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The article is about email. Europe could probably bring email "in-house". Large players like IONOS and OVH might help do it at scale. But what about AI? Soon a

by mg 1y ago

The article is about email. Europe could probably bring email "in-house". Large players like IONOS and OVH might help do it at scale. But what about AI? Soon all of our email will be pre-handled by our OpenAI assistant while we will be driven around by Waymo and a good part of our work is done by a Tesla humanoid robot. How can Europe catch up and do that in a sovereign way? For world-class AI, a country needs: 1 Photolithography 2 Wafers 3 GPUs 4 Software (SOTA Neural Networks) 5 Energy Components 2-5 seem not on the horizon on a world-class level in Europe. So Europe probably won't have the means to do AI "in-house" in the coming decades, right?

ricardobeat 1y ago
Photolithography is in the hands of Europe already, and that makes no difference. All that really matters at the moment is the software and where 'the cloud' resides. We already have AI in-house. Mistral is based in France, and their Le Chat platform hosted exclusively in the EU.
- mg 1y ago
  But does Mistral stand a chance to make a state of the art model? People will always want to use the best model. Like they use the best search engine. How would Mistral catch up with US companies, who spend tens of billions of dollars per year on improving their models? As far as I know, Mistral raised something like $1B so far.
- norman784 1y ago
  IIRC I read somewhere that ASML depends on some components provided by the US, if so, then it's not 100% in Europe hands yet.
  - guiraldelli 1y ago
    If nothing has changed in a few years, the dependency is only for the EUV machines, and that company was acquired by ASML. So keeping the company in USA is a favour they do to the country, not that they rely on it.
AureliusMA 1y ago
France has a lot of energy.
- wiether 1y ago
  And even more ideas, apparently!
cruzcampo 1y ago
[dead]
GardenLetter27 1y ago
[flagged]
- mschuster91 1y ago
  Well, we value the lives of our citizens and aren't willing to sacrifice them to further the development of hype technology. Tesla's "autopilot" alone is linked to at least fifty one fatalities [1]. It's fine for me if y'all decide that's the course to take, y'all voted for this after all, but here in Europe, we prefer doing things the right way. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tesla_Autopilot_crashes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tesla_Autopilot_crashe...
  - cmenge 1y ago
    Yeah, one fatality for every 7.4m miles vs. 0.9m when driven by humans
    - mschuster91 1y ago
      We can hold humans accountable though. An AI driving tool, we cannot, not without serious reforms in the entire issue of "corporate veils" - when a human gets behind the wheel despite being knowingly unwell to drive, we lock the human up. With a corporate made driving tool, the insurance pays some money in damages and that's it, no human gets any kind of consequence (at least if there was no intent involved like with Volkswagen's emissions scandal). And we can (and do) make our cities safer to reduce road fatalities and injuries... Germany for example, even though it has Autobahns with unlimited speed, has about ~2800 fatalities per year on a population of about 84 million people. The Netherlands have ~700 road fatalities a year on 18 million people. The US in contrast has ~40.000 fatalities on a population of 340 million - about 4 times the fatality rate of Germany and the Netherlands. And yes, I am comparing based on populations because the availability of decent public transport is key in reducing vehicular accidents.
      - jstimpfle 1y ago
        That sounds really weird. Why are you keen to hold a human accountable? In my book it's an improvement that autonomous driving is significantly lowering the fatality rate (and we can expect it to decrease further), while simultaneously lowering the direct accountability of single humans. I wouldn't wish anyone the misfortune of being involved in a fatality. The less involvement the better.
guappa 1y ago
There's chip manufacturing in europe. Is it on par with taiwan? No, like everywhere else it is not on par with that. Also plenty of software developers. And USA just hires indians and europeans, no reason europe can't hire indians too.
- glimshe 1y ago
  Salaries in Europe are just a fraction of what you can get in the US. The quality of life for a good Software Engineer in most of the US is very high. As a foreign-born Software Engineer living in the US, I'd never trade it for Europe during my working years (nothing against Europe in particular).
  - LunaSea 1y ago
    The political situation might change this perspective for some engineers.
    - saubeidl 1y ago
      It has for me - I've moved back to Europe from the US. Do I make less money? Sure. Do I feel much safer and enjoy a much higher quality of life? Yup.
  - guappa 1y ago
    Sure much more money but: No time to enjoy said money No time with your family Extremely easy to get laid off If you are laid off, all your savings can easily be used up if you need healthcare, sending you into permanent poverty. If you consider that a better quality of life… sure… but not everyone likes betting their existence on the lottery. edit: forgot to mention, if you get laid off you also get quickly deported.
    - glimshe 1y ago
