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European AI. A playbook to own it
- BoorishBears 6mo agoInteresting reading this with > Tell HN: docker pull fails in spain due to football cloudflare block next to it on the front page
- tclancy 6mo agoOther than you seeing a thing you want to see, why? There’s a pretty well known story behind that. Also, this post was written by a mensch, so have some respect.
- BoorishBears 6mo agoI'd say that situation is representative of a very apropos mentality from a very apropos entity... but this reaction to even mentioning that is the most telling signal on if there's actually willpower to make what they're advocating for happen on the ground.
- rvnx 6mo ago[flagged]
- bartekpacia 6mo agoFortunately, U.S. startups never bullshit and posture to get VC money, and in the rare cases they do, it’s not posted to HN. Right?
- chihuahua 6mo agoIt sounds like you're basically saying that the post you responded to is correct.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- camillomiller 6mo agoGo back to your dystopia
- rvnx 6mo agoSomewhat doesn't change the reality how grants are attributed and what they are trying to do in this document. You can clearly see in my previous comment that they ask the government to subsidize their operations and to soften the copyright laws, etc. Though can may sound unpleasant, it's like this in Europe (and probably worldwide anyway, like any public policy influence). It doesn't mean it's right or wrong, but still it's 22 pages of lobbying with all the keywords to match the current EU policies. So I prefer to be direct about what it is.
- camillomiller 6mo agoI find it so funny that the people leading AI today have names that could be the characters of a bad scifi novel. Amodei (love of god) Altman (alternative to man?) Arthur Mensch fighting from the ethical side
- AIorNot 6mo agothis whole timeline feels like a Bad Cyberpunk novel, Trump, Musk etc
- fleroviumna 6mo ago[dead]
- spiderfarmer 6mo agoMistral is the only AI bot I haven’t blocked from my server.
- amarcheschi 6mo agoDo they respect robots.txt?
- kreyenborgi 6mo agoHow?
- dwedge 6mo agoI've tried Mistral a few times, at first it seemed promising (though lagging) but at some point it seems like they stopped focusing on AI and shifted their focus to being a mouthpiece for EU policy and pushing for regulation. I can't really take any of their announcements seriously anymore. A couple of weeks ago they were calling for a European AI tax to pay creatives.
- dr_dshiv 6mo ago“European AI tax to pay creatives” Love that idea.
- dwedge 6mo agoI mean we already pay a tax when buying phones or storage because it's assumed we'll use it for piracy so why not.
- touwer 6mo agoThey are making some very good specialised models, like Voxtral
- ks2048 6mo agoWhy do you say they "stopped focusing on AI"? I see a pretty consistent release of pretty good products - particularly in speech and OCR.
- dwedge 6mo agoI used their OCR against a few hundred page PDF that was printed text but missing the OCR. It cost me $5 and was useless, it did worse than tesseract. That's how all my experience with mistral is
- SyneRyder 6mo agoI used to use Mistral OCR, but found it was better just to write a program that sent the documents to Claude Sonnet to OCR instead. Claude is far better quality, better formatting and fewer errors. I'm also using Voxtral TTS to try to replace OpenAI. It "works", but I've had problems with volume levels being radically different between different audio chunks. It doesn't seem to "understand the full text" the way OpenAI's voice models do, which can be more expressive. Voxtral sometimes sounds robotic in the reading. And some Voxtral TTS output contains music in the background occasionally, which suggests their training corpus isn't that clean. Try generating a personalized news podcast, and the intro may occasionally sound like the music for BBC News underneath.... As for not focusing on AI, there's this interview in the Big Technology Podcast 2 months ago, where the Mistral CEO says their main focus is on helping companies fine-train models for internal use, over being a general model builder. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxUTdyEDpbU&t=1357s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxUTdyEDpbU&t=1357s
- __natty__ 6mo agoI like the "european technology" movement not because of any nationalist ideas, but because it stimulates technological innovation and creates a new dynamic.
- rjtavares 6mo agoIt's important to note that these efforts aren't nationalistic - they're multilateral. In fact, European nationalists are consistently trying to sabotage European efforts. On the bright side: people seem to be moving away from such nationalistic ideas. Here's to Orban being the first of many defeats for them in the near future.
- thrance 6mo ago"European nationalists" as in "nationalists which happen to reside in Europe", not "Chauvinistic European federalists", which feels like a rare breed.
