on mars.
> many people don't see themselves as having a meaningful identity as EU citizens
I sometimes wonder if the citizens of the United States (of America) even comprehend that the EU is not itself a sovereign nation (unlike the states in say, the USA, or Australia) and is just a union of sovereign polities.
Nobody in the EU is an EU Citizen unless they are a citizen of one of the member states.
> reducing unskilled and hateful immigration is the democratic thing do
Hateful, sure, though just like all those on the right who say the first word of "hate crime" is redundant, I'd argue home-grown hate's just as dangerous as imported.
But "unskilled" immigration? When the topic is AI? If this stuff works as advertised, *nobody's skills matter any more*. If it doesn't at least render many of our skills obsolete, why build it? If you make an AI which can't automate anything, how is this not a waste of money?
Even without that, I've not seen anyone who knows about Baumol's cost disease opine either way about migration, high or low skilled.
I am open to the idea that we should handle immigration differently, but I want a plan and specifics, not slogans. What we want to achieve, and by what mechanisms you plan to get there. Open any newspaper: are you more likely to find careful and considerate opinions or racist screeds?
And that is the problem. Time and energy and money and political capital are routinely spent on inconsequential electoral poliTICS rather than substantial poliCY.
The fighter jet program was a jobs program, not dissimilar to how many US government programs are jobs programs by having different parts of it made in different states for no goo reason. Add in some nationalism and it was inevitable it would not work out.
I always find it strange that being a "jobs program" is said as if derogatory, especially when talking about military equipment of all things. The free market optimizes for handling normalcy, not exception handling, like wartime. The reason to artificially these jobs is so that you have the factories and expertise to make these things when you need them.
And what, they couldn't split the jobs 50/50 in any meaningful way so that everyone was happy? Dunno, you can let the french design and the germans build or something.
That's how you get something like Ariane 6 -- engineered to satisfy political constraints rather that to be competitive. Granted, NASA or to some extent the US military have the same problem.
NASA is stubborn to keep going with Boeing. I'm actually fascinated that no one was put behind bars so far for the blunder the new rocket system is.
The US military has a few companies that it can work with to produce what it needs, so they are not necessarily tied to "we need to build a plane in 20 different locations to satisfy everyone".
And yeah, Europe has an expensive rocket no one wants to use commercially because it many times more expensive than the competition.
In a weird sense, the EU exemplifies what the USA would be like without a strong federal government: Dysfunctional as states compete with, undercut and stifle each other.
isnt the eu basically a less federalist version of the usa? how is it then that the usa claims its more free? the individual state members in the EU have more freedom than individual states.
> isnt the eu basically a less federalist version of the usa?
And what good does it do? The EU cannot speak in a single voice - there is no foreign minister, no defense minister, no whatever minister.
Like the EU foreign function: you have a person claiming to be the EU voice, and then you have the foreign ministers of every EU member that can just say whatever they want if what the EU voice says is contrary to their political game in their own country. Same for the other functions.
Being less federalist is not better, it is worse. The EU does not speak in a single voice in any domain.
> And what good does it do? The EU cannot speak in a single voice - there is no foreign minister, no defense minister, no whatever minister.
Nor can Switzerland. And still it is one of the best country world wide both in term of living and economically.
Distributed federal power like Switzerland trades quick decision making for resilience.
If it might look up 'messy' on the surface, it is in fact a quality. A very valuable one in fact: because it is exactly what prevent fucked up like Trump to happen in the EU.
I've never seen the Swiss foreign minister being contradicted by another minister or by an official from a Canton.
But the EU foreign minister can be contradicted by basically any country president/prime minister or their foreign ministers if it says something that is not aligned with every other EU member.
You misunderstood me. If Kaja Kallas says "the EU will do X", then the French or Spanish foreign ministers can say "no, we will not do that". So the EU does not do X because it upset a big country, it will maybe do X-Y or not do it at all if X is dependent on the money spent by France or Spain, or some of their facilities or whatever.
In your example, the mayor can criticize the canton decision, but he cannot do anything about it. That's the difference.
The EU is in some ways closer to a confederation, but with various "hacks" - in the form of various treaties - to try to work around the problems that led the US to abandon it in favour of a federal model.
It's largely down to very different levels of willingness to integrate more, and various levels of opposition to the kind of constitutional changes that would be required for a federal model.
EU is no where near US. EU started as a economic union and became a political nightmare. It would have done far better had it stayed only as an economic Union. Further, EU doesn't have a constitution. In US every law maker swear to protect and uphold the constitution and I don't even know what is the equivalent in EU.
Id say the EU is less federal because each member country maintains its own sovereignty and local laws. Its more of a coalition of the willing. While in the US the federal gov can override states. The EU also has each state vote on different legislations. (Massive oversimplification)
The US lays claim to all kinds of bullshit. But more to the point; different values, different laws - does it matter how centralized the control is? I would argue neither is “more” free, just free in different ways. US has a huge problem in equal access to the law, which undermines freedom no matter how good the laws are.
In the US, the freedom is explicitly for the people, not Federal nor State government. States are relatively more free than the Federal government, but both are greatly restricted by the Constitution. Before the Constitution, the US had a previous government under the Articles of Confederation (see below) that had many deficiencies and only gave freedom to member States.
The EU is organized more similar to the US under the Articles of Confederation.
The first American government (Articles of Confederation) gave State governments almost unlimited power e.g. they could print their own money. It did not grant freedom to the people in any meaningful way. States were free to abuse this power both against their own citizens and, more importantly, the other member States. This created many practical problems.
The second and current American government (Constitution) learned lessons from this experience. It removed a limited set of key powers from the States and gave it to the Federal government such as the creation of currency. It also forced all States to interact with each other on the same terms, with strict oversight from the Federal government. Additionally, it explicitly granted rights to the people rather than their State governments, since the States had demonstrated they could not be trusted to do the right thing. These changes forced the States to play nicely with each other and treat their people better.
These changes were a large improvement. Almost every law an American experiences is State law, because States have much more freedom to create laws. The Federal government can only make laws from a short list. Both State and Federal governments are strictly prohibited from creating many kinds of laws.
In the US, freedom is for the people, not for the member States. The Federal government has even less freedom than the member States to make law.
> In the US, the freedom is explicitly for the people, not Federal nor State government.
I don't see how anyone can make this claim in 2026 and not expect to be laughed out of the room? In practice, freedom is for sale; it's not available to the people nor the citizens.
Normal in history. Change often isn't binary. Consider for example: the exact date of the end of the British empire is several possible dates between "the independence of Ireland in the immediate aftermath of WW1" and "it still hasn't".
You don't think US states compete with, undercut and stifle each other?
Second question: you think the USA has a strong federal government?
I mean that is actually an open question even in non-Trump years, not least when one side of the political aisle was famously dedicated to shrinking it down so small it could be "drowned in a bathtub", to quote one of its more famous assholes.
>You don't think US states compete with, undercut and stifle each other?
Compete with each other, yes.
But all US states take pride in Silicon Valley being American.
No EU project for its own "Silicon Valley" can succeed, because the French would insist on it being in France, Germans would insist on Germany, Dutch in the Netherlands, etc.
> No EU project for its own "Silicon Valley" can succeed, because the French would insist on it being in France, Germans would insist on Germany, Dutch in the Netherlands, etc.
France and Germany and the Netherlands may compete with each other to attract VC and tech firms, but they're ultimately no more capable of preventing each other from getting a runaway success loop than New York and Utah were at preventing California from getting actual Silicon Valley.
The EU as an institution just doesn't wield any magic wand of creating things like that to be fought over, just like Washington DC also doesn't.
>France and Germany and the Netherlands may compete with each other to attract VC and tech firms, but they're ultimately no more capable of preventing each other from getting a runaway success loop than New York and Utah were at preventing California from getting actual Silicon Valley.
Yes, but why hasn't said success loop occurred anywhere else yet? Silicon Valley has been a "thing" for five decades now.
> The EU as an institution just doesn't wield any magic wand of creating things like that to be fought over, just like Washington DC also doesn't.
What I meant is that every time HN or elsewhere talks about Europe being behind the US in terms of tech there is mention of the need for a "European Silicon Valley". But that is going to require a level of support that is probably beyond the scale of one national government.
The EU can trace its origins back to France and Germany agreeing to combine its coal and steel.[1] Berlin and Paris would be happy to designate, say, the Strasbourg-Stuttgart axis as the "EU technology hub", with corresponding EU funding, but other member states aren't going to be happy.
[1] And further to the long wrangling over Alsace-Lorraine, but that's neither here nor there
> Yes, but why hasn't said success loop occurred anywhere else yet? Silicon Valley has been a "thing" for five decades now.
So have twenty-three Superfund sites —- land from 1970s businesses that the federal government had to take over because nobody else could or would fix the uncosted externality.
What is this whole thing about Europe being behind on AI? Do Mistral and DeepL not exist? Yes, I know DeepL is niche, but IMHO it is the best translation model out there.
I've tried using Mistral for various tasks, and it is so far behind the American models that I just never bother using it despite still having lots of Mistral API credits leftover. Even their OCR and TTS products are surpassed by generic US models - I use regular Claude Sonnet for OCR because it is more accurate than Mistral OCR.
I could rant about this, I am just so disappointed at how Mistral completely gave up and pivoted into bespoke fine-tuning consulting. The terrifying thing is that they don't seem to even understand how far behind they are, as if they never tried Opus, let alone Fable / Mythos. Or they do understand and that's why they focus on consulting now.
Well, the front page of their website claims "Frontier AI In Your Hands", so I guess they're not marketing it that way.
I personally think there's a hint in that Mistral Medium 3.5 costs 5x the price of Mistral Large 3, and that Mistral Large is not listed anymore as a "Featured Model" and hasn't been updated since Dec 2025:
But what I really base it on is an interview the Mistral CEO gave on the Big Technology Podcast back in January this year:
Alex Kantrowitz: "Do you consider yourself, is the most important thing you do building the models? Or is the most important thing you do the service? Are you primarily a model builder, or primarily a service provider?"
Arthur Mensch: "We are there to help our customers get to value."
Alex Kantrowitz: "So, service!"
Arthur Mensch: "We are here to... but to get to value, they need to have great models. And to get to value, they need to have the right tools to train the models. And so the best way to train, to create those tools, is effectively to train the best models. So the two things are extremely linked together. We create models that are very easy to customize. We create models with tools that we then export to our customers, so that they can use them, and we help our customers train their own models. You can't go and sell to an enterprise that you are going to help them create great custom systems, if you can't show to the world that you are effectively the leader in open source technology. So the two parts are equally important, the first is enabling the other, and there's effectively a flywheel there because we make our choices when it comes to the model design in a way that is enabling the various customers we have. As one example, we've put a lot of emphasis on having models that are great at physics, because we work with manufacturing companies that run into physical problems. So that's the flywheel we have set up. Having the science team and the business team sit together."
It's at 22:37 in the video. Elsewhere in the podcast he mentions that they don't believe in a large unified generic model, they think the future of AI is small dedicated-task models (OCR, TTS, bespoke trained)... but unfortunately I don't have a timestamp link for that part.
> they think the future of AI is small dedicated-task models
I mean, I do too. Or at least, this will be a large market. But the natural leader for that space is the firm building the frontier models. They have the most control and access for distillation.
Hmm, I'm skeptical of small model AI - they are useful for specific domains & the task they're trained for, I just think it's thinking too small. I worry that the people who think AI is only useful for email triage and OCR will miss all the grand problems that get solved by the very largest frontier models. But that's me, and I could be wrong.
Speaking of me being wrong: the Mistral CEO tweeted today that they're coming out with a "fat but sparse" model in July, so big that it will only be available to governments & a few partners at first (ala Glasswing/Mythos I guess). I fear that's just marketing, but if Mistral really have gone all out to make a new truly large model & at least try to catchup to China, good luck to them!
It is behind in the sense that if tomorrow the US and China place an export ban on their models all we're left with are Mistral's ones.
They are not bad, and they have made huge progress, but you're still one year behind if not more.
May matter less and less as time progresses, or it may matter more if research further speeds up.
Honestly I wish capitalism and globalization kept working as they did for decades, but since more than a decade we're reverting to inefficient protectionist steps, one after the other.
