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Scientists plan huge European AI hub to compete with US

213 points by charlysl 9y ago

candiodari 9y ago
If you had any idea what scientists make in the EU, you'd see 1) why this is happening 2) why this effort won't change a thing They could, you know, pay competitive wages. Ridiculous suggestion, I know, at this point that'd be a 5x and more (500% and more) raise.
- sveme 9y ago
  Places like EMBL or ESO are comparatively well paid, much better than at universities. Still less than in industry, but that's the case everywhere.
- dmichulke 9y ago
  I fully agree. German media constantly complains about "IT expert shortage" yet salaries grow like 3% per year. So IMO it's either not a shortage or the German industry doesn't know how to attract good people. To put some data points there (in EUR) 1. Germany Uni Doctorate Position: 32k, 22k after deductions 2. Germany AI / Data Scientist Position: 80k, 50k after deductions 3. Luxembourg Uni Doctorate Position: 32k, 26k after deductions 4. Luxembourg AI / Data Scientist Position: 80k, 60k after deductions Source: Friends and family and me The above two countries belong arguably to the economical top tier, yet they can hardly compete with a US Senior Software developer (>= 100k$?) Now imagine how the non-top tier countries fare (i.e., 80% of the EU population) I was an AI researcher and now work as ML/AI/Data Scientist consultant (mostly for non-European companies) and I yet have to see that European job offer of 120k€ per year, hell, make that 100k€.
  - Radim 9y ago
    Another datapoint for perspective, from the Czech Republic (also an EU country): * PhD stipend: €3.3k / year (untaxed) * median CZ salary: €13k / year, €11k after taxes * data scientist: €30k / year, €22k after taxes (royalty! although still below a doctorate student in Germany, apparently)
    - laingc 9y ago
      €30k buys you a hell of a lot more in the Czech Republic than in Hamburg or Munich.
      - Radim 9y ago
        Or in some cases, a hell of a lot less :-) Little known fact: people from CZ routinely travel to Germany for shopping. It's not just for the cheaper prices (electronics, drugstore), but even where the prices are comparable, for the much higher quality of products (dairy, food). The most expensive country I've lived in was Romania, where the salaries are even lower than CZ. This trend of higher salaries => cheaper and better goods is rather counter-intuitive (though services are cheaper, to be fair).
        trumpeta 9y ago
        Consumer goods are about the same between CZ and DE, I think what OP meant is things like housing or healthcare, that is much cheaper in CZ.
        allendoerfer 9y ago
        This is because of cheap German supermarkets (Aldi, Lidl) with ruthless efficiency dictating prices for the German market.
        rjsw 9y ago
        There is also the issue that food manufacturers have been selling products with different ingredients but the same packaging in Eastern Europe compared to the ones they sell in Western Europe.
        eeZah7Ux 9y ago
        It might be counter-intuitive but, on the contrary, high salaries and cheap goods are effects of economic power. Contrast it with powerless people that have low income and pay relatively high prices for basic goods or rent: the stereotypical coal miner from 1800, people in prison, poor people in some western countries...
  - ben_w 9y ago
    I’m in the UK, intending to move out for obvious reasons (would’ve gone a year ago but relative got an Alzheimer’s diagnosis early 2017). Considering Berlin, Silicon Valley, or a PhD just about anywhere if the cost is in my range. Once healthcare (at NHS level) and rent are accounted for, $100k in Silicon Valley isn’t as good as £37k in the UK. Germany has more expensive healthcare than the UK’s NHS, but significantly lower rent and overall is only slightly more expensive than the UK… unless you intend to eventually buy a house, in which case it’s suddenly much cheaper.
    - north_east_dev 9y ago
      > I’m in the UK, intending to move out for obvious reasons I thought you meant pay by this, but then you include Berlin in your list of potential places... Is there other reasons I'm missing out on? Genuinely curious
      - okkevdwal 9y ago
        I think he's talking about the upcoming Brexit :)
      - ben_w 9y ago
        Brexit. I could go on for ages about specifics, but experience says that nobody outside the UK really cares (it’s so 2016), and nobody inside the UK is changing their minds.
        north_east_dev 9y ago
        Haha! Oh right. I'm an immigrant in the UK myself. Curious as to why the natives would leave :)
        ben_w 9y ago
        Ah! Partly the total incompetence of the people who are in charge of making Brexit happen, partly because I don’t trust the UK government with human rights unless bound by international convention (a bind which looks like it will be a lot weaker after Brexit). It’s unfortunate, really, there’s a lot of nice stuff in the UK too. And I know I’ll miss it.
  - hdkrgr 9y ago
    While I don't disagree with your argument, the disparity is not quite that high (talking about Germany). A Uni Doctorate Position in Germany is 44k in the first year, ~49k from the second year (EUR before deductions) as per official TVL13 tariff. You are probably referring to the fact that it's common for PhD students to have 'half' or '3/4' positions, but afaik in CS, and especially AI, full positions are the norm. The Industry figures seem on point.
    - dmichulke 9y ago
      There might also be a difference between the Länder. Case in point: A friend and colleague of mine had a full position in Dresden (AI) and he got a little more than 30k (AFAIR before deductions). That was around 2009 I guess. Maybe in high rent cities (Munich, ...) it's different?
      - kmmlng 9y ago
        There is a difference between east and west Germany, but not specifically between the Länder. In 2009 you would have gotten (before deductions) ~34873 in the east and ~37852 in the west. In 2018 it is ~45863 in the east and ~45900 in the west. This is all assuming a full-time E13 position. Source (German): http://oeffentlicher-dienst.info/tv-l/west/ http://oeffentlicher-dienst.info/tv-l/west/
  - bobcostas55 9y ago
    I think this framing is a bit misleading. Salaries aren't exogenous, they track productivity. If a data scientist in Germany is making half of what he would be making in SV, it's because he's much less productive in Germany. Changing this isn't simply a matter of paying more to attract better talent, it's a much deeper issue.
    - candiodari 9y ago
      Actually, as someone who's actually been an academic in Western Europe, I'd say the reverse is true. Certainly mathematical ability is better in Western Europe (on average). The top, no doubt, SV's top performers far exceed those Europe has (perhaps because a decent part of them are from Europe, and those weren't selected randomly. I mean to some extent that's fun because I actually know almost 10% of the top ones. From working with them before they went to the US). But average among the population, even at universities, no doubt whatsoever, Europeans are better at math than USians. But for the top, the brain drain makes the playing field very unequal. Besides, it's not just ability of people at universities itself. Money for programs is also very different. The US military supports US research ... and in Europe ... it's also the US military that supports research (but obviously not equally, and I must say, I find it hard to blame them for that). And in the US you regularly see academics pay for their own organizations outside of the direct academic context. Obviously that works better with better pay. There are government grants, but it doesn't compare to US university endowments (or however they sponsor that). Many of the people "brain drained" didn't leave until they were 10 years into their academic career, out of frustration of just not fighting on a level playing field just because their governments just don't support them. If German universities paid the same, and stopped the brain drain, I have very little doubt they would exceed the output of SV. But with the current levels of people leaving, never going to happen. And to be fair, Germany's universities are nowhere near as bad as Southern Europe's universities, and even those are far ahead of most of Eastern Europe. That doesn't mean there isn't the occasional great person working there, there is, but most of the good ones leave.