- sixhobbits 6mo ago58 Minute reading time. I read the first dozen pages or so and I'm not sure what the goal of this thing is, why they wrote it, who they wrote it for? Is it aimed at European governments? Or companies? Or people? Or something else? > This playbook provides a clear, actionable framework to position Europe as that powerhouse, accelerating AI development and adoption, attracting and retaining top talent, simplifying regulation without sacrificing values, and mobilizing public and private investment to build homegrown AI infrastructure. Only with it, Europe can ensure AI is not only developed in Europe, but for Europe and on Europe’s terms. playbook for what? > This document is not a theoretical exercise. It is a practical playbook Seems quite theoretical? A lot of random statistics, and all the sections start with abstract empty claims in 'not x, y' slop format "Artificial intelligence is not an abstract promise. It is a tool that fulfills its potential when embedded in the real economy." I'd love an executive summary of this for anyone who has AI tokens to spend (I've got some other stuff to get done with what remains of my quota this week). I'm not saying this report is bad, I'm just saying it didn't do enough to convince me to read it, and it has some patterns that would make me guess it's bad.
- rvnx 6mo ago[dead]
- mhitza 6mo agoIndeed very slop-feeling "whitepaper", might as well be written by chatgpt/claude because it has the tropes. Multiple sections have expandable subsections for more details on proposals.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- hildeprand 6mo ago[dead]
- enejej 6mo agoIt’s a load of nonsense. They essentially want a bunch of stuff and most importantly funding from the EU and using the FOMO angle to get them to act. This of course is not on merit. They see that no other lab in Europe really exists and are trying to seize an open opportunity.
- simianwords 6mo agoMETA used to hire in Netherlands until it stopped and left. I wondered why and a few times I heard that it was because it was hard to be dynamic in the country with the stubborn labour laws. The anecdote confirms my own bias but there seems to be not much mention on encouraging risk taking allowing dynamic entrepreneurship in this playbook, which leads me to believe this is a non issue? But messagebird is another example.
- 59nadir 6mo ago> it was hard to be dynamic in the country with the stubborn labour laws It's hard to read this as anything other than "It's hard to treat your employees like shit when countries have strong labor laws and that just won't do for american megacorps".
- simianwords 6mo agoI feel like Europe needs to remove barriers and let people do things freely rather than stuff like "Empower AI students". Ambitious people will naturally find a way to get stuff done and you just have to allow it to happen and not get in the way. At least "EU AI talent visa" sounds like it can work by removing barriers to relocate.
- seabass-labrax 6mo agoI don't see the AI talent visa as a serious suggestion. There's already the Blue Card, which is pretty easy for software engineers to obtain; for an AI talent visa to be anything special, it would have to loosen the already fairly lax requirements. To manage to persuade the whole EU to create a special visa for an emerging field that doesn't even have commonly-agreed-upon qualifications would be a unrealistic feat when many EU member states are looking to close down immigration opportunities, not create them.
- phantomoc 6mo ago[dead]
- ForHackernews 6mo agoI don't understand why European providers can't just host open-weight models developed by the Chinese, or distill Google/OpenAI/Anthropic models to produce their own models on the the cheap. Nobody acts like you need to invent steel to have a steel mill.
- junofan 6mo agoI don’t know either, but playbook item #20 has: > The mechanism consists of a revenue-based levy applied to all commercial providers placing AI models on the market or putting them into service in Europe, reflecting their use of content publicly available online. This levy would apply equally to providers based abroad, creating a level playing field. The proceeds would flow into a central European fund dedicated to investing in new content creation, and supporting Europe's cultural sectors. Presumably Mistral is putting forth the most pro-AI position possible for the region. So it sounds like anyone doing what you described is at risk of a tax that will make their offerings uncompetitive. So why even bother?
- Barrin92 6mo agowhat's the point? The Chinese, Google and OpenAI are burning money and we get to use the service. Having AI providers locally barely creates any jobs, it's an easily substitutable service and it has (contrary to the claims by the AI crazies) very few national security implications. Steel is a great example because we don't pollute our rivers with steel mills any more either. As Milton Friedman said, if someone wants to give you steel and you give them green sheets of paper, be thankful, nothing's easier to make than paper. What are you losing, the bragging rights among nerds on the internet? Right now Americans are paying the energy bills, Sam Altman is paying for the compute, they make no money off it, and they're even publishing the models! So if push comes to shove, we can deploy them. But until then how is that not a great deal
- enaaem 6mo agoI postulate that if AI models get better, they also become more fungible. If you want to rule the world, you should make dumb software that takes time to learn. The world economy pretty much runs on MS Excel.
