6 ms·

Tangential, but I'm pretty sad about EU having absolutely nothing in the actual SotA LLM market. Especially given the recent events of US completely restricting

Tangential, but I'm pretty sad about EU having absolutely nothing in the actual SotA LLM market. Especially given the recent events of US completely restricting the actual SotA models. Has this been just pure lack of funding and infra?

ciefa 3mo ago
[dead]
vlian2088 3mo ago
[flagged]
- yfontana 3mo ago
  That act applies just as much to those American and Chinese models within the EU.
  - Sol- 3mo ago
    Which is a mistake the EU makes again and again. If you put onerous requirements on everyone, this means that the most well-capitalized firms will be able to shoulder the regulatory overhead the easiest. But who can't? New European startups. This already killed part of the tech sector with the GDPR while Google and Meta just hire 100 lawyers and are done with it.
    - roblabla 3mo ago
      [citation needed] here. The tech sector is still well and alive in EU, and outside adtech (which was hit hard by GDPR - that was the point) doesn't seem to have been visibly impacted.
      - mike_hearn 3mo ago
        AI research was mostly funded during the 2010s by Google (funded by ads) and FAIR (Facebook AI Research, funded by ads). Killing off adtech didn't reduce the number of ads seen by people in Europe or make any observable difference to anyone's lives, but did help ensure a company capable of developing LLMs could not arise,
        roblabla 3mo ago
        You say this as if ad revenue is the only possible way we could have done AI research - which is an _extremely_ weird take given the history of academia and R&D. Today adtech companies just make up the richest companies in the world, so it's not very surprising that they're the ones behind LLMs - they have more money to throw at the problem than most. I'm pretty confident that - if adtech companies didn't exist, we'd find other means of funding AI research (private investment, public funding, R&D spend from non-adtech companies, etc...). When the internet was researched and developed, it wasn't funded by adtech, and yet it managed to develop it just fine. --- Also, the point of GDPR wasn't to reduce the number of ads. It was to prevent massive, indiscriminate information gathering. Now, whether that was successful or not is debatable - I have my own gripes on GDPR enforcement (I really hope the banners will get nuked out of existence).
        mike_hearn 3mo ago
        I think the weird take is to assume it could have been otherwise when almost all the work was ad funded. It's not a coincidence it was Google and Facebook doing the research, IMO. Universities did a bit but like usual with academia the moment it benefited from large scale engineering to make progress they lost out to commercial labs.
      - nkmnz 3mo ago
        "The tech sector is still well and alive in EU" [citation needed]
        roblabla 3mo ago
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_N3-FKbi5c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_N3-FKbi5c https://www.cer.eu/insights/europe-has-produced-tech-champions-here-what-they-can-teach-us https://www.cer.eu/insights/europe-has-produced-tech-champio... https://www.investeurope.eu/news/newsroom/state-of-european-tech-2025-a-roadmap-to-unlock-further-tech-growth/ https://www.investeurope.eu/news/newsroom/state-of-european-... The tech sector represents 15% of EU's GDP. I currently work in the tech sector in europe, there's no shortage of companies hiring (both startups and enterprise), and anecdotally, from my personal network, enough startups are surviving the 5 and 10 years mark that I'm pretty confident there's enough new ideas/companies (as opposed to only having old/legacy enterprises) to ensure the good health of the sector. Now, I will acknowledge that funding is more complicated in the EU compared to the US - but that's something that has been acknowledged by EU leadership and is being actively worked on. The Draghi report lays out a vision for how this can be achieved, with recommendation on what steps to take to achieve that vision. https://commission.europa.eu/topics/competitiveness/draghi-report_en https://commission.europa.eu/topics/competitiveness/draghi-r... So yeah, the tech sector is still well and alive in the EU, and there is reason to believe that it's going to get in an even better position.
