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What problem do you believe that present regulations impose? At present, I see the thing preventing European LLMs as mostly being that there is less access to

What problem do you believe that present regulations impose? At present, I see the thing preventing European LLMs as mostly being that there is less access to capital for computing resources and the cost of computing resources. The US is very dominant in computing, it's a matter of history and the EU is a very recent thing. We don't have an Intel, or NVIDIA, etc., yet, and we may not have one for many years, but are established in the parts of the industry where we happen to be so. None of this has to do with regulation. But we do absolutely need some kind of hardware program to make European vector/tensor processors, something like the European processor initative, but willing to sell to whoever will buy and not just to existing supercomputer customers. Maybe they're even planning something of that sort. But the problem isn't regulations.

hot_gril 2y ago
What filereaper said. The taxes and labor regulations alone make the risk vs reward not make sense for tech startups, and that's without getting into explicit tech regulations.
- impossiblefork 2y ago
  The taxes are a huge problem. The labour regulations, I think less so. The taxes on wage income are why you can't get two European engineers for the price of one American engineer, and are I think, why there hasn't been a software industry exodus to European, or a European software explosion. If you could actually pay out what people bring in, I think we'd had an enormous software industry, because the jobs would have been so attractive. The typical European tax on wages isn't an obvious crisis when companies use capital, but when what's productive is labour itself, then it is.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > taxes are a huge problem. The labour regulations, I think less so I’d invert this. Taxes aren’t a huge issue for start-ups. Not being able to pivot by changing team composition is. Add to that the random EU-specific AI regulations, and it becomes a clearly second-tier place to launch from unless you have the political connections to land national champion status, e.g. Mistral.
    - hot_gril 2y ago
      I wouldn't say it's mainly the taxes either, except that every startup's lifeline is the potential of future acquisition, which taxation might hurt.
wormius 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASML_Holding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASML_Holding This is a very solid base to start from. "As of 2023 it is the largest supplier for the semiconductor industry and the sole supplier in the world of extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) photolithography machines that are required to manufacture the most advanced chips."
- impossiblefork 2y ago
  It's a great company, but it's a basic technology firm, which is pretty typical for the kind of industry that have traditionally been viewed as sensible in Europe. Such industries are subject to business cycles, i.e. the classic problem with machine tools, so people in these businesses need to think differently about what is good and bad, and what is sensible. The companies that compete in AI are companies that use the products of the companies that use the products of these companies, and the foundation doesn't really have much to do with what's built on top of it. If we want microchip manufacturing the thing we'd build on top would probably be NXP, but I don't think we really want microchip manufacturing unless we want to do something special. I don't have a problem with what I hear about TSMCs prices, they sound alright. What's interesting to me would be if there was some effort to make European DL/floating point maths accelerators for sale to the general public, to rid of the world of NVIDIA's margins, so that more people can have access to such machines, and then presumably, once compute were cheaper it'd be easier to have a compute intensive AI firm in Europe.
- constantcrying 2y ago
  AI companies in the US are mostly startups. ASML goes back to Phillips, which is over a century old and has moved into semi conductors very early. What ASML does is push a the technological boundary of an industrial process, which requires enormous R&D. You can find many such companies in the EU. The EU wants large corporations to do innovation. The US allows startups to do that, the consequences are pretty obvious.
constantcrying 2y ago
>But the problem isn't regulations. The problem absolutely are nonsense. In the US and many other countries you can near instantly found a company, raise capital, hire staff and develop a product. Doing the equivalent in Germany will take you years. The regulatory burdens on the individual who wants to found something are immense, opaque, heavily gate kept and require detailed and nuanced understanding of the law. The EU and especially Germany does not want startups to exist, they want innovation to come from large multi national corporations. The consequence is that they are falling behind on every technological metric.

hot_gril 2y ago

What filereaper said. The taxes and labor regulations alone make the risk vs reward not make sense for tech startups, and that's without getting into explicit tech regulations.

impossiblefork 2y ago
The taxes are a huge problem. The labour regulations, I think less so. The taxes on wage income are why you can't get two European engineers for the price of one American engineer, and are I think, why there hasn't been a software industry exodus to European, or a European software explosion. If you could actually pay out what people bring in, I think we'd had an enormous software industry, because the jobs would have been so attractive. The typical European tax on wages isn't an obvious crisis when companies use capital, but when what's productive is labour itself, then it is.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > taxes are a huge problem. The labour regulations, I think less so I’d invert this. Taxes aren’t a huge issue for start-ups. Not being able to pivot by changing team composition is. Add to that the random EU-specific AI regulations, and it becomes a clearly second-tier place to launch from unless you have the political connections to land national champion status, e.g. Mistral.
  - hot_gril 2y ago
    I wouldn't say it's mainly the taxes either, except that every startup's lifeline is the potential of future acquisition, which taxation might hurt.

wormius 2y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASML_Holding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASML_Holding This is a very solid base to start from. "As of 2023 it is the largest supplier for the semiconductor industry and the sole supplier in the world of extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) photolithography machines that are required to manufacture the most advanced chips."

impossiblefork 2y ago
It's a great company, but it's a basic technology firm, which is pretty typical for the kind of industry that have traditionally been viewed as sensible in Europe. Such industries are subject to business cycles, i.e. the classic problem with machine tools, so people in these businesses need to think differently about what is good and bad, and what is sensible. The companies that compete in AI are companies that use the products of the companies that use the products of these companies, and the foundation doesn't really have much to do with what's built on top of it. If we want microchip manufacturing the thing we'd build on top would probably be NXP, but I don't think we really want microchip manufacturing unless we want to do something special. I don't have a problem with what I hear about TSMCs prices, they sound alright. What's interesting to me would be if there was some effort to make European DL/floating point maths accelerators for sale to the general public, to rid of the world of NVIDIA's margins, so that more people can have access to such machines, and then presumably, once compute were cheaper it'd be easier to have a compute intensive AI firm in Europe.
constantcrying 2y ago
AI companies in the US are mostly startups. ASML goes back to Phillips, which is over a century old and has moved into semi conductors very early. What ASML does is push a the technological boundary of an industrial process, which requires enormous R&D. You can find many such companies in the EU. The EU wants large corporations to do innovation. The US allows startups to do that, the consequences are pretty obvious.

constantcrying 2y ago

>But the problem isn't regulations. The problem absolutely are nonsense. In the US and many other countries you can near instantly found a company, raise capital, hire staff and develop a product. Doing the equivalent in Germany will take you years. The regulatory burdens on the individual who wants to found something are immense, opaque, heavily gate kept and require detailed and nuanced understanding of the law. The EU and especially Germany does not want startups to exist, they want innovation to come from large multi national corporations. The consequence is that they are falling behind on every technological metric.