      I had plenty of time and leisure activities throughout my US career. Plenty of money for hobbies, toys and a house. I had the deportation risk while waiting for the Greencard. But I'd happily go back to my birth country with a ton of money if I was deported vs my friends who tried Europe and went back home (due to low Software wages and underemployment in Europe) with nothing to show for it. The vast majority of my US-born and foreign friends in the software field are doing great financially. A few got laid off but had good savings and were eventually hired elsewhere. Even the ones in the West Coast. They had to buy small houses (like the ones in Europe) but they got to do it anyway. I have a few friends who came from the richer parts of Europe. A handful went back, but not most. The ones from the poorer parts of Europe are certainly not going back. Europe is great for the rich, though. Thus a good place to retire if you can afford it. But the same can be said about many parts of the US, so ultimately it's a matter of taste.
seydor 1y ago
BYD and VW are outselling tesla in europe. Just like DJI drones, robots will probably be chinese because they build them faster. Any country that wants sovereignity must control the software , but europe does very little to grow a software ecosystem, other than continuously building obstacles for it.
- liversage 1y ago
  I get the impression that you think VW is Chinese, or am I misunderstanding your comment? VW is the world's largest auto maker and it's German.
saubeidl 1y ago
https://phys.org/news/2025-06-wendelstein-nuclear-fusion.html https://phys.org/news/2025-06-wendelstein-nuclear-fusion.htm... Europe is leading the world in Energy, by far.
- mg 1y ago
  Certainly not in terms of electricity generation: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-generation?tab=chart&country=IND~USA~CHN~OWID_EU27 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-generation?ta...
- hoseyor 1y ago
  You are not actually leading until you win/achieve something. Europe has severed itself from major sources of the fundamental driver of civilization, energy, it has bet on “renewable energy” in reckless ways, which was demonstrated by the small black swan event energy grid collapse just mere weeks ago. Germany has totally abandoned nuclear energy and has no real alternatives as it imports the majority of its energy and all its renewable energy sources are subpar, at best, and are unsustainable without massively distorting government command economy subsidies keeping afloat what is essentially a Ponzi scheme with decreasing real marginal returns. Germany, the engine of Europe, which keeps the whole EU boondoggle afloat has an avg of €0.44/kwh electricity prices. That does not really indicate energy leadership. Maybe Germany can get productive fusion energy online, but it also does not solve the deeper issue of a political system and control mechanism that is self-harming. It’s the near future: Germany has successfully provided operational fusion energy. German politics and psychological control will all the sudden just give up on blaming, punishing, and hating its own people? Everyone in Germany gets free AC and free unlimited heating? Free cars and free transportation because fusion basically nullifies the cost of energy? No, the German/EU political class loathes its own people and is recreating aristocracy, which for its own purposes relies on control and suppression of the masses. If anything the EU Lords would use that de facto unlimited energy to create unlimited AI surveillance and thought-crime robot armies to control the serfs.
- roenxi 1y ago
  It would be powerfully symbolic of the state of Europe if their energy sector was best summarised as planning to - at some unspecified point in the future - generate useful energy.
rockskon 1y ago
But I don't want AI to summarize my email. I want to read my email without a summarization layer.
ringeryless 1y ago
i remain unconvinced that anyone needs to "catch up" in any so-called AI race (to the bottom, IMO) dodging a bullet is a thing, as popular as everything AI seems on HN
audunw 1y ago
When it comes to chip manufacturing, no single country has it all in-house. Neither US, nor Taiwan, nor China can make state of the art chips without machines, materials, chemicals and support from a bunch of other countries. For personal assistant AI it seems to me that improvements in efficiency will make this a non-issue. We’re able to squeeze more and more out of smaller language models. Eventually the models that require 100s of GBs in GPUs and giant datacenters will not be able to provide enough additional capabilities to justify their cost. Most tasks will run on-device with 10s of GBs. Don’t know if there’s hope of state of the art CPUs, GPUs and/or NPUs being designed and manufactured in Europe. It has a lot of the expertise. Imagination Technologies and ARM designs GPUs in Europe. But the scale is lacking
ben_w 1y ago
> How can Europe catch up and do that in a sovereign way? Europe, or the EU? Because DeepMind, despite being owned by Google, was started in and still has HQ in the UK. Also, given Musk burned his bridges with Brazil, most of Europe, then the US Dems, Canada, SA, and now the US Reps, I don't see him going anywhere any more. Even with his personality aside, Tesla would have an uphill battle getting people to trust that their Optimus won't get hacked and turn into Mr Stabby The 100% Deniable Robot Assassin.
ta12653421 1y ago
Not true: E.g. we have Wacker Chemie AG, a global and major producer of wavers (Id guess also for TSMC). There is a lot of stuff here - so we have at least 1) and 2), which is the foundation for the rest. Regarding 5 - Europeans are working on it

by mg 1y ago

ricardobeat 1y ago

Photolithography is in the hands of Europe already, and that makes no difference. All that really matters at the moment is the software and where 'the cloud' resides. We already have AI in-house. Mistral is based in France, and their Le Chat platform hosted exclusively in the EU.