        Orygin 3mo ago
        Citation: Anybody working in tech in Europe can tell you this.
        nkmnz 3mo ago
        Duh, I work in tech in Europe myself. Look at the stock market, look at exit returns, look at employment rates, look at salaries, look at dividends, look at the number of startups. EU tech sector sucks compared with the US. It's not even close in terms of economical breadth, depth of integration, speed, size, capex, value created domestically and/or abroad, and overall trajectory.
- petesergeant 3mo ago
  Given that American and Chinese models exist in an environment where the executive can and will pull models because the vibes are off, or they don't think a company is sufficiently deferential or politically aligned, this feels like false attribution.
- pbkompasz 3mo ago
  They already stole all the data on the internet to train their models. These models haven't improved significantly in some time and remember that they lose money on every query. Why should anyone outside does companies get involved now, right before the whole show is about to collapse?
Sol- 3mo ago
The EU simply doesn't have a proper common market, especially when it comes to capital. Having more people than the US and a big economy in aggregate doesn't matter much if you can't efficiently pool resources. Could we in Europe have 100 billion fundraises for a new lab? If not, then it's over and you can give up.
- Epa095 3mo ago
  I agree with your analysis, at least as long as we shall remain strictly inside the free market methodologies. And having a common capital market would be good no matter what. But there are other ways to pool resources than the free market. Airbus was not made dynamically in a market, neither was the LHC. 100 billion € is a lot, it's half of the total allocated aid from Europe to Ukraina. Which can be read in two ways, either 'helping Ukraine is already weighing us down, another similar cost is too much for some IT toy ', or 'Europe has the ability to collect massive amount of capital when it needs to, and AI is a existential threat which justifies it'.
Epa095 3mo ago
Software in general, AI as well, is a rich get richer market. The big American companies can afford to (and very much do) scoop up European talents and upcoming European companies. And if they don't want to buy them, they can undercut them to bankruptcy. We live in a colony economy, with human capital as the raw produce, and it all gets funneled to the USA. The only way to avoid this is to stop playing the game as it is today, and start using proper industrial policy to build up a competitive industry (like China did). There has been no appetite for that the last decades, but Trump is making it completely clear that the state is back, and Europe is slowly acknowledging it as well.
- hsuduebc2 3mo ago
  Europeans should thank Trump for that. Digital sovereignty became a major theme mostly because his hollow head could not comprehend the previous strategy. I would say it is mostly a money problem rooted in the culture. VC funding is not nearly as common in Europe. Not that many people are willing to risk serious money the way US corporations do, or even ordinary Americans through the stock market. Banks will never lend you money for this. That itself makes it really easy to poach great engineers. You can earn very good money in Europe, but usually not the best money. If the EU wanted to pour billions into AI labs, national governments would immediately start fighting over which country should host them. These petty disputes, coming from hundreds of years of Europeans killing each other, are one of the main things holding them back. I believe that in the end, the strategy will be to watch what worked and what did not work for the Americans, then simply copy it. But Europe was never really cut off from crucial technology before, so I'm curious if that will have any interesting solution.
