11 ms·

Absolutely not, even if Europe was given all of the compute in the world. The issues are much much worse. Starting at "data privacy", continuing with the "EU AI

• LastTrain 4mo ago
  Some of those seem like good things TBH.
  • throw-the-towel 4mo ago
    Yes, but they are incompatible with being on the forefront of AI.
    • LastTrain 4mo ago
      Yep. I wonder if being at the forefront of AI makes for a better & more free society.
      • Eupolemos 4mo ago
        Being on the backfoot will make us vulnerable to those who are not. I do not understand how this can not be self evident.
        • LastTrain 4mo ago
          Sure, but clearly you don’t mean at any cost, right?
      • pptr 4mo ago
        You can only make money if you produce value. If you stop producing value because your old industries decline/collapse and you miss out on new industries, your wealth will trend towards that of a third world country.
        • LastTrain 4mo ago
          Yes there are those two very extreme things and then there is every position in between.
        • deleted 4mo ago
          [deleted]
        • Yeask 4mo ago
          Italy sells bags made in China for 5k. We know how to produce value.
        • noddybear 4mo ago
          Maybe. I would contend that wealth accumulation over the long term is a function of the strength of local institutions e.g educational, judiciary etc. This is effectively the thesis of ‘Why nations fail’. Europes relative decline will only continue if the institutions of the US (and others) continue to be robust and healthy. I am not sure if this can be relied on into the future.
      • bpodgursky 4mo ago
        The current question is whether being the minor partner in a relationship with the US or China makes for a better & more free society. Westphalian norms are falling apart and countries will need to make hard tradeoffs about how to build enough economic heft to maintain their cultural values.
      • moffkalast 4mo ago
        It's not about how large the models are, it's how you use them in society ;)
    • ux266478 4mo ago
      Not at all, they can just use the petabytes of data sold on the cheap by American and Chinese companies instead of their own.
• rootlocus 4mo ago
  We can debate the details and implementation but EU legislature is, at least in spirit, trying to protect human rights. What does it say about progress that the same laws that protect human rights also stifle innovation?
  • BjoernKW 4mo ago
    > We can debate the details and implementation but EU legislature is, at least in spirit, trying to protect human rights That's an unfounded assertion. Of course, politicians will claim this to be the case. I don't see how patronising citizens protects their human rights, though.
    • bluefirebrand 4mo ago
      You don't see how protecting the commons from being exploited by hypercapitalists for their own profit is protecting the rights of the average person?
      • BjoernKW 4mo ago
        I don't subscribe to ideological categories such as "hypercapitalists". So, no, I don't see that.
        • frollogaston 4mo ago
          These questions are getting more loaded each time. "You don't see how the EU fighting pure evil is a good thing?"
      • frollogaston 4mo ago
        It's not even doing that
    • moffkalast 4mo ago
      It's certainly a good question. On the idealistic side it's the right choice, people should have the right to have a say in their own data since it's implicitly copyrighted. GDPR has done wonders to prevent careless personal data leaks that are so common in the US, and other kinds of abuse. In a more practical view though I'm not sure if it'll do anything to stop job replacement from automation as such. Most corporations seem all to eager to make deals with OAI or Anthropic here anyway, and if not that it'll be Chinese ones. There is a question of "representation", like if a model cannot be trained on the data of one specific country with a specific language, then it does not learn it and the people of that country are now at a disadvantage when trying to leverage the result. Maybe that's a good thing, maybe not, depending on the perspective of how the model is being applied relative to the average person. If it's something that makes their job easier then it's a negative, if it's used by the government to automate scanning all chats then it would be beneficial for it to suck. For widespread languages that doesn't apply of course, so the UK and Spain might as well be exempt. In general I think it's good for the EU to try and slow down adoption of bleeding edge tech so the US population with its lack of regulations can act as guinea pigs and absorb most of the early damage until we figure out what is the best approach when we get around to adopting it. Even if that means missing out on potential early upsides too. An old example is lots of late adopters going straight to gigabit fiber instead of being stuck on copper DSL.
• ToucanLoucan 4mo ago
  If your product can't function in a way that respects humans' right to privacy, your product is the problem, not the humans' rights.
  • aspenmartin 4mo ago
    You can grumble about the way things are but Europe being so far behind a technological race with important geopolitical ramifications means that you guys are cutting off your nose to spite your face. Have fun with zero of European regulations impacting frontier development and then eventually having to depend on it.
    • 0x3f 4mo ago
      Europe lost religion and gained this instead.
    • ToucanLoucan 4mo ago
      I am dying to know what the important geopolitical consequences are of not having a ChatGPT lolol Oh gods our politicians will have to read their own emails, and write them too! We may never recover. Clearly there is no path forward apart from mass surveillance.
      • aspenmartin 4mo ago
        You are totally right, reading emails and vibe coding saas apps is all we can do. Omg why didn’t we think of that? Someone get the pentagon on the phone and cancel the drone warfare technology they’re already using and proving out in the battlefield with Palintir. Someone also call the NSA: we don’t need to hack nor do we need surveillance and spying nor do we need robust defenses against all of this. Ah!! Also the president, we can surely cede the market benefits to other countries that’s totally fine.
    • FridgeSeal 4mo ago
      LLM’s are nice. But if push came to shove, we could very easily continue on without them, or without them involved in every aspect. Being able to write cutesy SaaS apps faster is neat, but not like, essential, the way water is.
