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> what is keeping them back, though: Money? Compute? Skills? Training data? All of the above and more. Everything holding Mistral back is the same thing that h

• dash2 5mo ago
  >The average EU citizen can barely communicate with their neighbor in a common language beyond the level of a toddler (english fluency is massively overstated by Americans who only experience tourist capitals). Not true in my experience: even German waiters in small towns tend to have pretty fluent English.
  • CalRobert 5mo ago
    It varies a lot. Germany is pretty strong in English, and the Netherlands next door is exceptional, but as you go south to Italy, etc English proficiency weakens. Edit: more broadly, there’s just more friction when people aren’t in their first language. I know I hesitate to bring up some things, say hi to strangers, try making a joke, etc because the cost of talking is just… higher.
  • pembrook 5mo ago
    Was just driving around medium and small-ish towns in Bavaria. This was not my experience at all. The German speaking members of our group had to order food for us in most restaurants. And most locals aren’t waiters in restaurants.
• Shitty-kitty 5mo ago
  You say that as if the American version of maximalist Capitalism is good or desirable to most people. Personally, I would much rather have good public pensions and health-care, than A.I agents.
  • pembrook 5mo ago
    This has nothing to do with it. The US also has public pensions (social security payouts rival or beat many EU countries) with dramatically better tax free private options on top. Also, the US has free healthcare (Medicare and Medicaid) for roughly 50% of its population. Expanding that to 100% doesn’t suddenly make them a bad country to do business in. You think OpenAI is going to close up shop and move to Mexico if the US expands single payer healthcare? That would actually make it even easier for businesses to operate in the US!
    • Shitty-kitty 5mo ago
      Social Security and Medicare are vastly inferior to their European counterparts. Medicaid is an absolute disaster and a large number of doctors and health facilities will not even accept it.
      • pembrook 5mo ago
        Not true in the case of average social security payouts. But again, this argument is a total derailing of this thread and addresses none of my points. Explain to me how expanding US single payer healthcare suddenly makes the US a worse place to do business in than Europe? Companies would love not having to deal with the complexities of 401ks and employer health plans.
        • Shitty-kitty 5mo ago
          You must have misunderstood me. I never argued that US single payer healthcare would be bad, just that one based on expanding medicaid bottom-rung insurance, would not be adequate.
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• _fizz_buzz_ 5mo ago
  > 2. Talent & compute: due to #1, Silicon Valley can outbid Europe for the best talent and hardware. Watch an OpenAI launch video and listen to all the European accents. There is definitely a lot of truth to that. Maybe a bit of an arbitrary measure, but these are the nationalites of the people that wrote the "Attention is all you need" paper. Pretty revealing I find: Ashish Vaswani: India Niki Parmar: India Jakob Uszkoreit: Germany Llion Jones: Wales (UK) Aidan Gomez: Canada Łukasz Kaiser: Poland Illia Polosukhin: Ukraine Noam Shazeer: USA
  • snowpid 5mo ago
    Yes that was 2018. Things vastly deteriorated in the US.
• PeterStuer 5mo ago
  1 and 2 are the same. Infinite money without barely any consequence because of 'reserve currency' privilege. To compete with that, the EU can't nuke the dollar because it would be suicide given the Eurodollar realities, and they can't anchor EU ip and talent because our politicians are too intertwined with globalist ideology and capital.
  • snowpid 5mo ago
    "they can't anchor EU ip and talent because our politicians are too intertwined with globalist ideology and capital." You want to force staying in the EU?
    • PeterStuer 5mo ago
      You think other regions do not anchor strategic industries? The EU is extremely lax in this regard.
      • snowpid 5mo ago
        so why do you use the term globalist? Most talent is globalist anyway.
• WhyComboNadir 5mo ago
  re: #4 Maybe it’s easier if you grow up in the system and know how to navigate the written and unwritten rules, but as a dual Canadian-American who recently gained Austrian citizenship, the regulatory friction is absolutely real. I decided to launch a new venture through an Austrian GmbH. There are supposedly streamlined paths for local residents, but I had to go through the standard corporate pipeline. I spent three months fighting a bizarre catch-22 between my notary (who cost €3k+) and the bank. To open the account, I had to prove I deposited €10k in capital. But I couldn't make the deposit without an active bank account. On top of that, the bank's compliance team kept arbitrarily canceling my application due to "incorrect answers"... refusing to tell me what the errors actually were and forcing me to restart the entire process ab initio. I finally just gave up. I wrote off the €3,000 notary fee and €1,000 in registered office costs as a sunk cost, and incorporated a US LLC instead. It took under 10 minutes, no notary, fees of $25 since I did it myself, plus another 20 minutes to open the business bank account. There was no commercial reason to choose Austria; it was purely sentimental. My ancestors were entrepreneurs in Linz and Vienna, and I loved the idea of renewing that legacy. But the sheer weight of the bureaucracy managed to kill about 99% of the early-stage startup enthusiasm you normally rely on to get a new project off the ground.