mike_hearn 3mo ago
Mistral has raised $4B+ which is a decent chunk of change, albeit not in the league of OpenAI/Anthropic/xAI. The hard part is justifying pure LLM development financially. Models are all very similar. OpenAI justified it originally by being a 'charity' dedicated to pure research (not financial). Anthropic justified it by saying OpenAI didn't care enough about safety and splitting from them (not financial). Elon justified it by saying that AI would be woke and untruthful unless he built Grok (not financial). Google did Gemini because, well, they're where it all started and because AI research was one of the core missions Larry & Sergey gave it when they started it (but then sat on it for financial reasons). Then there's the Chinese models. It's unclear what their motives are tbh. I've never seen a really great explanation, only hypotheses. But as they're giving them away for free or very underpriced, their motivation doesn't seem to be financial either. But Mistral is a normal company. It doesn't have rich backers giving it money based on narratives about cosmic destiny, so it needs to justify what it's doing with ROI. So that more or less rules out large scale LLM training. There's also EU regulation to consider. When I looked at this in the past I found lots of odd rules that kill off any chance of having a European tech industry. The UK had one that said you could only crawl the internet for research purposes! https://knowledgerights21.org/news-story/the-uks-copyright-laws-will-hobble-its-ai-ambitions/ https://knowledgerights21.org/news-story/the-uks-copyright-l... And without the First Amendment you're at much greater risk of being prosecuted for things your models say. See how Germany has taken Google to court over things its models put in its search result pages. So the benefit isn't clear and the legal risks are very high.
- ghm2199 3mo ago
  Someone commented on this page that their main market are long term b2b contracts. If that’s true then what you are saying isn’t a problem.
  - mike_hearn 3mo ago
    Right, they pivoted, but originally they were a pure play LLM developer.
derfurth 3mo ago
One could make the case that being SotA in 2026 is very costly and not that important for being SotA in 2030 if much more efficient models indeed happens.
JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
How much does supporting multiple languages as first-class citizens (versus adding a translation layer) cost a model?
- anthonypasq 3mo ago
  absolutely nothing id imagine? you think all the chinese are using their models in english?
troyvit 3mo ago
Mistral is generally winning the fights it chooses to fight and that's what they need to do. Instead of looking at what EU's economy could contribute towards a SotA model it's more accurate to look at what France's economy could contribute, then compare that to the US or China. The scale isn't there. Instead what I like to see is what they can accomplish with that lower scale, and it's stuff like Leanstral, Voxtral and other niche products.
msdz 3mo ago
> Has this been just pure lack of funding and infra? For the most part, yes. France and Germany are the two biggest EU economies. France has well, Mistral, and we here have a government-funded VC entity that is way too proud [1] to be able to offer a whopping… €125 million (<$150 M USD) for helping European researchers achieve new SOTA in sovereign models. And that sum is not even going to a single challenge winner, it'll be split up among multiple recipients. Don't get me wrong, this is a cool first step, or rather, would have been one about three to four years ago. It's a pity, really. [1] (in German) https://www.sprind.org/worte/magazin/verkuendung-next-frontier-ai https://www.sprind.org/worte/magazin/verkuendung-next-fronti...
segmondy 3mo ago
Culture