      - deleted 9y ago
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- nopinsight 9y ago
  What are some major reasons? Is it because of the culture of not valuing software as much as 'hard' engineering or just lower average GDP per capita? (I read someone commenting that pay for software engineers in Japan and Korea are similarly uncompetitive for the former reason.) Swiss pay is supposed to be quite competitive with American, and other Western European countries are right around their borders.
  - ItsMe000001 9y ago
    > Is it because of the culture of not valuing software as much as 'hard' engineering No - they are paid about equally. Here is a table (German text, does not matter, the table is clear enough): https://www.ingenieur.de/karriere/gehalt/wie-viel-verdienen-elektroingenieure/ https://www.ingenieur.de/karriere/gehalt/wie-viel-verdienen-... "Engineers with >2 years experience by sector", from top to bottom: chemistry/pharmaceuticals, automobile, energy, IT, mech. engineering, electronics, engineering and planning offices, construction As you can see IT actually is right in the middle.
  - peoplewindow 9y ago
    European countries and companies are less likely to go big or go home in my experience. The USA has the expression, "bet the farm" and American leaders like to use it frequently. I can't think of any European equivalent saying off the top of my head. That results in bigger bets, bigger payouts when they succeed, more capital to invest in even bigger bets, etc. The UK case of DeepMind is a good example. A big bet by British standards - lots of money raised and spent on pure research with no business model to drive it. By British standards that's incredibly brave and/or reckless. Yet a successful gamble, sold for half a billion dollars. But, sold to an American company literally called Alpha bet.
  - logicchains 9y ago
    >I read someone commenting that pay for software engineers in Japan and Korea are similarly uncompetitive for the former reason. Pay for software engineers in China is actually more competitive than in Japan/Korea, in spite of China's GDP per capita being much lower. I suspect a key difference is the presence of many startups and large tech companies, something that Japan and Korea seem to lack.
- hocuspocus 9y ago
  Note, research and scientific staff is equally underpaid, if not more, in the US. Since fundamental physics and bioinformatics have been mentioned several times in this thread, if you're curious, look into salaries at places like the National Laboratories, or even independent labs like the Allen Institute. The market distortion in the field of AI/ML isn't as simple as poor wages in academic research. There are many strong European industries that could benefit from more AI/ML and that can definitely afford attractive salaries. Those jobs already exist around the German car makers for instance. Unfortunately, there's always more money to be made selling ads.
deleted 9y ago
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JumpCrisscross 9y ago
This reminds me of the European attempt at competing with the American BRAIN Initiative [1]: "The key difference between Europe's HBP and the U.S.'s BRAIN Initiative is that the latter does not depend on a single scientific vision. Instead many teams will compete for grants and lead innovation into different, unplanned directions. Competition is happening via the nimh's traditional peer-review process, which prevents the conflicts of interest that plagued decision making at the HBP. Peer review is not perfect—it tends to favor known scientific paradigms—and American science funding has plenty of problems of its own. But the BRAIN Initiative's more competitive and transparent decision making is far removed from the political black box in Brussels that produced the HBP." [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-the-human-brain-project-went-wrong-and-how-to-fix-it/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-the-human-bra...
- jamesblonde 9y ago
  There was a vision - it was Henry Markham's vision for simulating a cortical column. However, it was a bad idea, and it all blew up, due to a bad problem to focus on. https://www.nature.com/news/human-brain-project-votes-for-leadership-change-1.17060 https://www.nature.com/news/human-brain-project-votes-for-le...
- gisely 9y ago
  The BRAIN initiative came after the Human Brain Project so it would be more accurate to call the BRAIN initiative America's attempt to compete with the European HBP.
- DanielleMolloy 9y ago
  The BRAIN initiative started after the proposal of the Human Brain Project. The Human Brain Project also followed the Blue Brain Project, which was started in 2005. Leaving criticism of the HBP aside - it would be wrong to put it as if the HBP is the "European answer" to the BRAIN initiative.
tehlike 9y ago
Unless it is supported by capitalist intent, it cannot compete with us.
- ageofwant 9y ago
  You have already lost. Because 'us' almost certainly does not include you.
  - tehlike 9y ago
    Not sure i get you. Us=the us, and it does include me.
thaumaturgy 9y ago
Question for people knowledgeable on the topic: are there many examples of planned efforts like this actually working, where some group is able to attract top talent in some industry and keep it for the long term? The article mentions CERN; are there others? I would guess that most concentrations of talent are an unpredictable side-effect of some environmental factor.
- mjfl 9y ago
  I don't even think CERN, Higgs boson included, is worth the man hours or cash invested... HBP doesn't seem worth it. ITER is a huge failure that is scheduled to receive billions more euros for more than 25 more years. I don't know... Europe seems to fall victim to these sort of things very readily.
  - stctgion 9y ago
    Are you defining "worth it" as whether there is a profit to be made at some point? How much would you have paid for the higgs? Are some pieces of science best left in the dark because they cost too much?
    - mjfl 9y ago
      YES. There is no limit to the cost of modern science, but resources are still scarce in the real world and we cannot afford to spend unlimited funds on projects that will not pay off in human flourishing in the near future. To answer your first question that is the profit to be made and it absolutely is necessary to consider when directing tax dollars which could otherwise be spent feeding starving people or curing dying people. I would have paid $80 for the Higgs.
      - ben_w 9y ago
        While you are correct to say that scarce resources means we can’t do everything, pure/fundamental research like the LHC tends to have extremely high payoffs several decades after it is completed. Nobody knows what exactly, if we did we could focus on that stuff in particular, but its one of the best things we can do to grow the economy. (Also, if everyone in the EU paid $80 for the Higgs, that’s about three LHCs depending on where in its history you take the exchange rate).
jamesblonde 9y ago
Our big problem in Europe is not basic research, it's systems research. We have a European platform for Big Data and AI - Hops. It's open-source. It has nice properties, but it is harder to bootstrap an ecosystem outside the valley: (1) HDFS compatible FS with distributed metadata (2) GPU support in HopsYARN (3) UI to develop Keras/TensorFlow apps in jupyter, deploy on tensorflow serving. Spark support, too. However, getting it 'out there' is still a challenge from Europe. Here is a talk on the platform at CERN last week: https://indico.cern.ch/event/716743/ https://indico.cern.ch/event/716743/ More talks here: http://www.logicalclocks.com/eventscustom/ http://www.logicalclocks.com/eventscustom/
- chrisseaton 9y ago
  > Our big problem in Europe is not basic research, it's systems research. Hmm maybe we mean different things by 'systems research', but I'm in systems research and we're relatively strong in this area in Europe! Notable systems groups at Cambridge, Kent, Oxford, Glasgow, Manchester, EPFL, ETH, Linz, lots of smaller ones. Major influential systems projects started in Europe like Graal. Conferences which attract Americans to fly over like ECOOP and Curry On.