  • mike_hearn 5mo ago
    That catch-22 is supposed to be broken by the bank. It's a two phase commit where you open the account in a special state where you can only deposit the capital. Then the bank gives you evidence you've done so, you take that to the notary and open the company, then send the evidence you've done that back to the bank to convert it into a full account. It's a bizarre system that Switzerland uses too. I've done it twice. Unfortunately the German speaking world has a lot of rules that are trying to eliminate all risk for investors and employees. The GmbH/AG capital requirements are just the start. The next fun thing you might have encountered, at least in Switzerland, are rules that literally say your company's assets can't fall below 50% of your initial capitalization. If it does you're supposed to raise funds or make more investment of your own private capital and this rule pierces the usual liability requirements. Even more fun: it turns out that this law isn't actually enforced and locals regularly ignore it. But bad accountants won't tell you that. They'll just inform you of the law when you do your yearly accounts. Then you have wealth taxes that cover the valuation of a startup as if it were a cash position. So if you raise $100M in investor funding then whatever shares you have left over are considered to be liquid assets you can offload at will, and are wealth taxed as such. The fact that the shares don't trade in a liquid market is irrelevant to the tax authorities. In Zürich at least that got patched by the local tax office deciding that startup shares aren't counted for the wealth tax, but this just means you have to be able to convince the tax authority that your company is a startup. The way they determine this is more or less just the opinion of whoever at the tax office assesses your case. Does it sound "startuppy" enough? Fixing this stuff isn't hard, but it never gets fixed because European politics is both quite stagnant and dominated by people who view hostility to business as a virtue signal. They don't want to fix it because they think businesses are sort of like oil fields. They just exist, lying around naturally, and the only question is how to maximally exploit them.
• cj00 5mo ago
  > 4. Regulatory disadvantages: In everything from company regs, employee regs, unions, privacy regs, data portability regs, etc. Agreed. My own anecdote: my company is global and for the past 6 months, we've been working on getting regulatory and legal approval for an LLM-based feature. The initial proposals of going live in all of our markets have been pared back to exclude Europe altogether due to the regulatory environment. When I took part in company-wide gen AI councils that reviewed new product rollouts, it seemed like there was a definite hesitation from higher ups from pushing out any leading edge features to European markets. And it's not that the regulations would necessarily block these features from going live but that they'd increase implementation costs to the point where it wouldn't be worth it.
• Fnoord 5mo ago
  > European money is vacuumed out of the private sector into state pension funds and dumped into low yielding government bonds. Which countries do that? The ones in NL actually invest in US big tech. Once Europe stops investing in USA, Europe will be better able to compete. > Talent & compute: due to #1, Silicon Valley can outbid Europe for the best talent and hardware. Watch an OpenAI launch video and listen to all the European accents. That just denotes European students are high quality. Brain drain is happening due to bullying and fascism. The extend of longterm danage of current administration is unclear. > Local market fragmentation: Europe is a collection of countries that pretend to work together while not even having a unified capital market. The average EU citizen can barely communicate with their neighbor in a common language beyond the level of a toddler (english fluency is massively overstated by Americans who only experience tourist capitals). Bollocks. I have been in Berlin and Munich various times past decades, and people there speak English very well. Nowadays, translation is a profession which got hit by the AI club. The people in the rural areas don't have to work together with other people from rural areas. They just need websites and tooling in their native language, or a major language. Case in point: the French company Mistral has Dutch company ASML has one of their major investors. If you go to Eindhoven area (Netherlands mini SV called Brainport Eindhoven), you get away with English perfectly fine, and there too you will hear all kind if accents.
  • pembrook 5mo ago
    > Which countries do that? Every single one invests in government bonds with a large allocation. Aside from the pure ponzi scheme ones with no actual fund where its money in -> money out. Also, if Europe stopped investing in US equities their pension insolvency problem would get about 2-3X worse given US equities have far exceeded EU equity returns over the past 20 years. > Brain drain is happening due to bullying and fascism. The extend of longterm danage of current administration is unclear. Huh? Did you even see the headline of the 1991 article I linked? Brain drain has been happening because of everything I listed which has been true for decades. Europe couldn't come up with a relevant company in PCs, Operating Systems, Internet 1.0, Social media, Mobile, AI, etc. None of it is due to the current administration. > Bollocks. I have been in Berlin and Munich various times past decades, and people there speak English very well. Yes, and while you were traveling to tourist capitals occasionally I've been actually living in Europe. Your perception is not the reality the average German person lives. The problem isn't that the smartest Engineers in Europe don't speak english. The problem is that the average person in the markets they would sell into don't speak a common language. Kind of hard to cut deals and build a brand among 27 different insular, hyper nationalist markets in a bunch of languages you don't speak with completely different regulations.