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These are just signs of this market maturing. For a lot of business customers, EU based hosting is not optional. That includes models. Routing requests via API

These are just signs of this market maturing. For a lot of business customers, EU based hosting is not optional. That includes models. Routing requests via API endpoints in the US is not really acceptable. And anything involving privacy sensitive data of course needs to be handled properly. Sam Altman pinky swearing to be nice doesn't quite cut it in terms of hard guarantees. EU based legal entities and strong compliance with local laws with some hard SLAs and contractual guarantees is not going to be optional for liability reasons. Provenance of models, their training data, and exact ways they have been instructed to act are also not just nice to haves. I expect non EU jurisdictions are eventually going to be similarly picky about their AI suppliers and I expect all the big tech providers to adapt to local markets just like they did with cloud infrastructure. I don't have much experience with Mistral yet. But I may need to get my hands dirty to be able to sell this to some of our customers. We have a few more picky customers in Germany.

alkonaut 6mo ago
> We have a few more picky customers in Germany. Describe making business in Europe with one evergreen sentence
- askonomm 6mo ago
  Because companies here actively want to avoid breaking the law, as opposed to the U.S where breaking the law is just a matter of paying some $ to the grifter in chief? I always find it funny when Europeans being proactive about that sort of stuff is somehow a bad thing from Americans point of view. Like wanting decent human rights and not having to bend over to megacorps is something we should not have. Though, if the Americans in question just want to do their grifting in EU, it makes sense why they are upset at that, I guess, because it limits their grifting opportunities.
  - joe_mamba 6mo ago
    >Because companies here actively want to avoid breaking the law Haha, yeah sure. What other fairy tales you gonna tells us next? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens#2005_and_continuing:_worldwide_bribery_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens#2005_and_continuing:_w... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirecard_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirecard_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parmalat_bankruptcy_timeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parmalat_bankruptcy_timeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus#Bribery_allegations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus#Bribery_allegations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CumEx-Files https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CumEx-Files https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lafarge_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lafarge_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizergate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizergate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ING_Group#Money_laundering_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ING_Group#Money_laundering_cas... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_Holdings#Corruption_allegations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_Holdings#Corruptio...
    - deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
    - watwut 6mo ago
      Yes, European companies break the law too. However, the comment this was about literally mocked the companies that are actively trying to follow the law. So yes, such companies exist and plenty of people see their existence as a good thing rather then something to mock.
      - jgwil2 6mo ago
        That comment mocked German customers; it didn't mention companies at all.
        Mashimo 6mo ago
        I read it like the customers where German based companies.
        rat9988 6mo ago
        Obviously B2B given the context
      - mothballed 6mo ago
        Law has no virtue in and of itself.
        21asdffdsa12 6mo ago
        It also ultimately a expression of might makes right (sad as this is) and as the current culture supports a decline of western might, it also undoes the law - first international, than domestic. We simply decided to burden our might with these restriction fictions, others feel not at all compelled to follow. I expect to see further selling out of these laws, as the economic prosperity declines. I can perfectly see german law limiting german companies from developing and selling AI products, while at the same time allowing us companies for a "pay our retires and pension-plans" kickback.
  - lo_zamoyski 6mo ago
    > companies here actively want to avoid breaking the law This is hilarious. This reminds me of Soviet propaganda. "No, there was no Chernobyl disaster. Please disregard the corpses. Yes, the centrally-planned economy is doing fantastically, better than expected. Reports of famines and shortages are imperialist propaganda." (Mind you, the Soviets are not alone here, but the blatant chutzpah of Soviet propaganda is perhaps more conspicuous to the Western eye than the Western varieties of PR and psychological manipulation.)
  - owlcompliance 6mo ago
    [flagged]
    - Ylpertnodi 6mo ago
      Paris was a shithole 40 years ago, too. It's only free speech if the .gov says so.p Rapists get set free in all countries all the time.
philipallstar 6mo ago
> For a lot of business customers, EU based hosting is not optional They still use US clouds that can have information pulled by the US government.
- master-lincoln 6mo ago
  We should forbid that if customer PII is involved
  - philipallstar 6mo ago
    Companies can set whatever rules they like.
- hsuduebc2 6mo ago
  This is changing somehow. At least on a surface. For example Amazon have created European subsidiary completely managed by Europeans under European company thus under it's local jurisdiction.
  - FpUser 6mo ago
    Unless it is air gapped which it is not there is no way to protect Amazon's developed and owned software stack from reporting back to headquarters.
    - cbg0 6mo ago
      Sure there is: contracts, laws and prison time can ensure that doesn't happen.
      - overfeed 6mo ago
        The European leaders would have have no say in it. If the software from Seattle is designed to covertly exfiltrate information, they won't even know it. Even if they review the individual code changes, it can be an obfuscated attack similar to XZ where the code itself is clean, but not so much for the network fabric firmware binary test data.
Eridrus 6mo ago
You can get the frontier models hosted in Stockholm & Ireland: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/bedrock/latest/userguide/model-card-anthropic-claude-opus-4-7.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/bedrock/latest/userguide/model-c... There's probably a very good business to be made of bringing close to frontier knowledge and finetuning recipes and infrastructure to enterprises that cannot hire that talent. But that's largely not a business that is going to be of a lot of interest to technologists as consumers.