- a3w 6mo agoThe site starts with > The question is no longer whether Europe can compete, ... But it, too, do not ask myself this question any more. Since EU seems to have already lost completely. Even Proton's new local AI service uses Ollama, which was developed in USA and is pretty outclassed. Does HN say europe can do more than hope to catch up in five to ten years, if the race is still on then?
- philipallstar 6mo agoThe best the EU can do is things like Proton, which is to say pretty old, mature services that all the difficult innovation has been done on in the US, and all the risk-taking done there as well on what's a good idea and what's not, reimplemented in simpler forms and sold at a reasonable price. It's like how after patents expire, generic drugs can sometimes be produced very cheaply.
- 8593376393 6mo ago[dead]
- sva_ 6mo agoThere's this sentiment in Germany that if you can't make in industry, you work for the government or - even worse - become a politician. It seems like Mistral took that to the next level; they can't compete so they do lobbying instead. Being European, I love the idea of European AI labs. But I wish there was more competition. That being said, as a German for example, I can't think of an AI company successfully training a competitive foundation model here. The copyright mafia would take your investor's money before you could even finish the first training run (hyperbole.)
- taurath 6mo agoNobody can compete with trillions of dollars of capital if it’s a race for capital.
- jgalt212 6mo agoI'm not sure about that. Post GFC the ECB printed plenty of cash as well. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ECBASSETSW https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ECBASSETSW
- deaux 6mo agoZ.ai, Moonshot, Deepseek - which of these spent trillions? Their best models are much stronger than Mistral's, the first two have models that are competitive with the US frontier ones. Not hating on Mistral here, their latest Mistral Small 4 is quite capable and a very reasonable choice for its cost and size.
- martin-t 6mo agoIn that case, hopefully the copyright mafia will take the money from US and Chinese LLM companies and redistribute it to the people who did the actual work fueling the models, such as myself. I did not spend 10 years writing (A)GPL code for all of it to be stripped of its license, remixed and sold for profit. Of course in a truly just world, the LLM companies who took my code without permission would beg with offers of owning a share of them because if I didn't consent their models would have to be destroyed. Since my work is apparently so valuable that they just have to have it, it should count towards my retirement age too.
- mhitza 6mo agoReads like asking for a EU handout. It touches on some visible issues in the single market, but most of what I've seen is not warranted. Eg. minimum spending quotas for AI work/integration/research, using European models (basically today = use Mistral), or carving residency process exceptions for AI researchers.
- hobofan 6mo agoI'm a fan of Mistral, but this seems to be 80% "make Europe more startup-friendly in general" rather than anything specific to AI. Given how un-startup-driven adoption of new technologies usually happens in Europe, I don't see this playbook becoming a cornerstone of how AI adoption will pan out in Europe.
- sdevonoes 6mo agoCynical. Start by allowing remote positions in Mistral across Europe.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- rcarmo 6mo agoThat is an excellent point. They have shown zero interest in doing that so far.
- trvz 6mo agoI don't really care about the content, but European software is also when you switch to the tab the energy consumption of your MacBook quadruples due to some inane animations.
- zmmmmm 6mo agoThe glaring number to me is only 5% of VC funds vs 52% in the US. That's 10x more opportunity despite roughly comparable economies. As long as that is true, it seems like it will always be impossible to get an organic startup industry working in the EU. Any startup that is any good will almost certainly end up getting a round of investment from the US and most likely move their base of operations there. I wonder if recent US actions will start to influence this as there now appears to be more risk in sending your money to the US or founding your company there as a foreign entity than there used to be.
- enejej 6mo agoThe funding allocation is a reflection of different cultures really. I’m from the UK but there’s no way there’s the same density, drive, and hunger to take risk, to the extent that you find in US. Also there’s a lot more synergy in the US vs a fragmented Europe.
- zmmmmm 6mo agoYet the UK did produce Deepmind. Which you can look at both ways since it got gobbled up by Google. But it at least came from the UK. I assume the article excludes the UK, I feel like UK has much more of a startup and VC scene than Europe does and I wonder if that is part of the issue : if you do want to create a startup, the London is a better place than mainland Europe. So even startups that for whatever reason won't take US funding still land outside Europe.
- re-thc 6mo ago> Yet the UK did produce Deepmind That was a long time ago. That UK is not the UK of today.