  - jamesblonde 9y ago
    I agree - i would not include ECOOP and Curry On in systems research. They are prog language conferences. Systems research are the USENIX confs (NSDI, ATC, Fast), SOCC, SOSP, OSDI, Eurosys. Typically 10-30% of papers are european (often with American co-authors). I think things have gotten worse, if anything, since Peter Druschel's article on the state of systems research in Europe a decade ago: https://hal.inria.fr/inria-00444781/document https://hal.inria.fr/inria-00444781/document In any case, the largest systems software company in Europe Nokia, went belly up due to a crap OS. Now we're left with SAP, who are just trying to protect last generations' software (a DBMS and its stack). Where are Europe's next big players? And why do they sell out so quick (MySQL, Elastic, JBoss, etc)?
  - nopinsight 9y ago
    Except ETH and EPFL, other names you mention do not seem to be very competitive in CS systems research with top departments in the US and even some in Asia. I am not in systems so please let us know if the ranking based on conference publications skews American or it is a fair reflection of reality. http://csrankings.org/#/fromyear/2012/toyear/2018/index?arch&comm&sec&mod&hpc&mobile&metrics&ops&plan&soft&da&bed&world http://csrankings.org/#/fromyear/2012/toyear/2018/index?arch...
tensor 9y ago
US hardly has a monopoly on AI. Canada and China are also leading countries. It's great that the EU wants to invest too, the more the better! Science doesn't hold allegiance to any country and never should.
- Al-Khwarizmi 9y ago
  The open letter does talk about North America in general (not only the US) and China. The Guardian summarized all that to "the US" in their headline.
tormeh 9y ago
Doesn't this happen to US universities as well? I bet Mercedes et al could do the same as Google if they didn't require you to move to company towns in the middle of nowhere.
- carlmr 9y ago
  I think you're thinking of Audi (Ingolstadt, Neckarsulm) or Volkswagen (Wolfsburg) middle of nowhere towns with a severe lack of estrogen. Mercedes/Daimler and Porsche are in Stuttgart, a major city (for Germany at least). BMW is in Munich, doesn't get much more major city than that. The bigger problem I see is German company's unwillingness to pay engineers more for performance. You basically get the same salary whether you're pulling the whole team or slacking off.
  - tormeh 9y ago
    Stuttgart is not a world-class city and Munich is filled with Bavarians (I.e. conservative, burgeois). Cologne is too small, Hamburg has no tech scene. Germany only really has Berlin for the kind of tech and city that I imagine the HN audience is interested in. >Munich, doesn't get much more major city than that San Francisco, Shenzhen, Paris, London, Berlin? Because the competition is international. Regional/National thinking is part of the problem.
    - allendoerfer 9y ago
      The cities you listed are 3 times older than even the idea of an American continent. They are culturally rich and unique in their own way. They have survived several countries around them and are historically significant regardless of their size today. Cologne for example is the 4th biggest city in Germany and 2000 years old. They have traditions the rest of Germany finds odd and a strange beverage they seem to think of as beer. If that isn't enough for you culturally, than Germany really cannot compete. I don't see any reason to create some artificially big city for the sake of competing world-wide. Also you forgot that those cities are often very close to each other. The Rhein-Neckar (Mannheim, Heidelberg, Ludwigshafen), Rhein-Main (Frankfurt, Darmstadt, Wiesbaden, Mainz etc.) or Ruhr (too many to count really) area do form hubs, which can compete worldwide and are economically MUCH stronger than Berlin ever will be.
ageofwant 9y ago
> Meanwhile, some universities had been hit so hard that they > had lost an entire generation of talented young researchers. The schadenfreude is strong with this one. Maybe next time try treating your researchers less like cattle and start paying them market value salaries.
- Radim 9y ago
  Trouble is, it's not really a "market". EU universities are (mostly) subsidized from other people's taxes, so calling for "market salaries" is essentially calling for increased taxation. A tough sell, especially given the distant, lukewarm connection between the people paying and the people being paid.
dosycorp 9y ago
Ahem ....to compete with China.
Systemic33 9y ago
I believe that a contributing factor to the pay gap in Europe is the fact that we have so many languages, that we are too segregated to create the same level of competitiveness as seen in the US. This means that each country is fairly protective of its people, and even though EU has free movement of labour, the language and culture barrier is strong, and internationals have a harder time to get hired, unless the speak the local language. So the end results is that talent is spread across, and no single country has ability to become the place to be.
- Joeri 9y ago
  It also means that despite being a single market you can’t realistically launch a product across the EU. A SV startup can immediately address the whole US (if they don’t have a physical presence), but an EU startup has to go country by country. That means growth is slower, and talent is less competed for. After brexit I’d like to see business & gov across the EU standardize on english as lingua franca to enable faster growth.
  - Brakenshire 9y ago
    > After brexit I’d like to see business & gov across the EU standardize on english as lingua franca to enable faster growth. I wonder whether this will become easier now when the UK leaves, because the English language won't be tied to the competition between the major states. This is definitely a shame for London, which I think was emerging as the centre of English-speaking Europe, I expect that role now will be more spread across a number of northern European cities, like Stockholm, Copenhagen, Amsterdam etc.
    - calgoo 9y ago
      As someone living in a European country with several languages and internal political problems related to them, i can say that in my opinion this wont happen for a very long time and im not even sure its needed. Kids in these multi language countries are already growing up with english as a second or third language. They are growing up on the internet and are used to reading stuff in english, so the need to standardize on a language, in my opinion, is not even needed. In a generation or 2 the majority of people will speak it anyway.
gaius 9y ago
the scientists say the proposed Ellis institute is essential to avoid brain drain to big tech firms They don’t say tho’ the mechanism by which it will accomplish this. What’s in it for the individual researchers who choose this path over an industry job? ITER only exists because there is no well-funded private-sector fusion research. If Musk or Bezos or Gates entered that game it and CERN would evaporate overnight. I’m no AI guru but I’m a pretty decent infra engineer who can wrangle storage and compute at scale, and they’ll need people like that too, why would someone like me choose this path? What’s the offer? Genuinely curious.
- molteanu 9y ago
  Well, a nice office in a "culturally rich city with dozen of events, museums and world-class cuisine"?! Like it's done for all other industries. Some nice polished marketing and the fear of missing out if you don't go to the place where all the "exciting things happen".
  - gaius 9y ago
    Well, a nice office in a "culturally rich city with dozen of events, museums and world-class cuisine"?! I have been thinking about this today, and I'd take a cut in pay of say 25% in exchange for a private office in which to do interesting work, and absolute job security followed by a final salary pension. The way it used to be. But that actual deal would be a pay cut to 25%, crammed into a office too dingy for Civil Servants, at risk of being TUPE'd at the drop of a hat. No thanks.
icc97 9y ago
