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This is a bottom feeder mentality. Europe has enough bright people and resources to truly compete in the AI race. There is something wrong when the only selling

by matusp 25d ago

This is a bottom feeder mentality. Europe has enough bright people and resources to truly compete in the AI race. There is something wrong when the only selling point is that it's local.

black_puppydog 25d ago
We're regularly getting demonstrations that being at the frontier is no moat at all. "Run open weights locally" was literally on the HN front page a few days ago as a primary concern/competitor for the big US labs. So there's a big and meaningful gap between "not frontier" and "bottom feeder". There's just tons of applications where you don't need "the best" model, especially not tomorrow's best model.
- randomgermanguy 25d ago
  But a better model almost always comes with a better dollar-per-task-accomplished ratio, compared to worse models. So not only outpriced, outperformed, but also outregulated. Idk i wish there was some bright light in the future, but i dont see it
  - oblio 25d ago
    I would rather LLM cost curves go down 10x and then we really do something. We need a lot more hardware for universal LLMs (probably 10x, if not more), and we need it to be cheaper. If anything, I would fund a DRAM maker in Europe.
    - nickpp 25d ago
      > I would fund a DRAM maker in Europe. I wouldn't. I can think of at least 10 regulations (labor and environmental chef amongst them) that would render such a maker uncompetitive from the start. Chinese makers would eat its lunch.
      - oblio 25d ago
        We used to have some. Also, regarding labor, that part boggles the mind. Aren't those factories supposed to be highly automated? Also, at this point DRAM availability is becoming a security risk.
      - ezst 25d ago
        Doesn't matter, we need to opt out of the rat race that consists of making the planet worse for the next generations in exchange of quick bucks for the oligarchs. The way is to factor externalities in the final price, reward sustainable behaviour and set better standards. And that's what's going on: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/12/how-europes-new-carbon-tax-on-imported-goods-will-change-global-trade/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/12/how-europes-new-... The same applies to labour conditions and quality standards. And don't bring up arguments like "it can't work" or "that hurt competitiveness": all workers around the world want the exact same thing, a livable planet for their children. The only ones to object are the global elite who one ends up defending when they make the current status quo sound inevitable.
        nickpp 25d ago
        > all workers around the world want the exact same thing, a livable planet for their children Actually, they don't. First of all they want livable conditions for themselves. Ecologism is a hobby for people with full bellies. I remember during communism which failed to even feed and clothe us - but The Party kept telling us that we were actually winning and we were so morally superior to those "corrupt capitalists". This is what happens when ideological justifications replace rational thought.
        ezst 25d ago
        > Ecologism is a hobby for people with full bellies. Then it's a good thing that Chinese bellies are satisfied, we can get to those existential problems, now.
        oblio 25d ago
        > Ecologism is a hobby for people with full bellies. Almost the entire planet where this debate is raging, is the part of the planet where people have full bellies. On average, too full, even. Ecologism is also a hobby for people that don't want their kids to starve, as people living in Mesopotamia around the time of Akkad, or people around the Sea of Aral starting in the 1980s have discovered.
- selcuka 25d ago
  Those things are not mutually exclusive. We can have open weight, yet close-to-frontier models. China has very strong models that can also run locally.
- realusername 25d ago
  That's true, however, if you are too far from the top models, you still are in danger of not being in the race anymore. And with half the score of the top models, that's where Mistral is at. As it is now, no tech company in the EU will use it, if they were just 80% from the top, that would be more feasible.
- adventured 25d ago