- yobbo 6mo agoDeepmind was not a viable business at the time Google acquired it. Today, it is probably even less viable. It functions as R&D-lab for Google which has its own products and datacenters.
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- m3drano 6mo agoThe paper has plenty of things, but seems to me the gist of it is that they want to secure the public procurement cash flow in lieu of venture capital? I may be reading this wrong, but all the labels and normative proposals listed point to that.
- jamesblonde 6mo agoI lead a European owned and operated Data/AI company, Hopsworks. We are the only competitor to Databricks/Snowflake/etc based-in and from Europe. We can still compete, as we have a deep research/industry background (ex-MySQL and KTH folks). Crossing the chasm is harder from here. Even if you build a great product (we are best at real-time AI) - we had a paper at SIGMOD 2024 where we showed higher thoughput/lower latency by a factor of 4-40X Databricks, AWS Sagemaker, and GCP vertex - we lack the echo chamber. (Try the mental exercise where Databricks' peers acknowledge massive over-performance through a peer-reviewed paper and imagine how much noise it would generate). Still, we can replace our competitor at their largest European customer, Zalando, for real-time AI. But it's a much harder slog than it should be due to the 10X lower round sizes (due to 10X smaller VC fund sizes). European pension funds place way more money in US VC funds than in EU VC funds - that is self-defeating.
- miohtama 6mo agoThere cannot be echo chamber as long as entrepreneurship is not seen as generally acceptable in European culture
- shimman 6mo agoLooking at the US culture, it's not hard to see entrepreneurship as a societal disease. Let's not act like "entrepreneurship" is necessary at all to develop technology. Western governments simply have no ability to find their own destination as any attempt to get off the US big tech ramp comes with threats to destroy defense treaties, weapons contracts, and tariffs with their major ally. Hardly anything to do with "entrepreneurship" and more about the insidious nature of US imperialism and how damaging neoliberalism is to the world. Good on Europeans for rejecting this American blight.
- abletonlive 6mo ago> Looking at the US culture, it's not hard to see entrepreneurship as a societal disease. It's easy if you're in some nihilistic and cynical echochamber like reddit. For everybody else, entrepreneurship is still quite celebrated and seen as a positive for society.
- raincole 6mo ago> The question is no longer whether Europe can compete What a nice tagline lol. You really can read it both ways.
- outside1234 6mo agoWe also need to talk about work schedules. Nobody at Anthropic is taking a 5 week summer break or working a 35 hour week. Europe can be a top player in AI —- but there is a cost.
- LelouBil 6mo agoMaybe they should. Taking a break and looking at the direction AI is advancing won't hurt.
- esafak 6mo agoThey'd have to convince the Chinese to do the same.
- joe_mamba 6mo ago>Nobody at Anthropic is taking a 5 week summer break or working a 35 hour week The people working at Mistral, Expedition 33, or other top successful software coming out of the EU, most likely also aren't working only 35 hours/week either. In fact some probably squeeze some work on weekends too out of dedication and pressure to meet deadlines. In a lot of Austrian SW companies for example, have "all-in" contracts where you waive your rights to the scrutiny of the standard 38,5h/week in exchange for a "higher" salary with longer work hours and less time tracking. Similar cases in France I believe. The 35h/week European meme people here parrot, you mostly see only in civil servants, old established monopolistic companies with moats and strong unions, not in scrappy start-up trying to make it and fix a bug before release, or semiconductor companies fighting a tape-out. So no, work hours aren't what's limiting EU startups.
- mgrund 6mo agoThere is but I don’t think this is it. I’ve worked most of my career in US tech satellite offices and I have not experienced EU team members to be less productive than US team members, nor spend less time on work (if anything, more really since they also need to be available for US time zone overlap). It’s true there are chill jobs here, as there are in the US. But ambitious people tend to work as much as ambitious US people (and it’s really more like 40 hours work weeks - 39,5 where I live since lunch is not work time). But again, many are not really counting, it’s just a full time job. Vacations (typically 3 weeks summer holiday and additional weeks to distribute over the year) does create longer time on skeleton crew. Skilled tech labour is also cheaper so you can just hire more to make up for it.
- mstaoru 6mo agoSehr gut! I need to show it to my colleagues. Unfortunately half of them are on vacation currently and another half on sick leave. We decided to make a Teams call in August to discuss how to proceed with this.
- pu_pe 6mo agoIt seems every AI company eventually concludes that lobbying is required for them to operate. That suggests to me that they know they have no real moat.