Where this is shown up starkly is in Self-driving startups. This list of startups [0] only has 1 or 2 in Europe out of 33. Mercedes does most of it's self-driving research in the US. [0]: https://angel.co/job-collections/top-self-driving-cars-startups https://angel.co/job-collections/top-self-driving-cars-start...
Proven 9y ago
EU socialists are at it again. Innovation in centrally planned economy is guaranteed to work. How many AI tractors will they make per month?
DoctorOetker 9y ago
is it just me or does the guardian symbol in the browser tab (white G on a black disc) always look like the pirate party symbol (black flag on white background in a black circle)?
l5870uoo9y 9y ago
The question is really if Europe can compete with the whole US ecosystem without protectionist policies (and there justified). Nowhere is the US domination more visible than in the tech sector, where Europe essentially is a tech vassal state. The European countries need to build not only an AI hubs, but also an competitive business ecosystem that attracts top talent through salaries, opportunities, challenges and benefits. I don't think there is much appetite in the European population for competing on lavish salaries and raw capitalistic incentiments (both categories in which US leads). European leaders can just look at China and see successful protectionist policies. It makes sense to have some policies not only in US-EU relationship, but also inside EU that spreads the talent on a regional level so regions don't just get drained. This is also a big issue for East- and Central-european countries.
- adventured 9y ago
  There's actually something fascinating about the dominance / vassal premise: it applies within the US, and it applies within Europe as well. Silicon Valley, Boston, NY, Seattle, and a few others dominate the US on tech, with the rest of the US mostly fitting into your tech vassal state premise. The exact same thing is true within Europe for industry and tech. Germany overwhelmingly dominates Europe on auto manufacturing for example. What kind of cars are Russia, Spain, Portugal, UK, Poland, Ukraine, Greece, etc producing? The Germans are out selling and out producing the rest of Europe to an epic degree. How many Airbus planes - and or what share of components - are manufactured in Romania, Czech, Greece or Poland? In Europe these are industrial vassal states to France or Germany.
  - dragandj 9y ago
    The headquarters are in Germany, but tiny Slovakia, for example, has huge car production facilities.
ocschwar 9y ago
I don;t know about AI, but when it comes to using formal methods to nail down software development and make it reliable, the EU is already outpacing the US.
- ra1n85 9y ago
  This is an assertion without data to back it up. Care to elaborate?
  - ocschwar 9y ago
    INRIA, where Coq development takes place.
- aje403 9y ago
  Considering the vast majority of all CS and modern software languages and practices have originated in the US in the first place and the US still, by any rational or unbiased measure, has the largest and most innovative tech companies in the world, I am not totally convinced of what you're claiming
alexhutcheson 9y ago
The headline seems misleading. They're not planning one "huge hub" in one location. Instead, they're planning a bunch of mid-sized institutes spread across different countries, each with "hundreds of computer engineers, mathematicians and other scientists". That approach is understandable politically, but it seems much less likely to have the intended effect. If the goal is to kick-start a knowledge cluster in Europe that can compete with the Bay Area, then it seems much more likely to succeed if the funding and talent is concentrated in a single site. "Hundreds of computer engineers" is equivalent to a mid-size remote office of a major tech company. That's just an observation, though. I realize that the choice probably isn't this plan vs. one mega-site. More realistically it's this plan vs. nothing at all, or vs. competing piecemeal efforts by various EU member states.
- bitL 9y ago
  I think it would go standard European way - build an institution by a top-down directive reflecting political will, shake each others hands, then a few years later cry that you have all this outdated infrastructure but no inventive people working for you nor any bleeding-edge results, as all relevant people are snatched up and overpaid by industry giants.
- Eridrus 9y ago
  I think a hundred researchers/engineers is well beyond a midsize company remote office, because the caliber of people and mission will be very different. DeepMind is less than a thousand people, and was probably on the order of a few hundred when it became famous.
  - alexhutcheson 9y ago
    For comparison, the Fraunhofer Society has 72 institutes in Germany, all focused on applied research. Collectively, these institutes employ ~25,000 scientists and engineers[1], which gives us an average of ~350 scientists and engineers per office. This seems very comparable to what's being proposed, both in mission and in scale of individual institute. This seems to be an effective model for applied R&D, but I haven't seen anyone argue that a Fraunhofer Institute is sufficient to be a seed for a major tech cluster. The scale just isn't big enough. [1] https://www.fraunhofer.de/en/about-fraunhofer/profile-structure/facts-and-figures.html https://www.fraunhofer.de/en/about-fraunhofer/profile-struct...
throw2016 9y ago
SV has always been heavily subsidized. A lot of the fundamental tech comes from government research projects. Startups have access to easy capital and there is no transparency of the 10/1 or 100/1 failures, how this is sustained and where all the money is coming from. There is definitely govt money including from the CIA, NSA at work here. So there is no reason the EU cannot do the same, infact they are late. The open source movement has also played a key role in most of the SV success stories in the recent past. Zuckerberg, Page and others are the celebrated 'free market' 'wealth creators' but the work of Stallman, Torvalds, Rasmus and thousands of others have undeniably added billions of dollars of value. Our currently ideological narrative of 'wealth creators' and 'free markets' completely fails to account and value these and other critical social investments. We make the narratives we want. All the SV money further subsidizes companies like Uber and other startups hungry for market share, who can under price and run out competition in other markets which is dumping. Its just that no one is going after them in Europe and elsewhere yet but the rules are there and can be enforced when needed.
youpassbutter 9y ago
This is great news. We need more tech hubs and more competition in the tech industry. I'm still confused as to why europe decided to cede the entire tech industry to the US. Do europeans love us this much? That they want us to have all money/technology? But this doesn't go far enough. Europe has 600 million people. They should have 2 or 3 tech hubs. Look at what china is doing. They are developing their own tech industry. That is what europe should do. Foster their own tech industry.
giardini 8y ago
I want to thank everyone who contributed to this thread. The variety of experiences and viewpoints provided an incredible insight to someone who's been mostly in the USA for the last 2 decades. My conclusions: a) There's not a snowball's chance in Hell that a European AI hub compete with the US, b) Europe remains far more fragmented than I thought it was; even more fragmented than it appeared when I was in high school. "Brexit" may actually increase Europe's (and Britain's) organization. c) Britain and Europe have tons of good people but a lack of organization suitable for pure research, be it by governments, corporations, "hubs", or non-governmental organizations. d) China is similarly SNAFU'd but worse in some respects (unsettled markets, lack of transparency & property rights). Luckily, there doesn't appear to be a ghost of a chance of having one of China's many languages adopted as a scientific "lingua franca". [Note to self: cross the (formerly) relevant item off my "bucket list".] e) Perhaps restoring near-universal use of the character encoding UTF-16 or even US-ASCII is not a completely dead idea but merely one to be delayed until the adoption of English as the "lingua franca" of the Internet and Europe, salvaging much-needed bandwidth. Time will tell.