  Why hasn't Baidu taken over the world's search market? What moat does Google have that's so special in search? You need to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to scale globally in search. And you have to take the market away from Google at the same time. Good luck. OpenAI and Anthropic are doing that right now in LLMs, hyper scaling to a billion people. Having a billion users you can actually serve is a moat. When OpenAI is done attaching a full ad model to GPT, they'll be able to serve a billion users profitably globally with zero subscriptions. This is what keeps Google up at night: ~$500 billion in ad revenue up for grabs circa 2030. Any service with hundreds of millions of users is a lucrative ad business. TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Google, Amazon. OpenAI's moat, if they get there soon enough, is that they'll be able to lean into a high margin ad business to press down on the market and kill everybody. You won't be able to serve the infrastructure to compete at the cost structure they'll able to subsidize at via the high margin ad business. This is an extraordinarily straight-forward move, and it's comically anti-competitive, and nobody will stop them from doing it. Their mistake is that they're at least two years behind where they should be in advertising. Anthropic is the one at the most risk from the Chinese models, they have the weaker everyday consumer side. Enterprise won't be supported by an ad model very well.
- matusp 25d ago
  How much money are Europeans paying to US companies for AI services and how much are Americans paying to EU companies? I don't think it's a good idea to let billions of dollars go to other countries because you couldn't be bothered to build a competitive product.
gman83 25d ago
No, Europe doesn't have the capital markets required to build the required data centers. Underwriting gigawatt data centers and frontier models demands a fully realized European Capital Markets Union, a single energy regulator with cross-border grid integration, and shared fiscal borrowing power.
- grim_io 25d ago
  There is a big difference in compute requirements between EU and US. EU needs to meet their own demand, the US wants to be the global provider.
  - pferde 25d ago
    No, I think most of the recent huge datacenter buildups are for US AI efforts only in the AI arms race, not to be rented out.
    - grim_io 25d ago
      What is the AI arms reace to you? Isn't it to be the globally dominant provider of such a service? Everything else is in service of that goal.
      - pferde 23d ago
        We're still deep in the research and exploration phase, who knows what will huge oodles of compute be useful for in the end? Maybe it will end up being used by the owning corporation or local nation state, against similar amount of compute wielded by another corporation or nation state. After all, what else than governments and corporations will be left after the rest of us poors will inevitably be priced out of the economy?
- pferde 25d ago
  Thank god.
- lII1lIlI11ll 25d ago
KronisLV 25d ago
To compete, we’d have to throw a lot of the regulations and laws into the trash (especially anything regarding copyright) and do an order of magnitude more investment. I’m surprised that there’s no domestic chip production either, we don’t have our own CPUs or GPUs, meanwhile China is spinning up manufacturing so they don’t have to work around the Nvidia export restrictions as much. I like Mistral and there’s cool stuff going on like how EuroLLM models know Latvian language and all the other EU ones better than way bigger models, but we don’t have anything frontier. At the very least, they should be distilling Kimi K3 and GLM 5.3 as much as possible and working on MoE models like ~35B and ~120B versions to match Qwen.
- simgt 25d ago
  > I’m surprised that there’s no domestic chip production either, we don’t have our own CPUs or GPUs, meanwhile China is spinning up manufacturing so they don’t have to work around the Nvidia export restrictions as much. The CCP is able to plan the economy. We used to be able to do that in the 60s-70s, at least in France, but that mindset is long gone.
  - KronisLV 25d ago
    I mean the EU has ASML, why can’t we go the rest of the way? Seems kinda shortsighted and I say that as someone who bought the Intel Arc A580 on release and don’t regret it.
  - infamia 25d ago
    In the long run a planned economy is a huge disadvantage, the Soviets and now the the CCP are prime examples. For instance, the CCP is also sitting on a bunch of practically empty metropolises, paired with a property bubble and a falling population (all of which are exist to their meddling).
    - simgt 23d ago
      "Planning" has a very different meaning when referring to what France did, what the USSR did, and what China is doing. Remains to be seen if China is at a disadvantage.
throw1234567891 25d ago
you mean like Boeing vs Airbus?
simgt 25d ago
We're not in a good position on the supply chain needed. Right now it really means pouring billions on American corps, either by renting the compute or by building it. That would be mostly fine if it were only VC money but it's not.
- lII1lIlI11ll 25d ago
  > We're not in a good position on the supply chain needed. Right now it really means pouring billions on American corps, either by renting the compute or by building it. You are saying "right now" as if EU is seriously investing into developing its own AI hardware (both training and inference) but I'm not aware of any serious attempts to build such supply chain in EU.