mg 1y ago
But does Mistral stand a chance to make a state of the art model? People will always want to use the best model. Like they use the best search engine. How would Mistral catch up with US companies, who spend tens of billions of dollars per year on improving their models? As far as I know, Mistral raised something like $1B so far.
norman784 1y ago
IIRC I read somewhere that ASML depends on some components provided by the US, if so, then it's not 100% in Europe hands yet.
- guiraldelli 1y ago
  If nothing has changed in a few years, the dependency is only for the EUV machines, and that company was acquired by ASML. So keeping the company in USA is a favour they do to the country, not that they rely on it.

AureliusMA 1y ago

France has a lot of energy.

wiether 1y ago
And even more ideas, apparently!

cruzcampo 1y ago

[dead]

GardenLetter27 1y ago

[flagged]

mschuster91 1y ago
Well, we value the lives of our citizens and aren't willing to sacrifice them to further the development of hype technology. Tesla's "autopilot" alone is linked to at least fifty one fatalities [1]. It's fine for me if y'all decide that's the course to take, y'all voted for this after all, but here in Europe, we prefer doing things the right way. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tesla_Autopilot_crashes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tesla_Autopilot_crashe...
- cmenge 1y ago
  Yeah, one fatality for every 7.4m miles vs. 0.9m when driven by humans
  - mschuster91 1y ago
    We can hold humans accountable though. An AI driving tool, we cannot, not without serious reforms in the entire issue of "corporate veils" - when a human gets behind the wheel despite being knowingly unwell to drive, we lock the human up. With a corporate made driving tool, the insurance pays some money in damages and that's it, no human gets any kind of consequence (at least if there was no intent involved like with Volkswagen's emissions scandal). And we can (and do) make our cities safer to reduce road fatalities and injuries... Germany for example, even though it has Autobahns with unlimited speed, has about ~2800 fatalities per year on a population of about 84 million people. The Netherlands have ~700 road fatalities a year on 18 million people. The US in contrast has ~40.000 fatalities on a population of 340 million - about 4 times the fatality rate of Germany and the Netherlands. And yes, I am comparing based on populations because the availability of decent public transport is key in reducing vehicular accidents.
    - jstimpfle 1y ago
      That sounds really weird. Why are you keen to hold a human accountable? In my book it's an improvement that autonomous driving is significantly lowering the fatality rate (and we can expect it to decrease further), while simultaneously lowering the direct accountability of single humans. I wouldn't wish anyone the misfortune of being involved in a fatality. The less involvement the better.

guappa 1y ago

There's chip manufacturing in europe. Is it on par with taiwan? No, like everywhere else it is not on par with that. Also plenty of software developers. And USA just hires indians and europeans, no reason europe can't hire indians too.

glimshe 1y ago
Salaries in Europe are just a fraction of what you can get in the US. The quality of life for a good Software Engineer in most of the US is very high. As a foreign-born Software Engineer living in the US, I'd never trade it for Europe during my working years (nothing against Europe in particular).
- LunaSea 1y ago
  The political situation might change this perspective for some engineers.
  - saubeidl 1y ago
    It has for me - I've moved back to Europe from the US. Do I make less money? Sure. Do I feel much safer and enjoy a much higher quality of life? Yup.
- guappa 1y ago
  Sure much more money but: No time to enjoy said money No time with your family Extremely easy to get laid off If you are laid off, all your savings can easily be used up if you need healthcare, sending you into permanent poverty. If you consider that a better quality of life… sure… but not everyone likes betting their existence on the lottery. edit: forgot to mention, if you get laid off you also get quickly deported.
  - glimshe 1y ago
    I had plenty of time and leisure activities throughout my US career. Plenty of money for hobbies, toys and a house. I had the deportation risk while waiting for the Greencard. But I'd happily go back to my birth country with a ton of money if I was deported vs my friends who tried Europe and went back home (due to low Software wages and underemployment in Europe) with nothing to show for it. The vast majority of my US-born and foreign friends in the software field are doing great financially. A few got laid off but had good savings and were eventually hired elsewhere. Even the ones in the West Coast. They had to buy small houses (like the ones in Europe) but they got to do it anyway. I have a few friends who came from the richer parts of Europe. A handful went back, but not most. The ones from the poorer parts of Europe are certainly not going back. Europe is great for the rich, though. Thus a good place to retire if you can afford it. But the same can be said about many parts of the US, so ultimately it's a matter of taste.