213 points by charlysl 9y ago

If you had any idea what scientists make in the EU, you'd see 1) why this is happening 2) why this effort won't change a thing They could, you know, pay competitive wages. Ridiculous suggestion, I know, at this point that'd be a 5x and more (500% and more) raise.

sveme 9y ago
Places like EMBL or ESO are comparatively well paid, much better than at universities. Still less than in industry, but that's the case everywhere.
dmichulke 9y ago
I fully agree. German media constantly complains about "IT expert shortage" yet salaries grow like 3% per year. So IMO it's either not a shortage or the German industry doesn't know how to attract good people. To put some data points there (in EUR) 1. Germany Uni Doctorate Position: 32k, 22k after deductions 2. Germany AI / Data Scientist Position: 80k, 50k after deductions 3. Luxembourg Uni Doctorate Position: 32k, 26k after deductions 4. Luxembourg AI / Data Scientist Position: 80k, 60k after deductions Source: Friends and family and me The above two countries belong arguably to the economical top tier, yet they can hardly compete with a US Senior Software developer (>= 100k$?) Now imagine how the non-top tier countries fare (i.e., 80% of the EU population) I was an AI researcher and now work as ML/AI/Data Scientist consultant (mostly for non-European companies) and I yet have to see that European job offer of 120k€ per year, hell, make that 100k€.
- Radim 9y ago
  Another datapoint for perspective, from the Czech Republic (also an EU country): * PhD stipend: €3.3k / year (untaxed) * median CZ salary: €13k / year, €11k after taxes * data scientist: €30k / year, €22k after taxes (royalty! although still below a doctorate student in Germany, apparently)
  - laingc 9y ago
    €30k buys you a hell of a lot more in the Czech Republic than in Hamburg or Munich.
    - Radim 9y ago
      Or in some cases, a hell of a lot less :-) Little known fact: people from CZ routinely travel to Germany for shopping. It's not just for the cheaper prices (electronics, drugstore), but even where the prices are comparable, for the much higher quality of products (dairy, food). The most expensive country I've lived in was Romania, where the salaries are even lower than CZ. This trend of higher salaries => cheaper and better goods is rather counter-intuitive (though services are cheaper, to be fair).
      - trumpeta 9y ago
        Consumer goods are about the same between CZ and DE, I think what OP meant is things like housing or healthcare, that is much cheaper in CZ.
      - allendoerfer 9y ago
        This is because of cheap German supermarkets (Aldi, Lidl) with ruthless efficiency dictating prices for the German market.
        rjsw 9y ago
        There is also the issue that food manufacturers have been selling products with different ingredients but the same packaging in Eastern Europe compared to the ones they sell in Western Europe.
      - eeZah7Ux 9y ago
        It might be counter-intuitive but, on the contrary, high salaries and cheap goods are effects of economic power. Contrast it with powerless people that have low income and pay relatively high prices for basic goods or rent: the stereotypical coal miner from 1800, people in prison, poor people in some western countries...
- ben_w 9y ago
  I’m in the UK, intending to move out for obvious reasons (would’ve gone a year ago but relative got an Alzheimer’s diagnosis early 2017). Considering Berlin, Silicon Valley, or a PhD just about anywhere if the cost is in my range. Once healthcare (at NHS level) and rent are accounted for, $100k in Silicon Valley isn’t as good as £37k in the UK. Germany has more expensive healthcare than the UK’s NHS, but significantly lower rent and overall is only slightly more expensive than the UK… unless you intend to eventually buy a house, in which case it’s suddenly much cheaper.
  - north_east_dev 9y ago
    > I’m in the UK, intending to move out for obvious reasons I thought you meant pay by this, but then you include Berlin in your list of potential places... Is there other reasons I'm missing out on? Genuinely curious
    - okkevdwal 9y ago
      I think he's talking about the upcoming Brexit :)
    - ben_w 9y ago
      Brexit. I could go on for ages about specifics, but experience says that nobody outside the UK really cares (it’s so 2016), and nobody inside the UK is changing their minds.
      - north_east_dev 9y ago
        Haha! Oh right. I'm an immigrant in the UK myself. Curious as to why the natives would leave :)
        ben_w 9y ago
        Ah! Partly the total incompetence of the people who are in charge of making Brexit happen, partly because I don’t trust the UK government with human rights unless bound by international convention (a bind which looks like it will be a lot weaker after Brexit). It’s unfortunate, really, there’s a lot of nice stuff in the UK too. And I know I’ll miss it.
- hdkrgr 9y ago
  While I don't disagree with your argument, the disparity is not quite that high (talking about Germany). A Uni Doctorate Position in Germany is 44k in the first year, ~49k from the second year (EUR before deductions) as per official TVL13 tariff. You are probably referring to the fact that it's common for PhD students to have 'half' or '3/4' positions, but afaik in CS, and especially AI, full positions are the norm. The Industry figures seem on point.
  - dmichulke 9y ago
    There might also be a difference between the Länder. Case in point: A friend and colleague of mine had a full position in Dresden (AI) and he got a little more than 30k (AFAIR before deductions). That was around 2009 I guess. Maybe in high rent cities (Munich, ...) it's different?
    - kmmlng 9y ago
      There is a difference between east and west Germany, but not specifically between the Länder. In 2009 you would have gotten (before deductions) ~34873 in the east and ~37852 in the west. In 2018 it is ~45863 in the east and ~45900 in the west. This is all assuming a full-time E13 position. Source (German): http://oeffentlicher-dienst.info/tv-l/west/ http://oeffentlicher-dienst.info/tv-l/west/
- bobcostas55 9y ago
  I think this framing is a bit misleading. Salaries aren't exogenous, they track productivity. If a data scientist in Germany is making half of what he would be making in SV, it's because he's much less productive in Germany. Changing this isn't simply a matter of paying more to attract better talent, it's a much deeper issue.
  - candiodari 9y ago
    Actually, as someone who's actually been an academic in Western Europe, I'd say the reverse is true. Certainly mathematical ability is better in Western Europe (on average). The top, no doubt, SV's top performers far exceed those Europe has (perhaps because a decent part of them are from Europe, and those weren't selected randomly. I mean to some extent that's fun because I actually know almost 10% of the top ones. From working with them before they went to the US). But average among the population, even at universities, no doubt whatsoever, Europeans are better at math than USians. But for the top, the brain drain makes the playing field very unequal. Besides, it's not just ability of people at universities itself. Money for programs is also very different. The US military supports US research ... and in Europe ... it's also the US military that supports research (but obviously not equally, and I must say, I find it hard to blame them for that). And in the US you regularly see academics pay for their own organizations outside of the direct academic context. Obviously that works better with better pay. There are government grants, but it doesn't compare to US university endowments (or however they sponsor that). Many of the people "brain drained" didn't leave until they were 10 years into their academic career, out of frustration of just not fighting on a level playing field just because their governments just don't support them. If German universities paid the same, and stopped the brain drain, I have very little doubt they would exceed the output of SV. But with the current levels of people leaving, never going to happen. And to be fair, Germany's universities are nowhere near as bad as Southern Europe's universities, and even those are far ahead of most of Eastern Europe. That doesn't mean there isn't the occasional great person working there, there is, but most of the good ones leave.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
nopinsight 9y ago
What are some major reasons? Is it because of the culture of not valuing software as much as 'hard' engineering or just lower average GDP per capita? (I read someone commenting that pay for software engineers in Japan and Korea are similarly uncompetitive for the former reason.) Swiss pay is supposed to be quite competitive with American, and other Western European countries are right around their borders.
- ItsMe000001 9y ago
  > Is it because of the culture of not valuing software as much as 'hard' engineering No - they are paid about equally. Here is a table (German text, does not matter, the table is clear enough): https://www.ingenieur.de/karriere/gehalt/wie-viel-verdienen-elektroingenieure/ https://www.ingenieur.de/karriere/gehalt/wie-viel-verdienen-... "Engineers with >2 years experience by sector", from top to bottom: chemistry/pharmaceuticals, automobile, energy, IT, mech. engineering, electronics, engineering and planning offices, construction As you can see IT actually is right in the middle.
- peoplewindow 9y ago
  European countries and companies are less likely to go big or go home in my experience. The USA has the expression, "bet the farm" and American leaders like to use it frequently. I can't think of any European equivalent saying off the top of my head. That results in bigger bets, bigger payouts when they succeed, more capital to invest in even bigger bets, etc. The UK case of DeepMind is a good example. A big bet by British standards - lots of money raised and spent on pure research with no business model to drive it. By British standards that's incredibly brave and/or reckless. Yet a successful gamble, sold for half a billion dollars. But, sold to an American company literally called Alpha bet.
- logicchains 9y ago
  >I read someone commenting that pay for software engineers in Japan and Korea are similarly uncompetitive for the former reason. Pay for software engineers in China is actually more competitive than in Japan/Korea, in spite of China's GDP per capita being much lower. I suspect a key difference is the presence of many startups and large tech companies, something that Japan and Korea seem to lack.
hocuspocus 9y ago
Note, research and scientific staff is equally underpaid, if not more, in the US. Since fundamental physics and bioinformatics have been mentioned several times in this thread, if you're curious, look into salaries at places like the National Laboratories, or even independent labs like the Allen Institute. The market distortion in the field of AI/ML isn't as simple as poor wages in academic research. There are many strong European industries that could benefit from more AI/ML and that can definitely afford attractive salaries. Those jobs already exist around the German car makers for instance. Unfortunately, there's always more money to be made selling ads.