They could, but why? US and China has poured Trillion of USD into training and any semblance of getting those money back seems like some far fetched dream. Currently there is no realistic path to profitability with these models.
What I see as usable product in the future are smaller specialized models which are able to run and be trained with fraction of resources what goes to current frontier models.
Forget regulations, would it make sense for Europe to train a frontier model of it's own? Would it be sufficiently better than fine tuning a Chinese model? Would it actually be competitive with US frontier models? Would enough people pay to use it even within Europe to pay for the training costs? Do we have enough inference capacity that enough people /could/ use it? Would being "European" allow any governments in Europe to trust it, rather than deciding that actually there needs to be a French, German, Italian, Spanish and UK sovereign AI?
I am guessing that enough of these questions can be answered with "no" that nobody really wants to invest.
For the same reason there isn't really a serious third start up competitor to OpenAI and Anthropic.
I was suggesting US models are very good, and would probably be preferable to a less capable sovereign AI. My point was that this makes building European sovereign AI unappealing.
Similarly I was not suggesting Chinese models are an alternative to sovereign AI. An alternative which might be able to fulfil some of the objectives of a real sovereign AI while being far cheaper.
But if the needed total revenue for an investment is so absurdly large, that we need to capture 5-10% of the labour market,
being slow might mean not burning in the crash.
The US drove the CCCP to bankruptcy by investing in nuclear bombs. Maybe history repeats itself.
The US was able to do that because a majority of the world including Europe was determined to exclude USSR from all trade and by putting them into extreme paranoia of total destruction. EU has lots of trading partners from the West and not everything is improved by AI.
Yes an economy that's being inflated by AI can affect acquiring of certain resources like DRAM or certain silicon quotas, if you're not joining the bandwagon. However there is enough in-house tech in Europe to prop up the critical industries that do not get affected by AI.
The US also needs someone to sell their stuff for keeping the inflated prices. A majority internal market is as unhealthy for the US as the EU.
Are we really discussing a plan that has never been attempted before (training a frontier model on federated hardware) and that would require coordination on a continental scale, sketched on a five-page PDF on GitHub with no discernible author or affiliation? a PDF that, I am sorry to point out, reeks of AI prose in more than one passage?
Just post the prompt that generated this slop next time. Then we'd have a chance of seeing some original thoughts, instead of a bunch of web searches filtered through a bucket of mediocrity.
We do. But only for a limited context space, plant images. We do train our own Foundation Model, and it works great. It's the world frontier model. The machine is expensive, yes, but the customers also pay a lot to get it's advantages. And we got the H100`s on ebay.
We also have buerocracy and regulations problems, but not with the AI at all. Only with the military civil dual-use restriction of thermal cameras. The ones we are allowed to sell have ridicolous resolutions. It still works, but it's barely useful.
And our colleagues across town are also world leader in their AI field. They produce all the world best face recognition SW. They had to use tricks to overcome regulations, but it works. They have their own HW as us.
And again other colleagues across town do rent their GPU computes to train their models. That's for office OCR, and speech to text.
Just bribe someone for access, it's still cheaper than training your own model from scratch. They stole the entire accumulated output of humanity and fed it to their beast, no one should feel any moral or ethical compunction about taking from the AI firms.
Same problem, different scope. The EU doesn’t have a proper intelligence agencies, it has members who each run their own. The chances that any of them can achieve the scale of China’s spies is silly.
Unpopular opinion: They can not and they should not.
We live in a world where free open weight-models become competitive with frontier model within a year or two.
It is much more lucrative and proficient in term of business to solve real problems affecting the industries / govs with A.I right now than it is to do the arm race with OpenAI or Anthropic.
That is what Mistral is doing and that served them well so far.
The problem is not regulation and never has been. Regulation is a best a minor stone in the shoes of A.I company in Europe.
The problem is somewhere else: People fails to understand that there is no equivalent in the EU to the unlimited money tap of American VCs and private funding. That's just not a thing here, the investor landscape is much more dry.
Company here just cannot stay unprofitable for 25y while surfing on stocks valuation, it does not work like that in the EU.
And as such they cannot compete with behemoth like OpenAI that burn 80B$ a year of cash while staying afloat.
I do believe the approach of Mistral is the right one: Solve actual problems right now even if not Edge and construct on top of that.
Specially if politically speaking, the White House administration continue to give excellent arguments in favor of sovereignty for the incoming decade. It might be the best strategy they have.
I feel like the very thing that EU is great at: more consumer friendly and anti-corporate legistation, also hamstrings it for innovation. Why would VCs invest in AI there instead of in the US where they don't have to worry about any of that.
No because public EU compute is adminisered by physicists and although they are very competent in their own domains they are winging it when it comes to AI. It like expecting OakRidge to train LLMs...
Does Europe need to train a frontier AI model, at all?
"Training a frontier AI model" is a euphemism. The AI industry is, at present, a disproportionately resource-intensive and exploitative activity which carries only an religious promise of making up for itself at some future date (note that the beliefs being touted to board members are different than the gospel spread to users).
More accessible "non-frontier" models are being designed, built, and trained, while bigger models' gains are beginning to asymptote. Economically, Europe does not often hastily participate in new ways of wealth extraction, and with regard to sovereignty, I'd argue that "frontier" models are becoming a liability to the governments who build them and to the populations they're meant to lead.
> Does Europe need to train a frontier AI model, at all?
Perhaps. While I'm more impressed by AI than I think you are, I do also say on occasion that recent developments in AI feels much like the 90s rapid development of computer graphics, in the sense we're overly impressed by what we see only to discard it quickly when the next improvement arrives: https://archive.org/details/nextgen-issue-26
If the US government declares no model ≥ Fable can be released, that could make it completely pointless for anyone in the USA to work towards superior models, which may cause rapid catching up, or may cause the investment bubble to pop and all the money to go away.
Or it may cause all the investment to go to not-USA. China's one possibility, EU is another. No idea which would be least-distasteful to the people currently eager to invest in AI.
I'm with you. I think we will need less "frontier" models in the future, but we'll reach for more specialized ones. A small, focused model trained to e.g. coding is within the realm of useful reality. JetBrains is making some moves in the field, and laudably, some of their work is open-weight.
it is a bizarre nuclear arms race. what they do need are the raw reaources and the capabilities to sefend themselves ans the capability for offense atleast as a threat.
I'm not sure I follow how this metaphor plays out. Many stand to gain by harming and threatening Europe and many stand to suffer if Europe is harmed or threatened. Far be it from me to claim Europe a perfected system, but there are globalized interdependencies which exist here. I think that I'm not seeing the indicators of hard benefits which correlate to the hypotheses put forward by the financial markets. In which ways are the trillions of dollars of value meant to manifest and how do we know when they begin to do so?
These AI models are powerful enough to be used as cyber threats, as a minimum. They may not prove out the other GDP or ROI claims, but the ability to both improve security and dismantle is means if you're not regularly building and improving these models on the software vulnerabilities your organization has, you are increasingly vulnerable to attacks.
Since it's impractical to airgap your military and readinessness capabilities, this means you need incountry capabilities because even if America weren't a fascist, you could easily be disconnected from the support from a cyberattack.
I think you're just following too much AI hype to see any clear use case.
Ok, now I understand better the metaphor. I don't understand your conclusion about AI hype, but at at rate, your earlier point is clearer.
The story I'm not readily conceiting to is that trillion-dollar frontier model training capex is the only thing that results in the defense capabilities countries need in relation to information security. From my understanding, the cyber wins being celebrated of late have come just as much (if not more) from how models are wielded than how they were trained.
Maybe the more honest framing of my question is: at what level of capability does sovereign training become the only viable path, and is that level the same as the trillion-dollar pretraining capacity TFA is actually asking about, or is it rather something more tactical/accessible? That is the part I'm genuinely more interested in, since the closer you are to benefiting from the commercial aspects of model training, the more likely it is that the answers will simply follow the money, so to speak.
We are there already pretty much - if I understand your point (“How the models are wielded”) refers to the harness - which is part of model training already. Fable was trained to use Claude code harnesses effectively to keep plugging at a problem with a lot of working memory and world knowledge and reasoning capability - and to keep hitting that search space intelligently. And it is not just cybersecurity. I’ll give several examples from my own recent experience :
1. Cyber - already discussed - has an issue that the bigger models can actually do a full end-to-end exploration of an exploit - go from theory to an actual deployable payload.
2. CAD/CAM/Mechanics - CalculiX (ccx) - an open-source FEA and similar mechanical solver - think Siemens or ANSYS, but open-source. A team I was helping was trying to do a design mount of a physical object that would need to reduce vibrations in a frequency band - think microphone mount basically. Usual loop would be design, analyze with Siemens, go to beginning. AI loop is have AI design, then analyze using ANSYS, then analyze result, change design, iterate. That loop did not produce anything useful for elastic materials because ANSYS would take 12 hrs to do acoustic analysis using a GPU. 1 week of autonomous work by a frontier model resulted in a modification and custom solver added to ccx that could simulate the acoustics (vibrations) _in that particular problem_ in about 20 seconds - mainly because it could try new mathematical ideas, then compare them against ANSYS reference for quality of solution, and iterate. And 1 week _after that_ the frontier model - iterating on one design per minute - came up with multiple 3-d printable ground-breaking mounts - including sending one off to xeometry for printing and getting it shipped back. Existing designs had a 20 db drop in the frequency ranges needed - this one had 60. For reference 40 DB is basically infinity :) While this was for microphones - you can imagine that vibration reduction is a big thing in engine, suspension, and weapon mounting, and well, in general things that move. 3 person team btw - unthinkable even 1 year ago.
3. Pharma. Different company - but given a known Density Function Theory or Kappa Cluster molecule simulator, one can run nice agentic loops over frontier models to do chemical or pharmaceutical research - there’s a reason Anthropic is launching Claude Chemistry. Note that then limiting factor is the multi-week runtime of Kappa Cluster and similarly molecular dynamics simulators. If one _could_ speed that up for a particular problem space or molecule type, one could very very quickly have a high-end reasoning model iterate to a good molecular design - and frontier models are getting very good at precisely automating the ML research needed to do that autonomously - after all, there’s a reference there. 5 ppl - 2 years ago would be a research institute.
4. Physical AI - robotics - same principle.
5. This is basically the bet Bezos is doing with his new company.
Please do not underestimate the effect these models will have on our ability to improve our ability to effect the world - this is just starting to hit now. I think we can all extrapolate the GDP and defense impact of this - or at least that there will be a very significant one.
This has factored out product development, which is more than compute resources. Just like any industry, some organisation needs to take ownership and responsibility to convert technology to a usable product.
No. Computers are made in the USA or China, OSs are made in the USA (Linux, Windows, Mac).
I'm still waiting for the European computer but all microcontrollers (no processors yet) made in EU have an ARM (British-American) Cortex and the RAM is made elsewhere.
No, it cannot. The fundamental problem between the US and EU it is that in the US if something is not explicitly forbidden, it is allowed and in the EU if it is not explicitly allowed it is forbidden.
You cannot have innovation at the speed and scale that you have in the US because the legislation is cumbersome and there is no unified market with the same rules.
It's not just that. The US models were trained partly due to massive theft. They illegally acquired (not used, that was legal) massive amounts of texts that they trained their model on. If you or me stole that much we would be in prison but if you're rich you get to do it and pay a small fine. It's not even the laws. It's in the US you're allowed to break the laws.
I am of the opinion that if it is on the internet, it is free. Just like I find free movies, so do AI companies find free books or whatever they need for their models. What's so hard to understand?
It's sometimes very telling when other people think of you and your country. While I do agree we in Europe have sometimes too many rules, but I just can't understand the American obsession with freedom and being able to do things to the detriment of society
It's also quite weird that Americans are the first ones to go full judgemental mode as it is demonstrated in this comment section. When I visited there, I also found people to be overly reactive and judgemental of seemingly minor things and quite obsessed with wealth. I love the fact that nobody gives a flying fuck about anything other strangers are doing in Europe.