ciefa 3mo ago

[dead]

vlian2088 3mo ago

[flagged]

yfontana 3mo ago
That act applies just as much to those American and Chinese models within the EU.
- Sol- 3mo ago
  Which is a mistake the EU makes again and again. If you put onerous requirements on everyone, this means that the most well-capitalized firms will be able to shoulder the regulatory overhead the easiest. But who can't? New European startups. This already killed part of the tech sector with the GDPR while Google and Meta just hire 100 lawyers and are done with it.
  - roblabla 3mo ago
    [citation needed] here. The tech sector is still well and alive in EU, and outside adtech (which was hit hard by GDPR - that was the point) doesn't seem to have been visibly impacted.
    - mike_hearn 3mo ago
      AI research was mostly funded during the 2010s by Google (funded by ads) and FAIR (Facebook AI Research, funded by ads). Killing off adtech didn't reduce the number of ads seen by people in Europe or make any observable difference to anyone's lives, but did help ensure a company capable of developing LLMs could not arise,
      - roblabla 3mo ago
        You say this as if ad revenue is the only possible way we could have done AI research - which is an _extremely_ weird take given the history of academia and R&D. Today adtech companies just make up the richest companies in the world, so it's not very surprising that they're the ones behind LLMs - they have more money to throw at the problem than most. I'm pretty confident that - if adtech companies didn't exist, we'd find other means of funding AI research (private investment, public funding, R&D spend from non-adtech companies, etc...). When the internet was researched and developed, it wasn't funded by adtech, and yet it managed to develop it just fine. --- Also, the point of GDPR wasn't to reduce the number of ads. It was to prevent massive, indiscriminate information gathering. Now, whether that was successful or not is debatable - I have my own gripes on GDPR enforcement (I really hope the banners will get nuked out of existence).
        mike_hearn 3mo ago
        I think the weird take is to assume it could have been otherwise when almost all the work was ad funded. It's not a coincidence it was Google and Facebook doing the research, IMO. Universities did a bit but like usual with academia the moment it benefited from large scale engineering to make progress they lost out to commercial labs.
    - nkmnz 3mo ago
      "The tech sector is still well and alive in EU" [citation needed]
      - roblabla 3mo ago
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_N3-FKbi5c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_N3-FKbi5c https://www.cer.eu/insights/europe-has-produced-tech-champions-here-what-they-can-teach-us https://www.cer.eu/insights/europe-has-produced-tech-champio... https://www.investeurope.eu/news/newsroom/state-of-european-tech-2025-a-roadmap-to-unlock-further-tech-growth/ https://www.investeurope.eu/news/newsroom/state-of-european-... The tech sector represents 15% of EU's GDP. I currently work in the tech sector in europe, there's no shortage of companies hiring (both startups and enterprise), and anecdotally, from my personal network, enough startups are surviving the 5 and 10 years mark that I'm pretty confident there's enough new ideas/companies (as opposed to only having old/legacy enterprises) to ensure the good health of the sector. Now, I will acknowledge that funding is more complicated in the EU compared to the US - but that's something that has been acknowledged by EU leadership and is being actively worked on. The Draghi report lays out a vision for how this can be achieved, with recommendation on what steps to take to achieve that vision. https://commission.europa.eu/topics/competitiveness/draghi-report_en https://commission.europa.eu/topics/competitiveness/draghi-r... So yeah, the tech sector is still well and alive in the EU, and there is reason to believe that it's going to get in an even better position.
      - Orygin 3mo ago
        Citation: Anybody working in tech in Europe can tell you this.
        nkmnz 3mo ago
        Duh, I work in tech in Europe myself. Look at the stock market, look at exit returns, look at employment rates, look at salaries, look at dividends, look at the number of startups. EU tech sector sucks compared with the US. It's not even close in terms of economical breadth, depth of integration, speed, size, capex, value created domestically and/or abroad, and overall trajectory.
petesergeant 3mo ago
Given that American and Chinese models exist in an environment where the executive can and will pull models because the vibes are off, or they don't think a company is sufficiently deferential or politically aligned, this feels like false attribution.
pbkompasz 3mo ago
They already stole all the data on the internet to train their models. These models haven't improved significantly in some time and remember that they lose money on every query. Why should anyone outside does companies get involved now, right before the whole show is about to collapse?

Sol- 3mo ago

The EU simply doesn't have a proper common market, especially when it comes to capital. Having more people than the US and a big economy in aggregate doesn't matter much if you can't efficiently pool resources. Could we in Europe have 100 billion fundraises for a new lab? If not, then it's over and you can give up.

Epa095 3mo ago
I agree with your analysis, at least as long as we shall remain strictly inside the free market methodologies. And having a common capital market would be good no matter what. But there are other ways to pool resources than the free market. Airbus was not made dynamically in a market, neither was the LHC. 100 billion € is a lot, it's half of the total allocated aid from Europe to Ukraina. Which can be read in two ways, either 'helping Ukraine is already weighing us down, another similar cost is too much for some IT toy ', or 'Europe has the ability to collect massive amount of capital when it needs to, and AI is a existential threat which justifies it'.

Epa095 3mo ago

Software in general, AI as well, is a rich get richer market. The big American companies can afford to (and very much do) scoop up European talents and upcoming European companies. And if they don't want to buy them, they can undercut them to bankruptcy. We live in a colony economy, with human capital as the raw produce, and it all gets funneled to the USA. The only way to avoid this is to stop playing the game as it is today, and start using proper industrial policy to build up a competitive industry (like China did). There has been no appetite for that the last decades, but Trump is making it completely clear that the state is back, and Europe is slowly acknowledging it as well.