deleted 9y ago

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JumpCrisscross 9y ago

This reminds me of the European attempt at competing with the American BRAIN Initiative [1]: "The key difference between Europe's HBP and the U.S.'s BRAIN Initiative is that the latter does not depend on a single scientific vision. Instead many teams will compete for grants and lead innovation into different, unplanned directions. Competition is happening via the nimh's traditional peer-review process, which prevents the conflicts of interest that plagued decision making at the HBP. Peer review is not perfect—it tends to favor known scientific paradigms—and American science funding has plenty of problems of its own. But the BRAIN Initiative's more competitive and transparent decision making is far removed from the political black box in Brussels that produced the HBP." [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-the-human-brain-project-went-wrong-and-how-to-fix-it/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-the-human-bra...

jamesblonde 9y ago
There was a vision - it was Henry Markham's vision for simulating a cortical column. However, it was a bad idea, and it all blew up, due to a bad problem to focus on. https://www.nature.com/news/human-brain-project-votes-for-leadership-change-1.17060 https://www.nature.com/news/human-brain-project-votes-for-le...
gisely 9y ago
The BRAIN initiative came after the Human Brain Project so it would be more accurate to call the BRAIN initiative America's attempt to compete with the European HBP.
DanielleMolloy 9y ago
The BRAIN initiative started after the proposal of the Human Brain Project. The Human Brain Project also followed the Blue Brain Project, which was started in 2005. Leaving criticism of the HBP aside - it would be wrong to put it as if the HBP is the "European answer" to the BRAIN initiative.

tehlike 9y ago

Unless it is supported by capitalist intent, it cannot compete with us.

ageofwant 9y ago
You have already lost. Because 'us' almost certainly does not include you.
- tehlike 9y ago
  Not sure i get you. Us=the us, and it does include me.

thaumaturgy 9y ago

Question for people knowledgeable on the topic: are there many examples of planned efforts like this actually working, where some group is able to attract top talent in some industry and keep it for the long term? The article mentions CERN; are there others? I would guess that most concentrations of talent are an unpredictable side-effect of some environmental factor.

mjfl 9y ago
I don't even think CERN, Higgs boson included, is worth the man hours or cash invested... HBP doesn't seem worth it. ITER is a huge failure that is scheduled to receive billions more euros for more than 25 more years. I don't know... Europe seems to fall victim to these sort of things very readily.
- stctgion 9y ago
  Are you defining "worth it" as whether there is a profit to be made at some point? How much would you have paid for the higgs? Are some pieces of science best left in the dark because they cost too much?
  - mjfl 9y ago
    YES. There is no limit to the cost of modern science, but resources are still scarce in the real world and we cannot afford to spend unlimited funds on projects that will not pay off in human flourishing in the near future. To answer your first question that is the profit to be made and it absolutely is necessary to consider when directing tax dollars which could otherwise be spent feeding starving people or curing dying people. I would have paid $80 for the Higgs.
    - ben_w 9y ago
      While you are correct to say that scarce resources means we can’t do everything, pure/fundamental research like the LHC tends to have extremely high payoffs several decades after it is completed. Nobody knows what exactly, if we did we could focus on that stuff in particular, but its one of the best things we can do to grow the economy. (Also, if everyone in the EU paid $80 for the Higgs, that’s about three LHCs depending on where in its history you take the exchange rate).