That's not to say that there are no bureaucratic inefficiencies in Europe. There are a lot. France, Germany, Nordics and other members of the EU / EEA should strive to strengthen the industries and cut out the bullshit. It is a must to wake up from Boomer-pensioner-induced sleep and NIMBYsm, not for joining a stupid arms race but being able to provide a peaceful prosperity for our children. It is possible to enjoy quite a lot human rights and I think they are not a blocker.
Absolutely not, even if Europe was given all of the compute in the world. The issues are much much worse. Starting at "data privacy", continuing with the "EU AI Act" and just an overall mindset of regulation and German angst. Many structures in the EU actively prevent and fight against innovation. Oftentimes more subtle but the consequences stay the same. If you ever had to use one of the "sovereign" AI provides such as StackIT, OVH and the-like, I feel with you. It is just so bad in terms of product and performance, there is no comparison at all with Hyperscalers, and it shows. Eventually, it's a cultural and structural problem along the way and the future here looks horrible.
We can debate the details and implementation but EU legislature is, at least in spirit, trying to protect human rights. What does it say about progress that the same laws that protect human rights also stifle innovation?
> EU legislature is, at least in spirit, trying to protect human rights. What does it say about progress that the same laws that protect human rights also stifle innovation?
As you said, in spirit. In fact the EU’s AI Act is not really human rights legislation. (It exempts military and national-security uses.) Where it comes close, e.g. in seeking to ban facial recognition or social scoring, it does so clumsily.
So in practice, the EU has passed a series of laws that essentially make AI a monopoly of military and intelligence-community interests while forcing its consumers to use foreign products. Not exactly a win.
> (It exempts military and national-security uses.)
The EU cannot legislate on national security matters.
> EU cannot legislate on national security matters
Sure. Legally, makes sense. Practically, if you want to do all those things the legislation purports to be doing for human rights, you just have to get the right general or spy or police chief on your side. That makes the whole scheme a bit of a boondoggle. Lots of friction. Remarkably little tangible benefit.
> Sure. Legally, makes sense. Practically, if you want to do all those things...
If you had just owned up to how you were mistaken about EU legislative limits - confidently stated - I probably would have taken everything else in your initial comment at face value.
Your doubling down into unfalsifiable territory has me thinking your arguments are feelings-based with post-facto justifications.
> how you were mistaken about EU legislative limits
I’m not making any legal arguments. The fact that the EU can’t legislate on those issues doesn’t change that its AI Act has those loopholes.
> unfalsifiable territory
No, I’m not. If the AI Act constrained any actual risks, that would falsify my assertion. I’m saying it in practice doesn’t. Those capabilities are still being built, just not in Europe. And they’ll still be sold to Europe, just to its governments to use however they want, not to its people.
The EU doesn’t have the power to write AI legislation for human rights purposes. It does have the power to throw gum into its AI industry’s works. It did what it could. Which is very little of the former (by constraining B2C and B2B, sort of). It did a lot of the latter.
Congress can’t do a lot of things. Passing something stupid and then complaining that the reason it isn’t competently written is because of Constitutional limits doesn’t absolve the stupid bill.
I’m not an expert on EU law or AI. But I do make capital-allocation decisions around this stuff, and I know enough to know that as currently configured the only main AI business to do in the EU is in selling it things that kill or surveil.
I read their post in the way they intended. Regardless of whether they can, the fact that they fail to cover all the bases makes the legislation almost useless.
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I don't think you're able to understand what the alternative looks like.
There is no way I want America's future.
Please explain. Thanks isn't as self evident as your statement assumes.
No thanks. If you can't see it for yourself, that's on you.
> What does it say about progress that the same laws that protect human rights also stifle innovation?
Innovative methods to destroy human life are "stifled" by measures intended to preserve human life. What to you mean by "progress" -- the betterment of the human condition, or the enrichment of the few and powerful?
If someone gets rich because they provide an affordable useful service to millions then that is definitely progress. They should get rich.
And that is the difference in philosophy between the European and American mindset, and why America actually innovates.
That's why American will become a full dystopia before Europe.
Europe isn't a dystopia because it could import American innovation. There's a reason Germany car manufacturers were never going to electrify by themselves.
I genuinely think there's a level of unrealised density in this conversation.
Europe innovates too.
This sounds like PG's essay on the front page (today or yesterday).
It's just a very obvious point, evidenced by where most companies end up being created. Europe's main innovation failure is a failure to recognise the value in taking a risk, and instead to reward people who don't from the people who do. But that still makes it a good place to do bread and better work - old school fabrication of cheap, old-process chips is a good example.
EU legislature is an actual corpus of laws. It’s imperfect, but it’s arguably better than having a guy that can block a model or threat companies because they crossed him.
No it's not.
Europe has no models to even block.
The US has a guy who occasionally can screw things up for a few weeks, but who will be gone in a while.
You have it upside down: the innovation and the stuff is the valuable thing, the laws are there to help us organize ourselves a bit after the fact. They're always a secondary concern to the extent that the vast majority of civilization is working with one another, doing material things wherein the law usually is there as a backstop.
There are some ugly things here and there but by and large - 'cookie settings' has not materially improved people's lives - and not nearly as much as the innovations on the web themselves.
Doing is primacy, regulating is always secondary, with only a few exceptions.
The EU is in really really bad shape on industrial issues on a continental scale - 'too many regulations' is actually not a root cause (it's a big drag, but not root), but it's also not for the most part some kind of advantage.
You see the same thing play out with defence and other things.
Having to beg the US for help with Ukraine, for Patriot munitions, Starlink, advanced intel, for 5th Gen gear, mid range ballistic missiles - it's an existentially disempowering posture.
Human rights won't matter in the areas where the Russians have conquerd or destroyed. Again, here EU/Euro governance issues loom large.
'Do the thing' then as you go along, think about some guardrails or whatever, but the 'do the thing' is the hard part that deserves most of the focus.
Exactly. Europe makes the process and bureaucracy the end itself rather than understanding that they are one part of a means to an end, of actual innovation. People don't call Europe a mausoleum for nothing.
Nobody calls Europe a mausoleum.
It's vibrant and productive, just not at the 'next level' and it lacks some industrial dynamism.
Exactly, it’s quite funny that everyone equate US and US legal system to Trump. The founding fathers created a constitution that can whit-stand and survive people like Trump and still the Republic would thrive. Trump would be gone in few years but US would still be there like it has been for the past 250 years for the people by the people.
On the other hand EU started as an economic union and has rotten into a behemoth that tries to control every aspect of Europeans. It was not created by the people for the people, rather a bunch of bureaucrats to exert their power and establish authority. At the start EU has done a lot of good things as an economic union, but at its current form, it does more harm for the growth of Europe rather than helping
The founding fathers created a document that was already struggling with modern realities prior to Trump. 250 years is not a particularly impressive amount of time for a country to not fall apart.
The U.S. Constitution is older than the current constitution of every EU member state and has remained continuously in force longer than any of them.
A country that is a thousand years old is obviously going to have to change its constitution.
European countries have gone from massive societal changes to massive societal changes (for example from monarchies to republics).
The USA is a new country, and its constitutional rigidity causes a lot of social and political problems that most likely will lead to big changes in the future.
Yes, some countries in Europe remained monarchies for 1500 years or longer. They didn't really have a constituion back then because they were not republics.
They really did have constitutions back then. Substantial constitutions. With many many many documents over hundreds of years.
Their entire history of implementing and applying principles of Roman Law and other creeds was their ever growing constitution.> The USA is a new country, and its constitutional rigidity
and general loudness on the matter of "what is a constitution and why ours is the first and the greatest" has caused much confusion given they have such a short and barely evolved one.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution
UK has been a constitutional monarchy since 1215 Magna Carta
Only if you overlook the time it was a republic 1649 to 1660
You know that's not a good thing, right?
>250 years is not a particularly impressive amount of time for a country to not fall apart.
250 years is older than almost every country in Europe (by that I mean current borders and form of government, not the ancient historical ones).
Most were monarchies or various forms of dictatorship till only a few decades ago and finally settled on their current borders only after WW2 or the fall of the USSR or the Yugoslav wars.
For example Spain had its first democratic elections in 1977 and then the UK was dealing with "The Troubles" sectarian conflict in northern Ireland. Europe always was a powder keg around forms of governance, culture, religion and sects. All that is not something that goes away overnight just because EU membership happened.
In contrast, 250 years of continuous governance and conflict free stability is super impressive by that standard.
> conflict free stability is super impressive by that standard.
Not much happened between 1861 and 1865?
Not to mention if “borders” is part of the continuity definition the US is younger than my parents.
In terms of European history that barely counts a page, not even a chapter.
Care to elaborate on concrete examples on where it struggled? 250 years is quite impressive even if you don't believe it or not because only a handful of countries in the whole world has an older constitution.
There was a civil war, that killed millions, it was fought over slavery.
250 years is commendable, but it wasn't without problems.
'stable' as we understand it is relatively modern.
US Constitution has aged pretty well. Some things in there don't seem as relevant today, but some are more relevant now than ever.
https://theonion.com/third-amendment-rights-group-celebrates...
Yeah the 3rd is what I had in mind as not so relevant
really? The Onion as a source?
As a humorous illustration of the point (of the presence of what is now low relevance content in the constitution.)
Let's try to figure out where the 3rd amendment might actually have significance in the future. Maybe in space habitats? Or could forced installation of government AI in systems be considered a 3rd amendment violation?
"250 years is not a particularly impressive amount of time for a country to not fall apart." ?
Sure it is, it's very impressive.
What other nations have lasted that long?
Chinese Dynasties usually collapse within that range.
Aside from the UK, maybe Sweden (?) which have been fairly contiguous, most nations are more short-lived. France is on it's 5th Republic in the same time-frame.
America is way more than the gong show in charge right now.
Most of the 'tests' of it's integrity are due to really just that one guy.
But you're right to point out inherent problems with the Union.
Because EU is not a 'right wing flag waving' entity, we don't really think about it in terms of 'nationalism', but the EU has among the loudest, most clearly visceral and virulent nationalist supporters.
You can say anything you want about national governments but critique of the EU is met with a lot of rancour.
I've worked for EU bodies, it's full of well meaning people and it has tremendous value as an economic unions, but as a political entity it has existential flaws, too many to name, and it is absolutely an elitist project and it absolutely has a 'regulate first' attitude, which is quite upside down.
'Doing The Stuff' matters 10x more than 'Talking About The Stuff'.
> The US has a guy who occasionally can screw things up for a few weeks, but who will be gone in a while.
We have all just realized that the American Constitution is the jurisprudential analogue of the Albanian virus (https://github.com/AriBjornOlafsson/Albanian-Virus). I wouldn’t take it for granted that what has happened up to now, before this new twist, will continue to happen in a world where being Trump’s friend is enough to change the NASDAQ listing rules.
The cookie stuff is hilarious. I went to the EU recently, and the banners were so bad that I started using a US VPN.
You can protect human rights without stifling progress. It's not a "pick one of the above" situation.
The EU can and should reform many parts of its sclerotic laws and bureaucracies. Whether it can do so before it becomes a subservient puppet state which serves as a battleground for competing powers remains to be seen.
The usian 'frontier' "AI" corporations are involved in severe human rights abuses and war crimes.
I'm not so sure the ideal should be to substitute for those.
That's a bit like arguing that the USSR was, in spirit, trying to defend workers' rights, and therefore we should not have opposed it. At some point, the gap between what something claims to be "in spirit" and what it actually is in practice becomes too large to ignore.
Right, the purpose of a system is what it does.
> EU legislature is, at least in spirit, trying to protect human rights
Protect human rights as defined by EU legislature, obviously. And privacy in public places, for example, doesn't seem to be an undebatable human right.
Heck, I hate street views disfigured by huge privacy blobs.
Why shouldn't I? Your garden is not of a particular interest to me. It's just one of millions of gardens that I might look at as a part of scenery, or to get my bearings if I happen to be in the area. You'd be better off fighting street views in general, unless you are OK with the Streisand effect.
I prefer not to have views of my home permanently archived and made available to anyone in the world, unless they can present a reasonable need for it. City planners? Go ahead. Local people for navigation purposes? Go ahead. But some random bloke from another continent? That's clearly too far.
Services like Street View should have distance-based friction to preserve privacy. The further you are, the less (or at lower quality) should be available, to keep it proportional with the effort required to inspect the place in the real world.
