- 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?
- > 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.
- > 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?
- > 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?
- 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?
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- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- > 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???
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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...
- Compute 2027 coming soon ;)
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- reducing unskilled and hateful immigration is the democratic thing do
this has nothing to the other good idea which is to start building AI
- 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.
- 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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- > Can Europe train a frontier AI model on the compute it owns?
No
- 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.
- You're cute when you're cranky
- 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.
- They really shouldn’t.
- 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
- those that know, do not talk?
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50 points by smashini 4 hours ago | 61 comments