jamesblonde 9y ago

Our big problem in Europe is not basic research, it's systems research. We have a European platform for Big Data and AI - Hops. It's open-source. It has nice properties, but it is harder to bootstrap an ecosystem outside the valley: (1) HDFS compatible FS with distributed metadata (2) GPU support in HopsYARN (3) UI to develop Keras/TensorFlow apps in jupyter, deploy on tensorflow serving. Spark support, too. However, getting it 'out there' is still a challenge from Europe. Here is a talk on the platform at CERN last week: https://indico.cern.ch/event/716743/ https://indico.cern.ch/event/716743/ More talks here: http://www.logicalclocks.com/eventscustom/ http://www.logicalclocks.com/eventscustom/

chrisseaton 9y ago
> Our big problem in Europe is not basic research, it's systems research. Hmm maybe we mean different things by 'systems research', but I'm in systems research and we're relatively strong in this area in Europe! Notable systems groups at Cambridge, Kent, Oxford, Glasgow, Manchester, EPFL, ETH, Linz, lots of smaller ones. Major influential systems projects started in Europe like Graal. Conferences which attract Americans to fly over like ECOOP and Curry On.
- jamesblonde 9y ago
  I agree - i would not include ECOOP and Curry On in systems research. They are prog language conferences. Systems research are the USENIX confs (NSDI, ATC, Fast), SOCC, SOSP, OSDI, Eurosys. Typically 10-30% of papers are european (often with American co-authors). I think things have gotten worse, if anything, since Peter Druschel's article on the state of systems research in Europe a decade ago: https://hal.inria.fr/inria-00444781/document https://hal.inria.fr/inria-00444781/document In any case, the largest systems software company in Europe Nokia, went belly up due to a crap OS. Now we're left with SAP, who are just trying to protect last generations' software (a DBMS and its stack). Where are Europe's next big players? And why do they sell out so quick (MySQL, Elastic, JBoss, etc)?
- nopinsight 9y ago
  Except ETH and EPFL, other names you mention do not seem to be very competitive in CS systems research with top departments in the US and even some in Asia. I am not in systems so please let us know if the ranking based on conference publications skews American or it is a fair reflection of reality. http://csrankings.org/#/fromyear/2012/toyear/2018/index?arch&comm&sec&mod&hpc&mobile&metrics&ops&plan&soft&da&bed&world http://csrankings.org/#/fromyear/2012/toyear/2018/index?arch...

tensor 9y ago

US hardly has a monopoly on AI. Canada and China are also leading countries. It's great that the EU wants to invest too, the more the better! Science doesn't hold allegiance to any country and never should.

Al-Khwarizmi 9y ago
The open letter does talk about North America in general (not only the US) and China. The Guardian summarized all that to "the US" in their headline.

tormeh 9y ago

Doesn't this happen to US universities as well? I bet Mercedes et al could do the same as Google if they didn't require you to move to company towns in the middle of nowhere.

carlmr 9y ago
I think you're thinking of Audi (Ingolstadt, Neckarsulm) or Volkswagen (Wolfsburg) middle of nowhere towns with a severe lack of estrogen. Mercedes/Daimler and Porsche are in Stuttgart, a major city (for Germany at least). BMW is in Munich, doesn't get much more major city than that. The bigger problem I see is German company's unwillingness to pay engineers more for performance. You basically get the same salary whether you're pulling the whole team or slacking off.
- tormeh 9y ago
  Stuttgart is not a world-class city and Munich is filled with Bavarians (I.e. conservative, burgeois). Cologne is too small, Hamburg has no tech scene. Germany only really has Berlin for the kind of tech and city that I imagine the HN audience is interested in. >Munich, doesn't get much more major city than that San Francisco, Shenzhen, Paris, London, Berlin? Because the competition is international. Regional/National thinking is part of the problem.
  - allendoerfer 9y ago
    The cities you listed are 3 times older than even the idea of an American continent. They are culturally rich and unique in their own way. They have survived several countries around them and are historically significant regardless of their size today. Cologne for example is the 4th biggest city in Germany and 2000 years old. They have traditions the rest of Germany finds odd and a strange beverage they seem to think of as beer. If that isn't enough for you culturally, than Germany really cannot compete. I don't see any reason to create some artificially big city for the sake of competing world-wide. Also you forgot that those cities are often very close to each other. The Rhein-Neckar (Mannheim, Heidelberg, Ludwigshafen), Rhein-Main (Frankfurt, Darmstadt, Wiesbaden, Mainz etc.) or Ruhr (too many to count really) area do form hubs, which can compete worldwide and are economically MUCH stronger than Berlin ever will be.

ageofwant 9y ago

> Meanwhile, some universities had been hit so hard that they > had lost an entire generation of talented young researchers. The schadenfreude is strong with this one. Maybe next time try treating your researchers less like cattle and start paying them market value salaries.

Radim 9y ago
Trouble is, it's not really a "market". EU universities are (mostly) subsidized from other people's taxes, so calling for "market salaries" is essentially calling for increased taxation. A tough sell, especially given the distant, lukewarm connection between the people paying and the people being paid.

dosycorp 9y ago

Ahem ....to compete with China.

Systemic33 9y ago

I believe that a contributing factor to the pay gap in Europe is the fact that we have so many languages, that we are too segregated to create the same level of competitiveness as seen in the US. This means that each country is fairly protective of its people, and even though EU has free movement of labour, the language and culture barrier is strong, and internationals have a harder time to get hired, unless the speak the local language. So the end results is that talent is spread across, and no single country has ability to become the place to be.

Joeri 9y ago
It also means that despite being a single market you can’t realistically launch a product across the EU. A SV startup can immediately address the whole US (if they don’t have a physical presence), but an EU startup has to go country by country. That means growth is slower, and talent is less competed for. After brexit I’d like to see business & gov across the EU standardize on english as lingua franca to enable faster growth.
- Brakenshire 9y ago
  > After brexit I’d like to see business & gov across the EU standardize on english as lingua franca to enable faster growth. I wonder whether this will become easier now when the UK leaves, because the English language won't be tied to the competition between the major states. This is definitely a shame for London, which I think was emerging as the centre of English-speaking Europe, I expect that role now will be more spread across a number of northern European cities, like Stockholm, Copenhagen, Amsterdam etc.
  - calgoo 9y ago
    As someone living in a European country with several languages and internal political problems related to them, i can say that in my opinion this wont happen for a very long time and im not even sure its needed. Kids in these multi language countries are already growing up with english as a second or third language. They are growing up on the internet and are used to reading stuff in english, so the need to standardize on a language, in my opinion, is not even needed. In a generation or 2 the majority of people will speak it anyway.

gaius 9y ago

the scientists say the proposed Ellis institute is essential to avoid brain drain to big tech firms They don’t say tho’ the mechanism by which it will accomplish this. What’s in it for the individual researchers who choose this path over an industry job? ITER only exists because there is no well-funded private-sector fusion research. If Musk or Bezos or Gates entered that game it and CERN would evaporate overnight. I’m no AI guru but I’m a pretty decent infra engineer who can wrangle storage and compute at scale, and they’ll need people like that too, why would someone like me choose this path? What’s the offer? Genuinely curious.

molteanu 9y ago
Well, a nice office in a "culturally rich city with dozen of events, museums and world-class cuisine"?! Like it's done for all other industries. Some nice polished marketing and the fear of missing out if you don't go to the place where all the "exciting things happen".
- gaius 9y ago
  Well, a nice office in a "culturally rich city with dozen of events, museums and world-class cuisine"?! I have been thinking about this today, and I'd take a cut in pay of say 25% in exchange for a private office in which to do interesting work, and absolute job security followed by a final salary pension. The way it used to be. But that actual deal would be a pay cut to 25%, crammed into a office too dingy for Civil Servants, at risk of being TUPE'd at the drop of a hat. No thanks.

icc97 9y ago

Where this is shown up starkly is in Self-driving startups. This list of startups [0] only has 1 or 2 in Europe out of 33. Mercedes does most of it's self-driving research in the US. [0]: https://angel.co/job-collections/top-self-driving-cars-startups https://angel.co/job-collections/top-self-driving-cars-start...