This is just NIMBYism, literally.
Street View is one of the most amazing technologies ever invented. It brings humanity closer together. No longer do you need to get a visa and get on a plane to see what the world is like in a particular place. You can just look on street view. Throughout history people have given up their lives for that kind of world knowledge.
Your inclination to ruin one of humanity's greatest achievements with distance-based blurring to protect the privacy of what is already visible at street level is just sad.
NIMBY is something different, but I'm a proud NIMBY too. People can vote for what happens in their own towns.
At the expense of the overall economic health of everyone. See the rents in San Francisco for examples compared to places where countries actually build, like Singapore and China.
If that's good long-term for the people in SF who've already invested their time and money there, shouldn't be any other way. It's also not some zero-sum game where voting against development always benefits them at the cost of others; sometimes they want development.
It's not good long term for them though, as housing disparity statistically correlates to higher crime.
Maybe more development wouldn't have caused lower crime in SF, we won't know. And that's also not the only thing they care about.
> This is just NIMBYism, literally.
No. OpSec is not Nimbyism.
> It brings humanity closer together.
Sure, then they show up at your door angry about something they saw online. No thanks.
> Services like Street View should have distance-based friction to preserve privacy. The further you are, the less (or at lower quality) should be available, to keep it proportional with the effort required to inspect the place in the real world.
How would the website validate how far I am from your neighborhood? What if I am your neighbor but I am traveling this week? Can I still check Street View of my neighborhood? This is how we get websites to require ID-based verification for everything.
OK, feel free to ruin experience for millions of people.
Ok I will. I don't care, it's my house not theirs.
Watch for those indiscriminate youtubers driving around with their cameras.
There's not a lot I can do about that, but it doesn't really matter since random YouTube videos don't index my house into a globally available map view
> Your garden is not of a particular interest to me.
They why on earth do you care?
That bureaucrats can kill any kind of progress with the best of intentions.
"I'm from the government, and I'm here to help"
this is true, but in practice the EU and its local governments have a giant issue with incompetence when it comes to the specifics of regulation. it's overregulated and sometimes even in such ways that it doesn't even achieve the protection it seeks to generate, so a net loss in both directions.
> We can debate the details and implementation but EU legislature is, at least in spirit, trying to protect human rights
That's an unfounded assertion. Of course, politicians will claim this to be the case. I don't see how patronising citizens protects their human rights, though.
It's certainly a good question. On the idealistic side it's the right choice, people should have the right to have a say in their own data since it's implicitly copyrighted. GDPR has done wonders to prevent careless personal data leaks that are so common in the US, and other kinds of abuse.
In a more practical view though I'm not sure if it'll do anything to stop job replacement from automation as such. Most corporations seem all to eager to make deals with OAI or Anthropic here anyway, and if not that it'll be Chinese ones.
There is a question of "representation", like if a model cannot be trained on the data of one specific country with a specific language, then it does not learn it and the people of that country are now at a disadvantage when trying to leverage the result. Maybe that's a good thing, maybe not, depending on the perspective of how the model is being applied relative to the average person. If it's something that makes their job easier then it's a negative, if it's used by the government to automate scanning all chats then it would be beneficial for it to suck. For widespread languages that doesn't apply of course, so the UK and Spain might as well be exempt.
In general I think it's good for the EU to try and slow down adoption of bleeding edge tech so the US population with its lack of regulations can act as guinea pigs and absorb most of the early damage until we figure out what is the best approach when we get around to adopting it. Even if that means missing out on potential early upsides too. An old example is lots of late adopters going straight to gigabit fiber instead of being stuck on copper DSL.
> GDPR has done wonders to prevent careless personal data leaks that are so common in the US, and other kinds of abuse.
Has it? I still have to see evidence of that. What GDPR definitely has achieved, though, is people engaging in pointless busywork out of fear some busybody is trying to have them fined for being in violation of GDPR.
> In a more practical view though I'm not sure if it'll do anything to stop job replacement from automation as such.
Again, I fail to see how automating jobs is supposed to be something negative. If a job can be automated that means humans ultimately can engage in more worthwhile endeavours. Most modern jobs would have been completely alien to someone from the 19th century. The same applies conversely. How many farriers do you know personally?
> In general I think it's good for the EU to try and slow down adoption of bleeding edge tech so the US population with its lack of regulations can act as guinea pigs and absorb most of the early damage until we figure out what is the best approach when we get around to adopting it.
Quite frankly, by that point there might be not be enough left of the EU to make such a (very) late adoption possible or even relevant at all. We're talking about a timescale of just a few years for a revolution that'll dwarf the Industrial Revolution (which took an entire century, give or take). Up until now, the benefits by far outweigh the downsides and if we're talking about catastrophic damage (essentially, the SkyNet scenario), EU regulation certainly won't stop a US AI from killing Europeans.
> An old example is lots of late adopters going straight to gigabit fiber instead of being stuck on copper DSL.
That's actually a very good example of how overly cautious behaviour in European countries leads to those countries being left behind. Up until very recently, for example, Germany's last mile Internet infrastructure was largely DSL-based (perhaps, still is; at least they're trying to make more use of fibre optics now).
Hmm well the practical point of GDPR is twofold from where I see it: the process being too convoluted and risky turns off some corporations from storing data entirely (maybe it's not complicated enough yet in that regard), and the deletion requests where I can send anyone holding my data an email saying they have to delete it all. I do it sometimes, maybe it's just a placebo and half I secretly hope it is because once someone inevitably whistleblows it, they'll be appropriately fined in the billions like Google gets regularly.
> If a job can be automated that means humans ultimately can engage in more worthwhile endeavours
Yeah if that were actually the case. Seems like the plan is to just automate everything we can in broad strokes, then wait if anything happens to turns up to occupy that portion of the workforce. Nobody seems to have any idea what to do with vast amounts of unemployed people who aren't qualified to do anything anymore.
I think the very possible end result is that there won't be any immediate new jobs in a meaningful volume in the time span when they're needed. As you say, the timeline can be very short, and in the US it certainly will be. The idealistic future is that UBI gets implemented, automation gets taxed and redistributed, so the economy continues to work. But that's a fantasy with the current ring wing wave across the world where any kind of social service is seen as communist money burning for some reason, pocketing that extra wealth through corruption will be the priority. We've seen this again and again in countries where most of the income is dug from the ground in some form, which is economically the same as a few companies making it all through automation. The end result is usually not great for the population. With the AI Act being very anti-authoritarian, banning credits cores, facial recognition, etc. it's a step in the right direction to compensate.
The likely result is probably gonna be some kind of army service and an increase of international tensions to justify a draft when we realize there's only so many extra Wolt drivers a population needs, and then those will go to Starship too. With a war economy you can do pretty much anything to maintain stability, the numbers are made up and the protests don't matter.
If a delay in adoption can help bridge this intermediate gap without complete chaos, millions will suffer a lot less.
> the process being too convoluted and risky turns off some corporations from storing data entirely (maybe it's not complicated enough yet in that regard)
This is a common misconception by people who never had to deal with GDPR in a business capacity (including the politicians who have caused this mess). Corporations either simply don't care or they have their legal department deal with this. It's the small companies and self-employed solo entrepreneurs that suffer.
As for the economic ramifications, there will certainly be a massive short-term upheaval. However, going all Luddite - or even just slowing down the process locally - won't help. Regulation doesn't generate wealth, after all (although EU politicians would like you to believe that), and for something like UBI we need massive wealth generation.
You don't see how protecting the commons from being exploited by hypercapitalists for their own profit is protecting the rights of the average person?
It's not even doing that
I don't subscribe to ideological categories such as "hypercapitalists". So, no, I don't see that.
These questions are getting more loaded each time. "You don't see how the EU fighting pure evil is a good thing?"
> What does it say about progress that the same laws that protect human rights also stifle innovation?
Perhaps it merely says that certain good positive things stifle other good, positive things?
Having 24 languages is a good, positive thing for the EU's cultural distinctiveness, respect for citizens' heritage, and the fairness of the nexus of power not excluding speakers of any country's language.
And yet it's a major barrier to cross-border trade, military cooperation, popular support of closer political ties, and the prospects of any EU companies growing large enough to counterbalance the amazons and facebooks of the world.
A ban on cracking eggs serves the interests of eggs, while stifling the omelette industry.
That's a loaded question.
“Human rights” as defined by the continent that brought you both The Enlightenment and The Holocaust
Feels like a reaaaaal roll of the dice
It's ok, they fixed the second one by making hatred illegal
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And yet the EU legislature seems to be actively hostile to some human rights, such as the right to free expression and the right to keep and bear arms. How do you account for that discrepancy?
European countries have higher freedom of press than the US. Bearing arms is not a human right in Europe, different culture.
Europe has more human rights protections than the US and stronger enforcement of them, even against the state, by many metrics. Freedom of expression ends where other human rights begin, is protecting hate speech and Holocaust denial really something worthwhile?
So are you claiming that human rights are subjective and not universal? Or that it's acceptable for the EU to violate human rights if the USA is worse in some ways?
Belarus is a European country. How is freedom of the press doing there?
I don’t know why you think the American definition of human rights is universal?
It is. Look at the freedom of press index for example. And as the US doesn’t accept foreign courts, there is not really a legal apparatus against the state outside of the US, which many European countries do have.
Belarus is not part of the EU, nor did it sign many of the international human rights
I don't know why you think the EU definition of human rights matters at all?
The comment I responded to was about Europe. Belarus is part of Europe. As are Serbia, Moldova, etc.
It does matter, for example for all countries that signed the ECHR. And most European countries even have more rights guaranteed by the state and by EU.
You are trying to move goalposts instead of trying to counter my arguments
It's doing fine
> What does it say about progress that the same laws that protect human rights also stifle innovation?
Claiming that GDPR and the EU AI Act "protect human rights" is very, very far-fetched. How does the training of, say, Claude or GPT-X models, hurt human rights?
We forgot already that getting paid for your work is your right and LLMs were trained on stolen property?
I didn't "forget". I never agreed that I had some natural right to exclude anyone from or demand payment for using bits of information I "made".
It's not also actually "getting paid for your work" when you're talking about copyright. It's "collecting rent for your property".
Once upon a time, artists and writers got conned into thinking that was a good deal for them, forgoing payment for work in return for a dangling promise of rent extraction. The vast majority of them were wrong.
It might or might not be legal, but who's getting paid when ChatGPT uses knowledge from a phpbb forum from 2008? Is that human person well taken care of in today's society? I use ChatGPT too, but if ChatGPT's coming for all jobs, don't the humans that fed the machine have a right to not be lost and forgotten?
> don't the humans that fed the machine have a right to not be lost and forgotten?
Honest answer, no, not if it was publicly published and available for free, not indefinitely.
From an ethical (not legal) perspective, 18 years seems long enough for something like that to enter the public domain.
Exactly. Even the German "Urheberrecht" has a deadline (70 years afaik, outdated and too long obviously).
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no its not. its about mass surveillance and mass population control. regulating, watching, punishing and jailing the taxpayers while letting millions of people enter illegally and destroy the society from both sides.
europe is huxley nightmarish utopia worst parts without any of the bright ones.
Some of those seem like good things TBH.
Yes, but they are incompatible with being on the forefront of AI.
Yep. I wonder if being at the forefront of AI makes for a better & more free society.
You can only make money if you produce value. If you stop producing value because your old industries decline/collapse and you miss out on new industries, your wealth will trend towards that of a third world country.
Maybe. I would contend that wealth accumulation over the long term is a function of the strength of local institutions e.g educational, judiciary etc. This is effectively the thesis of ‘Why nations fail’. Europes relative decline will only continue if the institutions of the US (and others) continue to be robust and healthy. I am not sure if this can be relied on into the future.
Yes there are those two very extreme things and then there is every position in between.
Italy sells bags made in China for 5k. We know how to produce value.
The current question is whether being the minor partner in a relationship with the US or China makes for a better & more free society.
Westphalian norms are falling apart and countries will need to make hard tradeoffs about how to build enough economic heft to maintain their cultural values.
Being on the backfoot will make us vulnerable to those who are not.
I do not understand how this can not be self evident.