• kgwxd 4mo ago
  "Innovation"
• mnewme 4mo ago
  Bullshit. The AI Act is not the problem, Mistral models are definitely usable and some were/are competitive. European future looks bright compared to the political landscape the US has now
  • Saline9515 4mo ago
    Do you think that companies and States will use "usable" models from Mistral (who has left the race anyway), or frontiers/near frontier ? It's akin to say that walking a good enough means of transportation and we don't need anything else. One day the guys in charriots will remind you of the dire reality.
    • mnewme 4mo ago
      I am not denying Mistral is not top tier anymore, (except OCR and STT for speed/efficency) just that the AI Act is not the reason they are not. But we will see, they have very interesting Enterpise Use Cases, like with Mistral Forge. And YannLeCun decided to build in Europe as well
      • 0x3f 4mo ago
        > And YannLeCun decided to build in Europe as well AMI has offices across the world. Fact is, companies often have at least an office where the CEO lives. Same when Musk kicked up a stink about 'leaving California'. It wasn't really anything of substance.
        • mnewme 4mo ago
          Yes but you can make the reverse argument as well: many US companies have offices in Europe and often their research departments. This whole US vs Europe discussions are fruitless anyways
  • sajithdilshan 4mo ago
    Political landscape of the US right now will change in few years like it has been changing for the last 250 years. USA does not equate to its current political situation. But EU would keep on rotting from inside and I would eat my hat if Mistral doesn’t go out of business in next 5 years
• brailsafe 4mo ago
  Imo useful long-term innovation comes about during the conflict of fighting for and against the rate of technological change, and whatever proves inherently better is what's left after the dust settles. There's a point at which there's so much opposition that nothing innovative happens for too long, but uncontested innovation isn't something most people want either. If the future is uncompetitive but lagging behind the U.S and China, I'd struggle to see the problem
• fxtentacle 4mo ago
  The thing that nobody talks about is how many EU citizens already are working on frontier models, just inside US companies. That’s why the prohibition was so crippling for Anthropic. And, btw, the bang per buck that I got from OVH was better than EC2.
  • signatoremo 4mo ago
    > The thing that nobody talks about is how many EU citizens already are working on frontier models, just inside US companies Why don't you ask yourself: how come those brilliant European minds couldn't find a job that pays well enough at home? Why could they in the US? There are many more Chinese and Indian, and other internationals working for US companies, outnumbering Europeans. It's not like Europe was intentionally targeted by US companies. Real GDP has grown 84% in the US since 2000 [0]. EU grown 40-45% in the same span. The two regions were basically had the same economic output in 2000. Europe has been left behind economically. Living in Europe is nice (I love Europe by the way), but the question is why EU can't compete with the US and increasingly China. Sooner or later that'd affect your living standard as well. Look at how much China has caught up with the West in terms of quality of life. [0] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1
    • lava_pidgeon 4mo ago
      This questions are discussed a lot. I just refer to the draghi report and also in the start up field the underdeveloped financial market in the EU. Finance markets have a negative vibe (rich people, greed, causing huge problems like 2008, antisemitism) so most politicians didn't care.
    • TacticalCoder 4mo ago
      > The two regions were basically had the same economic output in 2000. Europe has been left behind economically. Which basically coincides with the introduction of the Euro currency. The dumbest currency ever created: a common currency for countries with different fiscal laws/different tax rates and different economic outputs. Since then one the Eurozone state already (partially) defaulted on its public debt: Greece. My beloved EU is fucked. And not just because of that ultra-poorly and very probably short-lived currency that the Euro is: the EU is a socialist construction, by socialists, for socialists. In 25 years of introducing the Euro they manage to kill the first industry of the most important economy of the EU: the car industry in Germany. > Sooner or later that'd affect your living standard as well. Oh but the EU is making sure the standard of living falls really quick. For as if the EU wasn't falling into poverty quickly enough, politicians are at hard at work at importing millions upons millions of very poor people from africa and the middle-east. For the most part totally unemployable people (a politicians in Germany talked about 93% migrants without a job, that cannot speak the language and unemployable and used the term "a lost generation"). In my native city, Brussels ("head" of the EU), a recent report from a Belgian university estimates that 5% of the population of the city are undocumented migrants: undocumented means they aren't working. It's impossible to work without a shitload of paperwork in the EU. One out of every 20 people is an unemployable, unaccounted, undocumented, migrant. Let that sink in. The EU is fucked way more than people imagine. And anyone who thinks that the millions and tens of millions of migrants coming without any education are going to be the ones that shall save the EU economically is totally delusional. I raised my kid in english, only every going to british school and now british college, and wife is working towards acquiring a new citizenship. Thankfully we've also got family in Japan (a country notoriously hard to get in), so we've got that option too. We moved to a new country four times already, but now we're planning to leave the sinking ship that the EU is. There's no future in the EU: the only way forward is that major european cities are going to keep turning ever more into slums.
• niemandhier 4mo ago
  Kimi was trained at cost, so were other models. Sure some things are a hurdle, but in the end, being the first just means doing all the work.
• matt-p 4mo ago
  Are we talking about the EU or Europe? The UK, for example, is outside the EU and arguably Europes strongest AI hub birthing DeepMind, Stability and others. Home to top universities etc. I think compute is certainly our weakest point but it should be possible to train a frontier-ish model on Isambard-AI if you supplement it with other London based commercial compute for post-training.
• killerpopiller 4mo ago
  Did you read the AI Act? AI Act regulates high risk AI systems and banns AI systems like social scoring. Most of the AI applications are not regulated. Did you read the GDPR and follow court rulings regarding AI training. OLG Köln saw no violation in Meta‘s training of user data in Insta and FB. It is obvious that you don’t know what you are taking about. I’am tired of unfounded EU bashing. The guardrails in place are not hindering