Proven 9y ago

EU socialists are at it again. Innovation in centrally planned economy is guaranteed to work. How many AI tractors will they make per month?

DoctorOetker 9y ago

is it just me or does the guardian symbol in the browser tab (white G on a black disc) always look like the pirate party symbol (black flag on white background in a black circle)?

l5870uoo9y 9y ago

The question is really if Europe can compete with the whole US ecosystem without protectionist policies (and there justified). Nowhere is the US domination more visible than in the tech sector, where Europe essentially is a tech vassal state. The European countries need to build not only an AI hubs, but also an competitive business ecosystem that attracts top talent through salaries, opportunities, challenges and benefits. I don't think there is much appetite in the European population for competing on lavish salaries and raw capitalistic incentiments (both categories in which US leads). European leaders can just look at China and see successful protectionist policies. It makes sense to have some policies not only in US-EU relationship, but also inside EU that spreads the talent on a regional level so regions don't just get drained. This is also a big issue for East- and Central-european countries.

adventured 9y ago
There's actually something fascinating about the dominance / vassal premise: it applies within the US, and it applies within Europe as well. Silicon Valley, Boston, NY, Seattle, and a few others dominate the US on tech, with the rest of the US mostly fitting into your tech vassal state premise. The exact same thing is true within Europe for industry and tech. Germany overwhelmingly dominates Europe on auto manufacturing for example. What kind of cars are Russia, Spain, Portugal, UK, Poland, Ukraine, Greece, etc producing? The Germans are out selling and out producing the rest of Europe to an epic degree. How many Airbus planes - and or what share of components - are manufactured in Romania, Czech, Greece or Poland? In Europe these are industrial vassal states to France or Germany.
- dragandj 9y ago
  The headquarters are in Germany, but tiny Slovakia, for example, has huge car production facilities.

ocschwar 9y ago

I don;t know about AI, but when it comes to using formal methods to nail down software development and make it reliable, the EU is already outpacing the US.

ra1n85 9y ago
This is an assertion without data to back it up. Care to elaborate?
- ocschwar 9y ago
  INRIA, where Coq development takes place.
aje403 9y ago
Considering the vast majority of all CS and modern software languages and practices have originated in the US in the first place and the US still, by any rational or unbiased measure, has the largest and most innovative tech companies in the world, I am not totally convinced of what you're claiming

alexhutcheson 9y ago

The headline seems misleading. They're not planning one "huge hub" in one location. Instead, they're planning a bunch of mid-sized institutes spread across different countries, each with "hundreds of computer engineers, mathematicians and other scientists". That approach is understandable politically, but it seems much less likely to have the intended effect. If the goal is to kick-start a knowledge cluster in Europe that can compete with the Bay Area, then it seems much more likely to succeed if the funding and talent is concentrated in a single site. "Hundreds of computer engineers" is equivalent to a mid-size remote office of a major tech company. That's just an observation, though. I realize that the choice probably isn't this plan vs. one mega-site. More realistically it's this plan vs. nothing at all, or vs. competing piecemeal efforts by various EU member states.

bitL 9y ago
I think it would go standard European way - build an institution by a top-down directive reflecting political will, shake each others hands, then a few years later cry that you have all this outdated infrastructure but no inventive people working for you nor any bleeding-edge results, as all relevant people are snatched up and overpaid by industry giants.
Eridrus 9y ago
I think a hundred researchers/engineers is well beyond a midsize company remote office, because the caliber of people and mission will be very different. DeepMind is less than a thousand people, and was probably on the order of a few hundred when it became famous.
- alexhutcheson 9y ago
  For comparison, the Fraunhofer Society has 72 institutes in Germany, all focused on applied research. Collectively, these institutes employ ~25,000 scientists and engineers[1], which gives us an average of ~350 scientists and engineers per office. This seems very comparable to what's being proposed, both in mission and in scale of individual institute. This seems to be an effective model for applied R&D, but I haven't seen anyone argue that a Fraunhofer Institute is sufficient to be a seed for a major tech cluster. The scale just isn't big enough. [1] https://www.fraunhofer.de/en/about-fraunhofer/profile-structure/facts-and-figures.html https://www.fraunhofer.de/en/about-fraunhofer/profile-struct...

throw2016 9y ago

SV has always been heavily subsidized. A lot of the fundamental tech comes from government research projects. Startups have access to easy capital and there is no transparency of the 10/1 or 100/1 failures, how this is sustained and where all the money is coming from. There is definitely govt money including from the CIA, NSA at work here. So there is no reason the EU cannot do the same, infact they are late. The open source movement has also played a key role in most of the SV success stories in the recent past. Zuckerberg, Page and others are the celebrated 'free market' 'wealth creators' but the work of Stallman, Torvalds, Rasmus and thousands of others have undeniably added billions of dollars of value. Our currently ideological narrative of 'wealth creators' and 'free markets' completely fails to account and value these and other critical social investments. We make the narratives we want. All the SV money further subsidizes companies like Uber and other startups hungry for market share, who can under price and run out competition in other markets which is dumping. Its just that no one is going after them in Europe and elsewhere yet but the rules are there and can be enforced when needed.

youpassbutter 9y ago

This is great news. We need more tech hubs and more competition in the tech industry. I'm still confused as to why europe decided to cede the entire tech industry to the US. Do europeans love us this much? That they want us to have all money/technology? But this doesn't go far enough. Europe has 600 million people. They should have 2 or 3 tech hubs. Look at what china is doing. They are developing their own tech industry. That is what europe should do. Foster their own tech industry.

giardini 8y ago

I want to thank everyone who contributed to this thread. The variety of experiences and viewpoints provided an incredible insight to someone who's been mostly in the USA for the last 2 decades. My conclusions: a) There's not a snowball's chance in Hell that a European AI hub compete with the US, b) Europe remains far more fragmented than I thought it was; even more fragmented than it appeared when I was in high school. "Brexit" may actually increase Europe's (and Britain's) organization. c) Britain and Europe have tons of good people but a lack of organization suitable for pure research, be it by governments, corporations, "hubs", or non-governmental organizations. d) China is similarly SNAFU'd but worse in some respects (unsettled markets, lack of transparency & property rights). Luckily, there doesn't appear to be a ghost of a chance of having one of China's many languages adopted as a scientific "lingua franca". [Note to self: cross the (formerly) relevant item off my "bucket list".] e) Perhaps restoring near-universal use of the character encoding UTF-16 or even US-ASCII is not a completely dead idea but merely one to be delayed until the adoption of English as the "lingua franca" of the Internet and Europe, salvaging much-needed bandwidth. Time will tell.