Sure, but clearly you don’t mean at any cost, right?
It's not about how large the models are, it's how you use them in society ;)
Not at all, they can just use the petabytes of data sold on the cheap by American and Chinese companies instead of their own.
The thing that nobody talks about is how many EU citizens already are working on frontier models, just inside US companies. That’s why the prohibition was so crippling for Anthropic.
And, btw, the bang per buck that I got from OVH was better than EC2.
> The thing that nobody talks about is how many EU citizens already are working on frontier models, just inside US companies
Why don't you ask yourself: how come those brilliant European minds couldn't find a job that pays well enough at home? Why could they in the US? There are many more Chinese and Indian, and other internationals working for US companies, outnumbering Europeans. It's not like Europe was intentionally targeted by US companies.
Real GDP has grown 84% in the US since 2000 [0]. EU grown 40-45% in the same span. The two regions were basically had the same economic output in 2000. Europe has been left behind economically.
Living in Europe is nice (I love Europe by the way), but the question is why EU can't compete with the US and increasingly China. Sooner or later that'd affect your living standard as well. Look at how much China has caught up with the West in terms of quality of life.
[0] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1
This questions are discussed a lot. I just refer to the draghi report and also in the start up field the underdeveloped financial market in the EU. Finance markets have a negative vibe (rich people, greed, causing huge problems like 2008, antisemitism) so most politicians didn't care.
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> The two regions were basically had the same economic output in 2000. Europe has been left behind economically.
Which basically coincides with the introduction of the Euro currency. The dumbest currency ever created: a common currency for countries with different fiscal laws/different tax rates and different economic outputs. Since then one the Eurozone state already (partially) defaulted on its public debt: Greece.
My beloved EU is fucked. And not just because of that ultra-poorly and very probably short-lived currency that the Euro is: the EU is a socialist construction, by socialists, for socialists.
In 25 years of introducing the Euro they manage to kill the first industry of the most important economy of the EU: the car industry in Germany.
> Sooner or later that'd affect your living standard as well.
Oh but the EU is making sure the standard of living falls really quick.
For as if the EU wasn't falling into poverty quickly enough, politicians are at hard at work at importing millions upons millions of very poor people from africa and the middle-east. For the most part totally unemployable people (a politicians in Germany talked about 93% migrants without a job, that cannot speak the language and unemployable and used the term "a lost generation").
In my native city, Brussels ("head" of the EU), a recent report from a Belgian university estimates that 5% of the population of the city are undocumented migrants: undocumented means they aren't working. It's impossible to work without a shitload of paperwork in the EU. One out of every 20 people is an unemployable, unaccounted, undocumented, migrant. Let that sink in.
The EU is fucked way more than people imagine.
And anyone who thinks that the millions and tens of millions of migrants coming without any education are going to be the ones that shall save the EU economically is totally delusional.
I raised my kid in english, only every going to british school and now british college, and wife is working towards acquiring a new citizenship. Thankfully we've also got family in Japan (a country notoriously hard to get in), so we've got that option too.
We moved to a new country four times already, but now we're planning to leave the sinking ship that the EU is.
There's no future in the EU: the only way forward is that major european cities are going to keep turning ever more into slums.
Are we talking about the EU or Europe?
The UK, for example, is outside the EU and arguably Europes strongest AI hub birthing DeepMind, Stability and others. Home to top universities etc.
I think compute is certainly our weakest point but it should be possible to train a frontier-ish model on Isambard-AI if you supplement it with other London based commercial compute for post-training.
Imo useful long-term innovation comes about during the conflict of fighting for and against the rate of technological change, and whatever proves inherently better is what's left after the dust settles. There's a point at which there's so much opposition that nothing innovative happens for too long, but uncontested innovation isn't something most people want either. If the future is uncompetitive but lagging behind the U.S and China, I'd struggle to see the problem
Bullshit. The AI Act is not the problem, Mistral models are definitely usable and some were/are competitive.
European future looks bright compared to the political landscape the US has now
Political landscape of the US right now will change in few years like it has been changing for the last 250 years. USA does not equate to its current political situation. But EU would keep on rotting from inside and I would eat my hat if Mistral doesn’t go out of business in next 5 years
It’s an interesting contrast that you claim that the USA does not equate to its current political situation, whereas conversely the EU is ‘rotting’ from the inside. Do you think this is a balanced and reasonable claim?
it is a reasonable claim. Trump would be gone in few years and the constitution guarantees it. What does EU has? more bureaucrats? EU doesn't even has a constitution and yet it interfere with the politics of sovereign nations till they bend the knee to Brussels
There is a constant change in politicians and parties and views among people (hello 2022!) about policy topics inside the EU all the time. Do you seriously think politics in the EU stays the same?
It absolutely has. It's always more regulation, more bureaucracy and more red tapes. They are just creating more barriers to keep themselves employed and to expand the reach of their authority.
Actually right now the reverse is happening. GDPR will become easier there is simplification coming, there will be less national goldplating
They have been discussing that for years, but still nothing happened. At the rate of the bureaucracy it would take few more years to even draft the laws to ease GDPR
You are not up to date, this is already in legislation process and needs the vote of the parlaiment, highly likely it will come. There is also a simplification package and a migration pact. A lot is happening right now
Can you share your sources please? When is the vote scheduled?
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/package-dig...
> I would eat my hat if Mistral doesn’t go out of business in next 5 years
Hope you're hungry. The Mistral are going to what most great European companies are good at - regulatory arbitrage. They're going to insert themselves everywhere within EU (French govt, etc) and extract value that way whilst delivering subpar services to what open weight Chinese models can deliver. Honestly they'll probably be profitable before most other AI providers are simply because there's very little pressure to improve models.
It could be true that French government might use it, but I hardly think Germans or Italians or any other government would trust Mistral or use it. Even though they are part of EU, they still don’t trust each other completely when it comes to national security and sharing intelligence. I can easily imagine BND fine tuning some Chinese model or still relying on American models
There will always be a place for domestically sourced AI I think. Even if Mistral models suck theyll get enough defense revenue that they wont go out of business
Sums up EU in a nutshell, if it cannot compete in the open market, fund it by tax payers money (defence budgets are funded by tax payers money)
They do in many other areas. Look at ASML or look at chemicals
I mean US is doing the same thing with intel so not like this is EU exclusive
You cannot be seriously comparing Mistral to Intel. Intel might be falling behind right now, but they were pioneers in 90s and 2000s. When has Mistral ever been a pioneer on anything?
Actually at MoE. Though Deepseek took that approach and improved it by a lot.
Do you think that companies and States will use "usable" models from Mistral (who has left the race anyway), or frontiers/near frontier ? It's akin to say that walking a good enough means of transportation and we don't need anything else. One day the guys in charriots will remind you of the dire reality.
I am not denying Mistral is not top tier anymore, (except OCR and STT for speed/efficency) just that the AI Act is not the reason they are not.
But we will see, they have very interesting Enterpise Use Cases, like with Mistral Forge.
And YannLeCun decided to build in Europe as well
> And YannLeCun decided to build in Europe as well
AMI has offices across the world. Fact is, companies often have at least an office where the CEO lives. Same when Musk kicked up a stink about 'leaving California'. It wasn't really anything of substance.
Yes but you can make the reverse argument as well: many US companies have offices in Europe and often their research departments.
This whole US vs Europe discussions are fruitless anyways
If your product can't function in a way that respects humans' right to privacy, your product is the problem, not the humans' rights.
You can grumble about the way things are but Europe being so far behind a technological race with important geopolitical ramifications means that you guys are cutting off your nose to spite your face. Have fun with zero of European regulations impacting frontier development and then eventually having to depend on it.
I am dying to know what the important geopolitical consequences are of not having a ChatGPT lolol
Oh gods our politicians will have to read their own emails, and write them too! We may never recover. Clearly there is no path forward apart from mass surveillance.
You are totally right, reading emails and vibe coding saas apps is all we can do. Omg why didn’t we think of that? Someone get the pentagon on the phone and cancel the drone warfare technology they’re already using and proving out in the battlefield with Palintir. Someone also call the NSA: we don’t need to hack nor do we need surveillance and spying nor do we need robust defenses against all of this. Ah!! Also the president, we can surely cede the market benefits to other countries that’s totally fine.
LLM’s are nice. But if push came to shove, we could very easily continue on without them, or without them involved in every aspect.
Being able to write cutesy SaaS apps faster is neat, but not like, essential, the way water is.
LLMs are a “nice to have” blows my mind. LLMs power autonomous drones that kill real people in real wars. Coding agents are the primary way people code. That and we get a GPT4->5 jump every 18 months. Are we on the same planet?
LLMs conduct strikes on children which a human may not have done. so wow, you got a frontier model but you lost something there in the process.
Why are we missing the point here: LLMs are of major geopolitical significance. Autonomous drones kill children, now what? Would you rather have a home grown frontier model capability to defend yourself? Or would you prefer to rely on the good graces of tech CEOs?
I think the EU would prefer wars not happen and that they never have to think about defending their borders or themselves. This is fantasy land, but the cafes and museums and old city squares are gorgeous.
If that's all you're using LLMs for, you've definitely fallen behind.
I like how “you’ve fallen behind” is the ai version of “you’re not gonna make it” from the crypto-bro days.
My favorite part is how people compare AI to crypto as if they are remotely in the same universe of importance and impact
Europe lost religion and gained this instead.
Dont make the assumption that the laws and regulations in place respect human rights and are a 100% good. They also entrench EU bureaucratic power (and thus the power of the ministers) without regards to future technology.
State regs often fail to grapple with the future, and at best slow it down and at worst smother it.
Kimi was trained at cost, so were other models.
Sure some things are a hurdle, but in the end, being the first just means doing all the work.
Did you read the AI Act?
AI Act regulates high risk AI systems and banns AI systems like social scoring. Most of the AI applications are not regulated.
Did you read the GDPR and follow court rulings regarding AI training. OLG Köln saw no violation in Meta‘s training of user data in Insta and FB.
It is obvious that you don’t know what you are taking about.
I’am tired of unfounded EU bashing. The guardrails in place are not hindering
"Innovation"
The question was never do enough computers exist in Europe, but rather can Europe organize the capital and cross-company / cross-border relationships required to build a big model at scale. There the answer still looks iffy at best. This is where the US has, and continues to, thrive and where Europe can’t get out of its own way.
I don't believe Europe can build models that can compete with American ones.
1. In order to build competitive models, you need to offer competitive salaries and equity. Europe has very old and inadequate corporate law virtually everywhere but in UK. European labs cannot attract talent that can build such competitive models with the proper lack of incentives.
2. In order to build competitive models, you need gargantuan amounts of compute. And thus capital. How can you compete when big tech can just cough a handful of equity and raise $ 85 B like Alphabet is doing right now?
3. In order to have these datacenters financially feasible you need cheap energy. We don't have it. Some places like France have clean one, but it's still not cheap enough, you're still paying a 45-50% premium over some random South Carolina.
What Europe should do is to finally tackle its fundamental issues with corporate laws, startups and incentivize more money to flow into venture capital.
Essentially we need a bunch of Mistrals, but with more competition and better incentives.
There's plenty of brilliant European engineers and scientists that would gladly take some pay cut to work in Europe instead of US and could bring their expertise here, but you still need the right incentives.
You also need to scrape huge amounts of data with no regard for copyright which is:
1. No longer possible the same way it was for openai and anthropic and
2. Much more regulated in the EU
Also the EU would need state backing since we don't have the same private capital, meaning the regulations are even tighter.
You can do what frontier labs do today which is to properly license things that are copyrighted and use open source web crawls for things that don’t have copyright issues. You can then also commission new datasets (volume needed goes down when quality is high).
The European regulations are the thing that will kneecap anything meaningful coming out of Europe. Mind blowing to me that this is worth the tradeoff since Europe will be beholden to other frontier labs be it China or the US, so regulations accomplishing very little if anything on impacting actual AI development and losing vast amounts of leverage in the process.
> You can do what frontier labs do today which is to properly license things that are copyrighted and use open source web crawls for things that don’t have copyright issues. You can then also commission new datasets (volume needed goes down when quality is high).
It cost Anthropic $1.5 billion for training on libgen's 480k pirated ebooks.