by matusp 25d ago

This is a bottom feeder mentality. Europe has enough bright people and resources to truly compete in the AI race. There is something wrong when the only selling point is that it's local.

black_puppydog 25d ago

We're regularly getting demonstrations that being at the frontier is no moat at all. "Run open weights locally" was literally on the HN front page a few days ago as a primary concern/competitor for the big US labs. So there's a big and meaningful gap between "not frontier" and "bottom feeder". There's just tons of applications where you don't need "the best" model, especially not tomorrow's best model.

randomgermanguy 25d ago
But a better model almost always comes with a better dollar-per-task-accomplished ratio, compared to worse models. So not only outpriced, outperformed, but also outregulated. Idk i wish there was some bright light in the future, but i dont see it
- oblio 25d ago
  I would rather LLM cost curves go down 10x and then we really do something. We need a lot more hardware for universal LLMs (probably 10x, if not more), and we need it to be cheaper. If anything, I would fund a DRAM maker in Europe.
  - nickpp 25d ago
    > I would fund a DRAM maker in Europe. I wouldn't. I can think of at least 10 regulations (labor and environmental chef amongst them) that would render such a maker uncompetitive from the start. Chinese makers would eat its lunch.
    - oblio 25d ago
      We used to have some. Also, regarding labor, that part boggles the mind. Aren't those factories supposed to be highly automated? Also, at this point DRAM availability is becoming a security risk.
    - ezst 25d ago
      Doesn't matter, we need to opt out of the rat race that consists of making the planet worse for the next generations in exchange of quick bucks for the oligarchs. The way is to factor externalities in the final price, reward sustainable behaviour and set better standards. And that's what's going on: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/12/how-europes-new-carbon-tax-on-imported-goods-will-change-global-trade/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/12/how-europes-new-... The same applies to labour conditions and quality standards. And don't bring up arguments like "it can't work" or "that hurt competitiveness": all workers around the world want the exact same thing, a livable planet for their children. The only ones to object are the global elite who one ends up defending when they make the current status quo sound inevitable.
      - nickpp 25d ago
        > all workers around the world want the exact same thing, a livable planet for their children Actually, they don't. First of all they want livable conditions for themselves. Ecologism is a hobby for people with full bellies. I remember during communism which failed to even feed and clothe us - but The Party kept telling us that we were actually winning and we were so morally superior to those "corrupt capitalists". This is what happens when ideological justifications replace rational thought.
        ezst 25d ago
        > Ecologism is a hobby for people with full bellies. Then it's a good thing that Chinese bellies are satisfied, we can get to those existential problems, now.
        oblio 25d ago
        > Ecologism is a hobby for people with full bellies. Almost the entire planet where this debate is raging, is the part of the planet where people have full bellies. On average, too full, even. Ecologism is also a hobby for people that don't want their kids to starve, as people living in Mesopotamia around the time of Akkad, or people around the Sea of Aral starting in the 1980s have discovered.
selcuka 25d ago
Those things are not mutually exclusive. We can have open weight, yet close-to-frontier models. China has very strong models that can also run locally.
realusername 25d ago
That's true, however, if you are too far from the top models, you still are in danger of not being in the race anymore. And with half the score of the top models, that's where Mistral is at. As it is now, no tech company in the EU will use it, if they were just 80% from the top, that would be more feasible.
adventured 25d ago
Why hasn't Baidu taken over the world's search market? What moat does Google have that's so special in search? You need to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to scale globally in search. And you have to take the market away from Google at the same time. Good luck. OpenAI and Anthropic are doing that right now in LLMs, hyper scaling to a billion people. Having a billion users you can actually serve is a moat. When OpenAI is done attaching a full ad model to GPT, they'll be able to serve a billion users profitably globally with zero subscriptions. This is what keeps Google up at night: ~$500 billion in ad revenue up for grabs circa 2030. Any service with hundreds of millions of users is a lucrative ad business. TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Google, Amazon. OpenAI's moat, if they get there soon enough, is that they'll be able to lean into a high margin ad business to press down on the market and kill everybody. You won't be able to serve the infrastructure to compete at the cost structure they'll able to subsidize at via the high margin ad business. This is an extraordinarily straight-forward move, and it's comically anti-competitive, and nobody will stop them from doing it. Their mistake is that they're at least two years behind where they should be in advertising. Anthropic is the one at the most risk from the Chinese models, they have the weaker everyday consumer side. Enterprise won't be supported by an ad model very well.
matusp 25d ago
How much money are Europeans paying to US companies for AI services and how much are Americans paying to EU companies? I don't think it's a good idea to let billions of dollars go to other countries because you couldn't be bothered to build a competitive product.