alkonaut 6mo ago

> We have a few more picky customers in Germany. Describe making business in Europe with one evergreen sentence

askonomm 6mo ago
Because companies here actively want to avoid breaking the law, as opposed to the U.S where breaking the law is just a matter of paying some $ to the grifter in chief? I always find it funny when Europeans being proactive about that sort of stuff is somehow a bad thing from Americans point of view. Like wanting decent human rights and not having to bend over to megacorps is something we should not have. Though, if the Americans in question just want to do their grifting in EU, it makes sense why they are upset at that, I guess, because it limits their grifting opportunities.
- joe_mamba 6mo ago
  >Because companies here actively want to avoid breaking the law Haha, yeah sure. What other fairy tales you gonna tells us next? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens#2005_and_continuing:_worldwide_bribery_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens#2005_and_continuing:_w... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirecard_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirecard_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parmalat_bankruptcy_timeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parmalat_bankruptcy_timeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus#Bribery_allegations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus#Bribery_allegations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CumEx-Files https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CumEx-Files https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lafarge_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lafarge_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizergate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizergate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ING_Group#Money_laundering_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ING_Group#Money_laundering_cas... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_Holdings#Corruption_allegations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_Holdings#Corruptio...
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - watwut 6mo ago
    Yes, European companies break the law too. However, the comment this was about literally mocked the companies that are actively trying to follow the law. So yes, such companies exist and plenty of people see their existence as a good thing rather then something to mock.
    - jgwil2 6mo ago
      That comment mocked German customers; it didn't mention companies at all.
      - Mashimo 6mo ago
        I read it like the customers where German based companies.
      - rat9988 6mo ago
        Obviously B2B given the context
    - mothballed 6mo ago
      Law has no virtue in and of itself.
      - 21asdffdsa12 6mo ago
        It also ultimately a expression of might makes right (sad as this is) and as the current culture supports a decline of western might, it also undoes the law - first international, than domestic. We simply decided to burden our might with these restriction fictions, others feel not at all compelled to follow. I expect to see further selling out of these laws, as the economic prosperity declines. I can perfectly see german law limiting german companies from developing and selling AI products, while at the same time allowing us companies for a "pay our retires and pension-plans" kickback.
- lo_zamoyski 6mo ago
  > companies here actively want to avoid breaking the law This is hilarious. This reminds me of Soviet propaganda. "No, there was no Chernobyl disaster. Please disregard the corpses. Yes, the centrally-planned economy is doing fantastically, better than expected. Reports of famines and shortages are imperialist propaganda." (Mind you, the Soviets are not alone here, but the blatant chutzpah of Soviet propaganda is perhaps more conspicuous to the Western eye than the Western varieties of PR and psychological manipulation.)
- owlcompliance 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  - Ylpertnodi 6mo ago
    Paris was a shithole 40 years ago, too. It's only free speech if the .gov says so.p Rapists get set free in all countries all the time.

philipallstar 6mo ago

> For a lot of business customers, EU based hosting is not optional They still use US clouds that can have information pulled by the US government.

master-lincoln 6mo ago
We should forbid that if customer PII is involved
- philipallstar 6mo ago
  Companies can set whatever rules they like.
hsuduebc2 6mo ago
This is changing somehow. At least on a surface. For example Amazon have created European subsidiary completely managed by Europeans under European company thus under it's local jurisdiction.
- FpUser 6mo ago
  Unless it is air gapped which it is not there is no way to protect Amazon's developed and owned software stack from reporting back to headquarters.
  - cbg0 6mo ago
    Sure there is: contracts, laws and prison time can ensure that doesn't happen.
    - overfeed 6mo ago
      The European leaders would have have no say in it. If the software from Seattle is designed to covertly exfiltrate information, they won't even know it. Even if they review the individual code changes, it can be an obfuscated attack similar to XZ where the code itself is clean, but not so much for the network fabric firmware binary test data.

Eridrus 6mo ago

You can get the frontier models hosted in Stockholm & Ireland: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/bedrock/latest/userguide/model-card-anthropic-claude-opus-4-7.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/bedrock/latest/userguide/model-c... There's probably a very good business to be made of bringing close to frontier knowledge and finetuning recipes and infrastructure to enterprises that cannot hire that talent. But that's largely not a business that is going to be of a lot of interest to technologists as consumers.