Investors will cough up that money if you're already clearly a frontier lab with a model people are paying a lot of money for.
Tough to get that much cash without anything to show.
I thought the joke was that people aren't paying enough money.
Regulations aside, Europe is extremely divided. There's constant resistance from individual states, disputes and far right extremism gaining traction. At this point, it seems like EU can barely agree to make any decision.
Well-meaning restrictions that threaten Europe's ability to compete sound like something that would eventually encourage far right extremism by impeaching the validity of the restrictions' philosophical underpinnings.
In my experience it doesn't take anything that ample to encourage far right extremism. It's enough to point at an existing problem and a convincing scapegoat. It works today not eventually and it works regardless of any reason or reality.
It's true though that multiple problems mean multiple propaganda seeds.
> 1. In order to build competitive models, you need to offer competitive salaries and equity.
FWIW, for the equity part there's a proposal expected to pass for next year: https://www.eu-inc.org/ (but it doesn't address taxes, cross-border employment, or anything significant so it's mostly moot). The main goal is to attract native VCs.
AFAIK it's designed by lawyers and old money, with little to no input from tech entrepreneurs.
The culture's still all wrong. If you have a startup that failed in SV, that's par for the course. Better luck next time! If you fail in the EU, that's the kiss of death. Your startup failed???
> If you fail in the EU, that's the kiss of death. Your startup failed???
As a native German, I wouldn't say this is the case: the opinions of people rather differ quite a bit on this topic (there also exist quite a lot of people who are nearer to the US-American mentality here).
What I would rather claim is some kind of kiss of death, is if your startup failed because you made stupid mistakes. People don't like such unresponsible people (many people say that startup founders also have responsibility for their employees).
This sentiment is so wrong, yet so bloody persistent. I know plenty of european entrepreneurs, myself included, that went through one or more screw ups. All the ones that stuck with entrepreneurship eventually landed a hit.
It had input from entrepreneurs but was disregarded.
> you need to offer competitive salaries and equity
This has always been an argument for "peace time" underperformance of european tech sector but I don't buy this argument for critical national security needs. Historically countries never needed to top the compensation charts to get talent. What they do need is a clear mission and ambition. This is what is missing in Europe
...for LLMs?
Just as a reminder, Google DeepMind is right here in the UK, and there are hundreds, thousands of top AI researchers that are foundational to everything that the US is doing, as much, if more so than the Chinese contributions.
We need compute, yes, but we certainly aren't short of talent if we put our minds to it, and many of them are already here.
Deepmind lab is a US company.
By ownership perhaps.
Founded in the UK, then bought by Google, it still has its HQ in London.
It is a good example that what Europe lacks is capital. And there is an rich get richer phenomenon where wealth flows to the USA, and successful European companies gets sold (and many talented Europeans ends up working for American companies). In many ways the dynamic is one of a colony.
The more I learn about modern economics, the less I feel I know. Right now, the sense I have is that the flow of money from Europe to the USA is more like using the US as a flag of convenience than a material loss of wealth, especially given how many "American" companies have European offices filled with European staff and how much money is made selling space for ads from European companies to European users.
Does it matter?
If they develop the "next big thing" and the next US administration decides its for US citizens only, nothing has changed.
Does it matter in which countries the offices with the staff who develop some of these models are? I think so, for a number of reasons too long to go into.
Re "US citizens only", the question I'd have right now for all the AI companies is: can any new better-or-as-good-as Fable AI model actually be released?
If not, stop development of better models. That's the single most expensive thing any of them are doing.
Export controls on software is somewhere between "hard" and "impossible", so "US citizens only" means something between "nobody" and "perhaps some government agents", but the latter don't pay enough to justify the cost.
> In order to build competitive models, you need to offer competitive salaries and equity. Europe has very old and inadequate corporate law virtually everywhere but in UK.
It is a fact that a much smaller amount of money is available in the EU for startup investments.
But in which sense it the corporate law inadequate? As far as I am aware the laws allow quite a lot of freedom in setting up the corporate governance for many forms of companies.
There's no stock option mechanisms available in most of EU.
You get someone you cannot tempt him with "do a great job and get X amount of equity".
In Italy it is not enforceable, even if you sign a contract.
With this, startups can only compete with bigger companies on salary, hard, and don't get equally motivated hires to get a piece of a company. You get people there for the paycheck.
It's also unfriendly to venture capitalists, for different reasons.
So corporate law is a major problem in most of EU, as it's unfriendly both to investors and employees.
Also, firing people is hard in EU. You hire the wrong person, you're stuck with it.
As per your points, Europe really can't compete, particularly when power is considered. However, frontier models that require city-sized data centres might not be all they are cracked up to be.
In China they seem to be nonchalantly doing a lot with AI for specific rather than 'ask me anything' tasks. To them, they are quite used to everyday applications that work well within limited domains, no vast data centre needed, just on-device. Hence the hype is no big deal.
Europe needs to think again about what can be done to make Europe attractive for software development, and I have seen no helpful encouragement from UK or European governments over the last few decades. No word of a lie, all we got in the UK was the BBC Micro, way back in the early 1980s, and since then tech has been culturally uncool.
This cultural aspect has not gone away, if a guy is a software engineer then he isn't going to get lucky with the lasses, they will run a mile.
What gets me is that the UK or places in Europe such as those places where finance matters, could have had active policing and law enforcement of data breaches and hacking, with sensible standards for storing customer data, making Europe the best place to host your data, purely for the legal protections. But we ended up with cookie notices and anti-slavery statements.
> all we got in the UK was the BBC Micro, way back in the early 1980s, and since then tech has been culturally uncool.
Off the top of my head, ARM is from Cambridge.
Pre-iphone no tech was cool, not even ARM. Source: me, out drinking.
FLUX by Black Forrest Labs would disagree there and it is built right in Germany.
Can Europe train a frontier AI model?
It seems unlikely at the moment. The writeup you have is quite interesting, but notably distributed compute for frontier is at least a bump in the road.
As other's have pointed out, if resources across Europe came together there could be a good amount of resources today to do so, but it is fragmented.
Project Glasswing, and most recently the blocking of Fable 5 potentially only for non-US citizens have sparked more attention in the political spheres regarding sovereignty/competitiveness of European AI.
There as also this great write-up which explains the trajectory Europe currently has when it comes to AI compute here: https://europe2031.ai/
So theoretically: yes, but there doesn't seem to be a big enough will to attempt to catch up with the trajectory of American hyper-scalers.
Thanks! Will give it a read :)
Sure, theoretically, if it could come to an agreement, and meanwhile the cross-border cooperation of even the inter-EU countries is at an abysmal rate, and currently, even during a goddamn land war with Russia, Germany and France can't come to an agreement to build a fighter jet ensemble (together).
You mean like they've been doing since the 1950s with the the largest physics laboratory in the world (CERN)? Or more to the point, the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) of which 27/27 EU member states participate?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_High-Performance_Comp...
Even at the smaller level the ethos and ambition is clear - take EURO-3C: the Horizon Europe project aimed at delivering a pan-European sovereign infrastructure that integrates Telco, Edge, Cloud, and AI capabilities under a federated model which has 70+ Euro-participants.
https://www.medialaws.eu/the-euro-3c-initiative-a-new-dawn-f...
CERN is not an EU project, predates the EU, and is not located in the EU. EuroHPC JU includes a number of non-EU members.
I think that is the way forward: work with whoever has common interests and is willing to work together.
I think the point is that the EU does not necessarily make cooperation between governments any easier.
It is partly located in the EU and primarily funded by European countries
Compute 2027 coming soon ;)
This is unfortunately the problem. The level of the public debate is abysmal, most politicians push unbelivably stupid shit about immigration and other identitarian nonsense, budget gets spent to ensure cheese and wine have the proper AOC certifications on them. Honestly up to a point I even understand it, many people don't see themselves as having a meaningful identity as EU citizens and you can't force it upon them.
Asking for sensible AI policy is like asking for a base on mars.
> many people don't see themselves as having a meaningful identity as EU citizens
I sometimes wonder if the citizens of the United States (of America) even comprehend that the EU is not itself a sovereign nation (unlike the states in say, the USA, or Australia) and is just a union of sovereign polities.
Nobody in the EU is an EU Citizen unless they are a citizen of one of the member states.
reducing unskilled and hateful immigration is the democratic thing do
this has nothing to the other good idea which is to start building AI
> reducing unskilled and hateful immigration is the democratic thing do
Hateful, sure, though just like all those on the right who say the first word of "hate crime" is redundant, I'd argue home-grown hate's just as dangerous as imported.
But "unskilled" immigration? When the topic is AI? If this stuff works as advertised, *nobody's skills matter any more*. If it doesn't at least render many of our skills obsolete, why build it? If you make an AI which can't automate anything, how is this not a waste of money?
Even without that, I've not seen anyone who knows about Baumol's cost disease opine either way about migration, high or low skilled.
Actually yea, it has everything to do with it.
I am open to the idea that we should handle immigration differently, but I want a plan and specifics, not slogans. What we want to achieve, and by what mechanisms you plan to get there. Open any newspaper: are you more likely to find careful and considerate opinions or racist screeds?
And that is the problem. Time and energy and money and political capital are routinely spent on inconsequential electoral poliTICS rather than substantial poliCY.
The fighter jet program was a jobs program, not dissimilar to how many US government programs are jobs programs by having different parts of it made in different states for no goo reason. Add in some nationalism and it was inevitable it would not work out.
I always find it strange that being a "jobs program" is said as if derogatory, especially when talking about military equipment of all things. The free market optimizes for handling normalcy, not exception handling, like wartime. The reason to artificially these jobs is so that you have the factories and expertise to make these things when you need them.
And what, they couldn't split the jobs 50/50 in any meaningful way so that everyone was happy? Dunno, you can let the french design and the germans build or something.
That's how you get something like Ariane 6 -- engineered to satisfy political constraints rather that to be competitive. Granted, NASA or to some extent the US military have the same problem.
NASA is stubborn to keep going with Boeing. I'm actually fascinated that no one was put behind bars so far for the blunder the new rocket system is.
The US military has a few companies that it can work with to produce what it needs, so they are not necessarily tied to "we need to build a plane in 20 different locations to satisfy everyone".
And yeah, Europe has an expensive rocket no one wants to use commercially because it many times more expensive than the competition.
If it's inevitable, then how come the F35's flying around? Sure there's some complaints to be made, but I've seen it work in person.
In a weird sense, the EU exemplifies what the USA would be like without a strong federal government: Dysfunctional as states compete with, undercut and stifle each other.
isnt the eu basically a less federalist version of the usa? how is it then that the usa claims its more free? the individual state members in the EU have more freedom than individual states.
someone explain this to me please
> isnt the eu basically a less federalist version of the usa?
And what good does it do? The EU cannot speak in a single voice - there is no foreign minister, no defense minister, no whatever minister.
Like the EU foreign function: you have a person claiming to be the EU voice, and then you have the foreign ministers of every EU member that can just say whatever they want if what the EU voice says is contrary to their political game in their own country. Same for the other functions.
Being less federalist is not better, it is worse. The EU does not speak in a single voice in any domain.
> And what good does it do? The EU cannot speak in a single voice - there is no foreign minister, no defense minister, no whatever minister.
Nor can Switzerland. And still it is one of the best country world wide both in term of living and economically.
Distributed federal power like Switzerland trades quick decision making for resilience.
If it might look up 'messy' on the surface, it is in fact a quality. A very valuable one in fact: because it is exactly what prevent fucked up like Trump to happen in the EU.
I've never seen the Swiss foreign minister being contradicted by another minister or by an official from a Canton.
But the EU foreign minister can be contradicted by basically any country president/prime minister or their foreign ministers if it says something that is not aligned with every other EU member.
> being contradicted by another minister or by an official from a Canton.
Then you are misinformed.
Because it happens continuously.
Canton executive argumenting again "conseil fédéral".
Local Syndic (Mayor) arguing against Canton decision.
Local parlement trying to address or delay legislation or arguing against Berne ones.
Just open a random news paper.
This is democracy, like it or not.