gman83 25d ago

No, Europe doesn't have the capital markets required to build the required data centers. Underwriting gigawatt data centers and frontier models demands a fully realized European Capital Markets Union, a single energy regulator with cross-border grid integration, and shared fiscal borrowing power.

grim_io 25d ago
There is a big difference in compute requirements between EU and US. EU needs to meet their own demand, the US wants to be the global provider.
- pferde 25d ago
  No, I think most of the recent huge datacenter buildups are for US AI efforts only in the AI arms race, not to be rented out.
  - grim_io 25d ago
    What is the AI arms reace to you? Isn't it to be the globally dominant provider of such a service? Everything else is in service of that goal.
    - pferde 23d ago
      We're still deep in the research and exploration phase, who knows what will huge oodles of compute be useful for in the end? Maybe it will end up being used by the owning corporation or local nation state, against similar amount of compute wielded by another corporation or nation state. After all, what else than governments and corporations will be left after the rest of us poors will inevitably be priced out of the economy?
pferde 25d ago
Thank god.
lII1lIlI11ll 25d ago

KronisLV 25d ago

To compete, we’d have to throw a lot of the regulations and laws into the trash (especially anything regarding copyright) and do an order of magnitude more investment. I’m surprised that there’s no domestic chip production either, we don’t have our own CPUs or GPUs, meanwhile China is spinning up manufacturing so they don’t have to work around the Nvidia export restrictions as much. I like Mistral and there’s cool stuff going on like how EuroLLM models know Latvian language and all the other EU ones better than way bigger models, but we don’t have anything frontier. At the very least, they should be distilling Kimi K3 and GLM 5.3 as much as possible and working on MoE models like ~35B and ~120B versions to match Qwen.

simgt 25d ago
> I’m surprised that there’s no domestic chip production either, we don’t have our own CPUs or GPUs, meanwhile China is spinning up manufacturing so they don’t have to work around the Nvidia export restrictions as much. The CCP is able to plan the economy. We used to be able to do that in the 60s-70s, at least in France, but that mindset is long gone.
- KronisLV 25d ago
  I mean the EU has ASML, why can’t we go the rest of the way? Seems kinda shortsighted and I say that as someone who bought the Intel Arc A580 on release and don’t regret it.
- infamia 25d ago
  In the long run a planned economy is a huge disadvantage, the Soviets and now the the CCP are prime examples. For instance, the CCP is also sitting on a bunch of practically empty metropolises, paired with a property bubble and a falling population (all of which are exist to their meddling).
  - simgt 23d ago
    "Planning" has a very different meaning when referring to what France did, what the USSR did, and what China is doing. Remains to be seen if China is at a disadvantage.

throw1234567891 25d ago

you mean like Boeing vs Airbus?

simgt 25d ago

We're not in a good position on the supply chain needed. Right now it really means pouring billions on American corps, either by renting the compute or by building it. That would be mostly fine if it were only VC money but it's not.

lII1lIlI11ll 25d ago
> We're not in a good position on the supply chain needed. Right now it really means pouring billions on American corps, either by renting the compute or by building it. You are saying "right now" as if EU is seriously investing into developing its own AI hardware (both training and inference) but I'm not aware of any serious attempts to build such supply chain in EU.