hsuduebc2 3mo ago
Europeans should thank Trump for that. Digital sovereignty became a major theme mostly because his hollow head could not comprehend the previous strategy. I would say it is mostly a money problem rooted in the culture. VC funding is not nearly as common in Europe. Not that many people are willing to risk serious money the way US corporations do, or even ordinary Americans through the stock market. Banks will never lend you money for this. That itself makes it really easy to poach great engineers. You can earn very good money in Europe, but usually not the best money. If the EU wanted to pour billions into AI labs, national governments would immediately start fighting over which country should host them. These petty disputes, coming from hundreds of years of Europeans killing each other, are one of the main things holding them back. I believe that in the end, the strategy will be to watch what worked and what did not work for the Americans, then simply copy it. But Europe was never really cut off from crucial technology before, so I'm curious if that will have any interesting solution.

mike_hearn 3mo ago

Mistral has raised $4B+ which is a decent chunk of change, albeit not in the league of OpenAI/Anthropic/xAI. The hard part is justifying pure LLM development financially. Models are all very similar. OpenAI justified it originally by being a 'charity' dedicated to pure research (not financial). Anthropic justified it by saying OpenAI didn't care enough about safety and splitting from them (not financial). Elon justified it by saying that AI would be woke and untruthful unless he built Grok (not financial). Google did Gemini because, well, they're where it all started and because AI research was one of the core missions Larry & Sergey gave it when they started it (but then sat on it for financial reasons). Then there's the Chinese models. It's unclear what their motives are tbh. I've never seen a really great explanation, only hypotheses. But as they're giving them away for free or very underpriced, their motivation doesn't seem to be financial either. But Mistral is a normal company. It doesn't have rich backers giving it money based on narratives about cosmic destiny, so it needs to justify what it's doing with ROI. So that more or less rules out large scale LLM training. There's also EU regulation to consider. When I looked at this in the past I found lots of odd rules that kill off any chance of having a European tech industry. The UK had one that said you could only crawl the internet for research purposes! https://knowledgerights21.org/news-story/the-uks-copyright-laws-will-hobble-its-ai-ambitions/ https://knowledgerights21.org/news-story/the-uks-copyright-l... And without the First Amendment you're at much greater risk of being prosecuted for things your models say. See how Germany has taken Google to court over things its models put in its search result pages. So the benefit isn't clear and the legal risks are very high.

ghm2199 3mo ago
Someone commented on this page that their main market are long term b2b contracts. If that’s true then what you are saying isn’t a problem.
- mike_hearn 3mo ago
  Right, they pivoted, but originally they were a pure play LLM developer.

derfurth 3mo ago

One could make the case that being SotA in 2026 is very costly and not that important for being SotA in 2030 if much more efficient models indeed happens.

JumpCrisscross 3mo ago

How much does supporting multiple languages as first-class citizens (versus adding a translation layer) cost a model?

anthonypasq 3mo ago
absolutely nothing id imagine? you think all the chinese are using their models in english?

troyvit 3mo ago

Mistral is generally winning the fights it chooses to fight and that's what they need to do. Instead of looking at what EU's economy could contribute towards a SotA model it's more accurate to look at what France's economy could contribute, then compare that to the US or China. The scale isn't there. Instead what I like to see is what they can accomplish with that lower scale, and it's stuff like Leanstral, Voxtral and other niche products.

msdz 3mo ago

> Has this been just pure lack of funding and infra? For the most part, yes. France and Germany are the two biggest EU economies. France has well, Mistral, and we here have a government-funded VC entity that is way too proud [1] to be able to offer a whopping… €125 million (<$150 M USD) for helping European researchers achieve new SOTA in sovereign models. And that sum is not even going to a single challenge winner, it'll be split up among multiple recipients. Don't get me wrong, this is a cool first step, or rather, would have been one about three to four years ago. It's a pity, really. [1] (in German) https://www.sprind.org/worte/magazin/verkuendung-next-frontier-ai https://www.sprind.org/worte/magazin/verkuendung-next-fronti...

segmondy 3mo ago

Culture