You misunderstood me. If Kaja Kallas says "the EU will do X", then the French or Spanish foreign ministers can say "no, we will not do that". So the EU does not do X because it upset a big country, it will maybe do X-Y or not do it at all if X is dependent on the money spent by France or Spain, or some of their facilities or whatever.
In your example, the mayor can criticize the canton decision, but he cannot do anything about it. That's the difference.
Sort of, if you squint right.
The EU is in some ways closer to a confederation, but with various "hacks" - in the form of various treaties - to try to work around the problems that led the US to abandon it in favour of a federal model.
It's largely down to very different levels of willingness to integrate more, and various levels of opposition to the kind of constitutional changes that would be required for a federal model.
EU is no where near US. EU started as a economic union and became a political nightmare. It would have done far better had it stayed only as an economic Union. Further, EU doesn't have a constitution. In US every law maker swear to protect and uphold the constitution and I don't even know what is the equivalent in EU.
Id say the EU is less federal because each member country maintains its own sovereignty and local laws. Its more of a coalition of the willing. While in the US the federal gov can override states. The EU also has each state vote on different legislations. (Massive oversimplification)
Because the laws are different? Are you really confused?
The US lays claim to all kinds of bullshit. But more to the point; different values, different laws - does it matter how centralized the control is? I would argue neither is “more” free, just free in different ways. US has a huge problem in equal access to the law, which undermines freedom no matter how good the laws are.
In the US, the freedom is explicitly for the people, not Federal nor State government. States are relatively more free than the Federal government, but both are greatly restricted by the Constitution. Before the Constitution, the US had a previous government under the Articles of Confederation (see below) that had many deficiencies and only gave freedom to member States.
The EU is organized more similar to the US under the Articles of Confederation.
The first American government (Articles of Confederation) gave State governments almost unlimited power e.g. they could print their own money. It did not grant freedom to the people in any meaningful way. States were free to abuse this power both against their own citizens and, more importantly, the other member States. This created many practical problems.
The second and current American government (Constitution) learned lessons from this experience. It removed a limited set of key powers from the States and gave it to the Federal government such as the creation of currency. It also forced all States to interact with each other on the same terms, with strict oversight from the Federal government. Additionally, it explicitly granted rights to the people rather than their State governments, since the States had demonstrated they could not be trusted to do the right thing. These changes forced the States to play nicely with each other and treat their people better.
These changes were a large improvement. Almost every law an American experiences is State law, because States have much more freedom to create laws. The Federal government can only make laws from a short list. Both State and Federal governments are strictly prohibited from creating many kinds of laws.
In the US, freedom is for the people, not for the member States. The Federal government has even less freedom than the member States to make law.
> In the US, the freedom is explicitly for the people, not Federal nor State government.
I don't see how anyone can make this claim in 2026 and not expect to be laughed out of the room? In practice, freedom is for sale; it's not available to the people nor the citizens.
This is irrelevant to the subject at hand. Not everything needs to be about whatever outrage bait is the current thing on your social media feed.
Normal in history. Change often isn't binary. Consider for example: the exact date of the end of the British empire is several possible dates between "the independence of Ireland in the immediate aftermath of WW1" and "it still hasn't".
You don't think US states compete with, undercut and stifle each other?
Second question: you think the USA has a strong federal government?
I mean that is actually an open question even in non-Trump years, not least when one side of the political aisle was famously dedicated to shrinking it down so small it could be "drowned in a bathtub", to quote one of its more famous assholes.
>You don't think US states compete with, undercut and stifle each other?
Compete with each other, yes.
But all US states take pride in Silicon Valley being American.
No EU project for its own "Silicon Valley" can succeed, because the French would insist on it being in France, Germans would insist on Germany, Dutch in the Netherlands, etc.
> No EU project for its own "Silicon Valley" can succeed, because the French would insist on it being in France, Germans would insist on Germany, Dutch in the Netherlands, etc.
France and Germany and the Netherlands may compete with each other to attract VC and tech firms, but they're ultimately no more capable of preventing each other from getting a runaway success loop than New York and Utah were at preventing California from getting actual Silicon Valley.
The EU as an institution just doesn't wield any magic wand of creating things like that to be fought over, just like Washington DC also doesn't.
>France and Germany and the Netherlands may compete with each other to attract VC and tech firms, but they're ultimately no more capable of preventing each other from getting a runaway success loop than New York and Utah were at preventing California from getting actual Silicon Valley.
Yes, but why hasn't said success loop occurred anywhere else yet? Silicon Valley has been a "thing" for five decades now.
> The EU as an institution just doesn't wield any magic wand of creating things like that to be fought over, just like Washington DC also doesn't.
What I meant is that every time HN or elsewhere talks about Europe being behind the US in terms of tech there is mention of the need for a "European Silicon Valley". But that is going to require a level of support that is probably beyond the scale of one national government.
The EU can trace its origins back to France and Germany agreeing to combine its coal and steel.[1] Berlin and Paris would be happy to designate, say, the Strasbourg-Stuttgart axis as the "EU technology hub", with corresponding EU funding, but other member states aren't going to be happy.
[1] And further to the long wrangling over Alsace-Lorraine, but that's neither here nor there
> Yes, but why hasn't said success loop occurred anywhere else yet? Silicon Valley has been a "thing" for five decades now.
Same reasons (plural) it also hasn't happened a second time anywhere else in the USA.
The list is long, and economics is full of anti-inductive loops.
> But that is going to require a level of support that is probably beyond the scale of one national government.
The EU as an institution is tiny in comparison to its member states, total budget only €192.8 billion: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/2026-euro...
> The EU can trace its origins back to France and Germany agreeing to combine its coal and steel.
While true, that's like saying the US can trace its origins back to some cold salty tea: it misses quite a lot of both the good and the bad.
> Yes, but why hasn't said success loop occurred anywhere else yet? Silicon Valley has been a "thing" for five decades now.
So have twenty-three Superfund sites —- land from 1970s businesses that the federal government had to take over because nobody else could or would fix the uncosted externality.
The most in any single county.
An increasingly useful, very vivid metaphor.
What is this whole thing about Europe being behind on AI? Do Mistral and DeepL not exist? Yes, I know DeepL is niche, but IMHO it is the best translation model out there.
I've tried using Mistral for various tasks, and it is so far behind the American models that I just never bother using it despite still having lots of Mistral API credits leftover. Even their OCR and TTS products are surpassed by generic US models - I use regular Claude Sonnet for OCR because it is more accurate than Mistral OCR.
I could rant about this, I am just so disappointed at how Mistral completely gave up and pivoted into bespoke fine-tuning consulting. The terrifying thing is that they don't seem to even understand how far behind they are, as if they never tried Opus, let alone Fable / Mythos. Or they do understand and that's why they focus on consulting now.
Did Mistral really throw in the towel on building frontier models?
Well, the front page of their website claims "Frontier AI In Your Hands", so I guess they're not marketing it that way.
I personally think there's a hint in that Mistral Medium 3.5 costs 5x the price of Mistral Large 3, and that Mistral Large is not listed anymore as a "Featured Model" and hasn't been updated since Dec 2025:
https://docs.mistral.ai/models/overview
But what I really base it on is an interview the Mistral CEO gave on the Big Technology Podcast back in January this year:
Alex Kantrowitz: "Do you consider yourself, is the most important thing you do building the models? Or is the most important thing you do the service? Are you primarily a model builder, or primarily a service provider?"
Arthur Mensch: "We are there to help our customers get to value."
Alex Kantrowitz: "So, service!"
Arthur Mensch: "We are here to... but to get to value, they need to have great models. And to get to value, they need to have the right tools to train the models. And so the best way to train, to create those tools, is effectively to train the best models. So the two things are extremely linked together. We create models that are very easy to customize. We create models with tools that we then export to our customers, so that they can use them, and we help our customers train their own models. You can't go and sell to an enterprise that you are going to help them create great custom systems, if you can't show to the world that you are effectively the leader in open source technology. So the two parts are equally important, the first is enabling the other, and there's effectively a flywheel there because we make our choices when it comes to the model design in a way that is enabling the various customers we have. As one example, we've put a lot of emphasis on having models that are great at physics, because we work with manufacturing companies that run into physical problems. So that's the flywheel we have set up. Having the science team and the business team sit together."
It's at 22:37 in the video. Elsewhere in the podcast he mentions that they don't believe in a large unified generic model, they think the future of AI is small dedicated-task models (OCR, TTS, bespoke trained)... but unfortunately I don't have a timestamp link for that part.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxUTdyEDpbU&t=1357s
> they think the future of AI is small dedicated-task models
I mean, I do too. Or at least, this will be a large market. But the natural leader for that space is the firm building the frontier models. They have the most control and access for distillation.
Hmm, I'm skeptical of small model AI - they are useful for specific domains & the task they're trained for, I just think it's thinking too small. I worry that the people who think AI is only useful for email triage and OCR will miss all the grand problems that get solved by the very largest frontier models. But that's me, and I could be wrong.
Speaking of me being wrong: the Mistral CEO tweeted today that they're coming out with a "fat but sparse" model in July, so big that it will only be available to governments & a few partners at first (ala Glasswing/Mythos I guess). I fear that's just marketing, but if Mistral really have gone all out to make a new truly large model & at least try to catchup to China, good luck to them!
https://x.com/arthurmensch/status/2066913356548542827
>Or they do understand and that's why they focus on consulting now.
Cohere would like a word here
Say more?
It is behind in the sense that if tomorrow the US and China place an export ban on their models all we're left with are Mistral's ones.
They are not bad, and they have made huge progress, but you're still one year behind if not more.
May matter less and less as time progresses, or it may matter more if research further speeds up.
Honestly I wish capitalism and globalization kept working as they did for decades, but since more than a decade we're reverting to inefficient protectionist steps, one after the other.
How exactly do you - or the Chinese, for that matter - place an export ban on an open weight model?
By not releasing them anymore.
Why even bother creating a repo like this? Why not just link to a ChatGPT conversation?
And at least save us the pain of trying to scroll through the bs intro. Just put the 10 or whatever bullet points right there.
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They could, but why? US and China has poured Trillion of USD into training and any semblance of getting those money back seems like some far fetched dream. Currently there is no realistic path to profitability with these models.
What I see as usable product in the future are smaller specialized models which are able to run and be trained with fraction of resources what goes to current frontier models.
Under normal circumstances, I'd agree with most folks here, it'd be highly unlikely.
However, we're (i think officially) in an arms race.
I wouldn't want to bet against anyone in these unprecedented times (with plenty of historical parallels).
Forget regulations, would it make sense for Europe to train a frontier model of it's own? Would it be sufficiently better than fine tuning a Chinese model? Would it actually be competitive with US frontier models? Would enough people pay to use it even within Europe to pay for the training costs? Do we have enough inference capacity that enough people /could/ use it? Would being "European" allow any governments in Europe to trust it, rather than deciding that actually there needs to be a French, German, Italian, Spanish and UK sovereign AI?
I am guessing that enough of these questions can be answered with "no" that nobody really wants to invest.
For the same reason there isn't really a serious third start up competitor to OpenAI and Anthropic.
So your ideas of having AI sovereign is to turn to Chinese models? Do you know what their intention will be and where will they go?
You don't like US models because their values don't align with yours, but then you turn to Chinese models? See how hypocrite that is?
I was suggesting US models are very good, and would probably be preferable to a less capable sovereign AI. My point was that this makes building European sovereign AI unappealing.
Similarly I was not suggesting Chinese models are an alternative to sovereign AI. An alternative which might be able to fulfil some of the objectives of a real sovereign AI while being far cheaper.
No, but EU can train an LLM to regulate others LLM
Or force replaceable batteries with exceptions that every LLM passes anyway.
> If a battery can do 1000 cycles and remain above 80% capacity it is exempt
Being slow is sometimes a problem.
But if the needed total revenue for an investment is so absurdly large, that we need to capture 5-10% of the labour market, being slow might mean not burning in the crash.
The US drove the CCCP to bankruptcy by investing in nuclear bombs. Maybe history repeats itself.
The US was able to do that because a majority of the world including Europe was determined to exclude USSR from all trade and by putting them into extreme paranoia of total destruction. EU has lots of trading partners from the West and not everything is improved by AI.