seydor 1y ago

BYD and VW are outselling tesla in europe. Just like DJI drones, robots will probably be chinese because they build them faster. Any country that wants sovereignity must control the software , but europe does very little to grow a software ecosystem, other than continuously building obstacles for it.

liversage 1y ago
I get the impression that you think VW is Chinese, or am I misunderstanding your comment? VW is the world's largest auto maker and it's German.

saubeidl 1y ago

https://phys.org/news/2025-06-wendelstein-nuclear-fusion.html https://phys.org/news/2025-06-wendelstein-nuclear-fusion.htm... Europe is leading the world in Energy, by far.

mg 1y ago
Certainly not in terms of electricity generation: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-generation?tab=chart&country=IND~USA~CHN~OWID_EU27 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-generation?ta...
hoseyor 1y ago
You are not actually leading until you win/achieve something. Europe has severed itself from major sources of the fundamental driver of civilization, energy, it has bet on “renewable energy” in reckless ways, which was demonstrated by the small black swan event energy grid collapse just mere weeks ago. Germany has totally abandoned nuclear energy and has no real alternatives as it imports the majority of its energy and all its renewable energy sources are subpar, at best, and are unsustainable without massively distorting government command economy subsidies keeping afloat what is essentially a Ponzi scheme with decreasing real marginal returns. Germany, the engine of Europe, which keeps the whole EU boondoggle afloat has an avg of €0.44/kwh electricity prices. That does not really indicate energy leadership. Maybe Germany can get productive fusion energy online, but it also does not solve the deeper issue of a political system and control mechanism that is self-harming. It’s the near future: Germany has successfully provided operational fusion energy. German politics and psychological control will all the sudden just give up on blaming, punishing, and hating its own people? Everyone in Germany gets free AC and free unlimited heating? Free cars and free transportation because fusion basically nullifies the cost of energy? No, the German/EU political class loathes its own people and is recreating aristocracy, which for its own purposes relies on control and suppression of the masses. If anything the EU Lords would use that de facto unlimited energy to create unlimited AI surveillance and thought-crime robot armies to control the serfs.
roenxi 1y ago
It would be powerfully symbolic of the state of Europe if their energy sector was best summarised as planning to - at some unspecified point in the future - generate useful energy.

rockskon 1y ago

But I don't want AI to summarize my email. I want to read my email without a summarization layer.

ringeryless 1y ago

i remain unconvinced that anyone needs to "catch up" in any so-called AI race (to the bottom, IMO) dodging a bullet is a thing, as popular as everything AI seems on HN

audunw 1y ago

When it comes to chip manufacturing, no single country has it all in-house. Neither US, nor Taiwan, nor China can make state of the art chips without machines, materials, chemicals and support from a bunch of other countries. For personal assistant AI it seems to me that improvements in efficiency will make this a non-issue. We’re able to squeeze more and more out of smaller language models. Eventually the models that require 100s of GBs in GPUs and giant datacenters will not be able to provide enough additional capabilities to justify their cost. Most tasks will run on-device with 10s of GBs. Don’t know if there’s hope of state of the art CPUs, GPUs and/or NPUs being designed and manufactured in Europe. It has a lot of the expertise. Imagination Technologies and ARM designs GPUs in Europe. But the scale is lacking

ben_w 1y ago

> How can Europe catch up and do that in a sovereign way? Europe, or the EU? Because DeepMind, despite being owned by Google, was started in and still has HQ in the UK. Also, given Musk burned his bridges with Brazil, most of Europe, then the US Dems, Canada, SA, and now the US Reps, I don't see him going anywhere any more. Even with his personality aside, Tesla would have an uphill battle getting people to trust that their Optimus won't get hacked and turn into Mr Stabby The 100% Deniable Robot Assassin.

ta12653421 1y ago

Not true: E.g. we have Wacker Chemie AG, a global and major producer of wavers (Id guess also for TSMC). There is a lot of stuff here - so we have at least 1) and 2), which is the foundation for the rest. Regarding 5 - Europeans are working on it