Yes an economy that's being inflated by AI can affect acquiring of certain resources like DRAM or certain silicon quotas, if you're not joining the bandwagon. However there is enough in-house tech in Europe to prop up the critical industries that do not get affected by AI.
The US also needs someone to sell their stuff for keeping the inflated prices. A majority internal market is as unhealthy for the US as the EU.
I was thinking about china driving the US to bankruptcy by commoditising LLMs, thus reducing the revenue.
thanks chatgpt
Clear giveaway: "Honest caveats"
Hey, the point is clarity, not novelty!
Or using GitHub for a couple files
Its a README not poetry
"Three layers."
Are we really discussing a plan that has never been attempted before (training a frontier model on federated hardware) and that would require coordination on a continental scale, sketched on a five-page PDF on GitHub with no discernible author or affiliation? a PDF that, I am sorry to point out, reeks of AI prose in more than one passage?
What are we even doing here.
Just post the prompt that generated this slop next time. Then we'd have a chance of seeing some original thoughts, instead of a bunch of web searches filtered through a bucket of mediocrity.
Just use AI to summarize to the prompt.
You're cute when you're cranky
We do. But only for a limited context space, plant images. We do train our own Foundation Model, and it works great. It's the world frontier model. The machine is expensive, yes, but the customers also pay a lot to get it's advantages. And we got the H100`s on ebay.
We also have buerocracy and regulations problems, but not with the AI at all. Only with the military civil dual-use restriction of thermal cameras. The ones we are allowed to sell have ridicolous resolutions. It still works, but it's barely useful.
And our colleagues across town are also world leader in their AI field. They produce all the world best face recognition SW. They had to use tricks to overcome regulations, but it works. They have their own HW as us.
And again other colleagues across town do rent their GPU computes to train their models. That's for office OCR, and speech to text.
The town is Dresden btw
Where can I get more info on the model, would love to read up about it
Not much. There is a patent: https://patents.justia.com/patent/12087031
Who cares? Just distill some existing frontier models and run the inference yourselves. Instant sovereign AI.
Until they choose to lock their models down (e.g. Fable). Building policy off copying isn't reliable.
By then you've already distilled it. Copying is super reliable. It's a historically-proven way to get nearly the same thing at a fraction of the cost.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-mover_advantage#Second-m...
Howre you going distill if they block your access e.g. Fable
Just bribe someone for access, it's still cheaper than training your own model from scratch. They stole the entire accumulated output of humanity and fed it to their beast, no one should feel any moral or ethical compunction about taking from the AI firms.
Welcome to the age of digital realpolitik.
Chinese are probably laughing reading this.
Same problem, different scope. The EU doesn’t have a proper intelligence agencies, it has members who each run their own. The chances that any of them can achieve the scale of China’s spies is silly.
How you make ROI when your model is blocked?
Unpopular opinion: They can not and they should not.
We live in a world where free open weight-models become competitive with frontier model within a year or two.
It is much more lucrative and proficient in term of business to solve real problems affecting the industries / govs with A.I right now than it is to do the arm race with OpenAI or Anthropic.
That is what Mistral is doing and that served them well so far.
The problem is not regulation and never has been. Regulation is a best a minor stone in the shoes of A.I company in Europe.
The problem is somewhere else: People fails to understand that there is no equivalent in the EU to the unlimited money tap of American VCs and private funding. That's just not a thing here, the investor landscape is much more dry.
Company here just cannot stay unprofitable for 25y while surfing on stocks valuation, it does not work like that in the EU.
And as such they cannot compete with behemoth like OpenAI that burn 80B$ a year of cash while staying afloat.
I do believe the approach of Mistral is the right one: Solve actual problems right now even if not Edge and construct on top of that.
Specially if politically speaking, the White House administration continue to give excellent arguments in favor of sovereignty for the incoming decade. It might be the best strategy they have.
I feel like the very thing that EU is great at: more consumer friendly and anti-corporate legistation, also hamstrings it for innovation. Why would VCs invest in AI there instead of in the US where they don't have to worry about any of that.
No because public EU compute is adminisered by physicists and although they are very competent in their own domains they are winging it when it comes to AI. It like expecting OakRidge to train LLMs...
They already tried training LLMs.
Does Europe need to train a frontier AI model, at all?
"Training a frontier AI model" is a euphemism. The AI industry is, at present, a disproportionately resource-intensive and exploitative activity which carries only an religious promise of making up for itself at some future date (note that the beliefs being touted to board members are different than the gospel spread to users).
More accessible "non-frontier" models are being designed, built, and trained, while bigger models' gains are beginning to asymptote. Economically, Europe does not often hastily participate in new ways of wealth extraction, and with regard to sovereignty, I'd argue that "frontier" models are becoming a liability to the governments who build them and to the populations they're meant to lead.
> Does Europe need to train a frontier AI model, at all?
Perhaps. While I'm more impressed by AI than I think you are, I do also say on occasion that recent developments in AI feels much like the 90s rapid development of computer graphics, in the sense we're overly impressed by what we see only to discard it quickly when the next improvement arrives: https://archive.org/details/nextgen-issue-26
If the US government declares no model ≥ Fable can be released, that could make it completely pointless for anyone in the USA to work towards superior models, which may cause rapid catching up, or may cause the investment bubble to pop and all the money to go away.
Or it may cause all the investment to go to not-USA. China's one possibility, EU is another. No idea which would be least-distasteful to the people currently eager to invest in AI.
I'm with you. I think we will need less "frontier" models in the future, but we'll reach for more specialized ones. A small, focused model trained to e.g. coding is within the realm of useful reality. JetBrains is making some moves in the field, and laudably, some of their work is open-weight.
it is a bizarre nuclear arms race. what they do need are the raw reaources and the capabilities to sefend themselves ans the capability for offense atleast as a threat.
I'm not sure I follow how this metaphor plays out. Many stand to gain by harming and threatening Europe and many stand to suffer if Europe is harmed or threatened. Far be it from me to claim Europe a perfected system, but there are globalized interdependencies which exist here. I think that I'm not seeing the indicators of hard benefits which correlate to the hypotheses put forward by the financial markets. In which ways are the trillions of dollars of value meant to manifest and how do we know when they begin to do so?
These AI models are powerful enough to be used as cyber threats, as a minimum. They may not prove out the other GDP or ROI claims, but the ability to both improve security and dismantle is means if you're not regularly building and improving these models on the software vulnerabilities your organization has, you are increasingly vulnerable to attacks.
Since it's impractical to airgap your military and readinessness capabilities, this means you need incountry capabilities because even if America weren't a fascist, you could easily be disconnected from the support from a cyberattack.
I think you're just following too much AI hype to see any clear use case.
Ok, now I understand better the metaphor. I don't understand your conclusion about AI hype, but at at rate, your earlier point is clearer.
The story I'm not readily conceiting to is that trillion-dollar frontier model training capex is the only thing that results in the defense capabilities countries need in relation to information security. From my understanding, the cyber wins being celebrated of late have come just as much (if not more) from how models are wielded than how they were trained.
Maybe the more honest framing of my question is: at what level of capability does sovereign training become the only viable path, and is that level the same as the trillion-dollar pretraining capacity TFA is actually asking about, or is it rather something more tactical/accessible? That is the part I'm genuinely more interested in, since the closer you are to benefiting from the commercial aspects of model training, the more likely it is that the answers will simply follow the money, so to speak.
We are there already pretty much - if I understand your point (“How the models are wielded”) refers to the harness - which is part of model training already. Fable was trained to use Claude code harnesses effectively to keep plugging at a problem with a lot of working memory and world knowledge and reasoning capability - and to keep hitting that search space intelligently. And it is not just cybersecurity. I’ll give several examples from my own recent experience :
1. Cyber - already discussed - has an issue that the bigger models can actually do a full end-to-end exploration of an exploit - go from theory to an actual deployable payload.
2. CAD/CAM/Mechanics - CalculiX (ccx) - an open-source FEA and similar mechanical solver - think Siemens or ANSYS, but open-source. A team I was helping was trying to do a design mount of a physical object that would need to reduce vibrations in a frequency band - think microphone mount basically. Usual loop would be design, analyze with Siemens, go to beginning. AI loop is have AI design, then analyze using ANSYS, then analyze result, change design, iterate. That loop did not produce anything useful for elastic materials because ANSYS would take 12 hrs to do acoustic analysis using a GPU. 1 week of autonomous work by a frontier model resulted in a modification and custom solver added to ccx that could simulate the acoustics (vibrations) _in that particular problem_ in about 20 seconds - mainly because it could try new mathematical ideas, then compare them against ANSYS reference for quality of solution, and iterate. And 1 week _after that_ the frontier model - iterating on one design per minute - came up with multiple 3-d printable ground-breaking mounts - including sending one off to xeometry for printing and getting it shipped back. Existing designs had a 20 db drop in the frequency ranges needed - this one had 60. For reference 40 DB is basically infinity :) While this was for microphones - you can imagine that vibration reduction is a big thing in engine, suspension, and weapon mounting, and well, in general things that move. 3 person team btw - unthinkable even 1 year ago.
3. Pharma. Different company - but given a known Density Function Theory or Kappa Cluster molecule simulator, one can run nice agentic loops over frontier models to do chemical or pharmaceutical research - there’s a reason Anthropic is launching Claude Chemistry. Note that then limiting factor is the multi-week runtime of Kappa Cluster and similarly molecular dynamics simulators. If one _could_ speed that up for a particular problem space or molecule type, one could very very quickly have a high-end reasoning model iterate to a good molecular design - and frontier models are getting very good at precisely automating the ML research needed to do that autonomously - after all, there’s a reference there. 5 ppl - 2 years ago would be a research institute.
4. Physical AI - robotics - same principle.
5. This is basically the bet Bezos is doing with his new company.
Please do not underestimate the effect these models will have on our ability to improve our ability to effect the world - this is just starting to hit now. I think we can all extrapolate the GDP and defense impact of this - or at least that there will be a very significant one.
This has factored out product development, which is more than compute resources. Just like any industry, some organisation needs to take ownership and responsibility to convert technology to a usable product.
No. Computers are made in the USA or China, OSs are made in the USA (Linux, Windows, Mac).
I'm still waiting for the European computer but all microcontrollers (no processors yet) made in EU have an ARM (British-American) Cortex and the RAM is made elsewhere.
They really shouldn’t.
those that know, do not talk?
europe2031.ai
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No, it cannot. The fundamental problem between the US and EU it is that in the US if something is not explicitly forbidden, it is allowed and in the EU if it is not explicitly allowed it is forbidden.
You cannot have innovation at the speed and scale that you have in the US because the legislation is cumbersome and there is no unified market with the same rules.
It's not just that. The US models were trained partly due to massive theft. They illegally acquired (not used, that was legal) massive amounts of texts that they trained their model on. If you or me stole that much we would be in prison but if you're rich you get to do it and pay a small fine. It's not even the laws. It's in the US you're allowed to break the laws.
I am of the opinion that if it is on the internet, it is free. Just like I find free movies, so do AI companies find free books or whatever they need for their models. What's so hard to understand?
Your opinion doesn't matter when it comes to matters of the law, for right or wrong.
I thought this was the internet where my opinion mattered the most.
What? Your comment is 100% incorrect. In the EU everything is permitted unless explicitly forbidden.
Source: I am European.
It's sometimes very telling when other people think of you and your country. While I do agree we in Europe have sometimes too many rules, but I just can't understand the American obsession with freedom and being able to do things to the detriment of society
It's also quite weird that Americans are the first ones to go full judgemental mode as it is demonstrated in this comment section. When I visited there, I also found people to be overly reactive and judgemental of seemingly minor things and quite obsessed with wealth. I love the fact that nobody gives a flying fuck about anything other strangers are doing in Europe.
That's not to say that there are no bureaucratic inefficiencies in Europe. There are a lot. France, Germany, Nordics and other members of the EU / EEA should strive to strengthen the industries and cut out the bullshit. It is a must to wake up from Boomer-pensioner-induced sleep and NIMBYsm, not for joining a stupid arms race but being able to provide a peaceful prosperity for our children. It is possible to enjoy quite a lot human rights and I think they are not a blocker.
> quite obsessed with wealth
You do know it is better to cry in a Mercedes than on a bike, no?