[thrown1212]

The “EU bad” line gets rolled out so often on HN it has become its own truth. “Everyone knows” that the EU tech industry is getting strangled by its technocratic regulators and that’s why the EU fails at tech har har look at these idiots. Etc.

[carom]

Where are their datacenter scale computing companies? How many decades did it take for that to arrive there? It will be the same story with AI.

European developer brain drain will continue with the brightest minds coming to America.

[hnlmorg]

> Where are their datacenter scale computing companies

There are loads. OVH and BT for example. Both of which predate AWS and GCP.

> How many decades did it take for that to arrive there?

Less time than the US. We also have, in general, faster internet at cheaper prices and better rural connectivity too.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting Europe is better than the US. Just stating that this “innovation could only happen in the US” meme is bullshit.

> It will be the same story with AI.

I literally just said I work for an AI tech company in Europe. And my company is hardly an isolated case.

> European developer brain drain will continue with the brightest minds coming to America.

You do realise that London, Berlin and other European tech hubs have their fair share of talented engineers who have moved to that country for work too?

America might have Silicon Valley but it’s hardly the only tech hub in the world.

[oytis]

> We also have, in general, faster internet at cheaper prices and better rural connectivity too.

What country are you talking about? Definitely not Germany.

> America might have Silicon Valley but it’s hardly the only tech hub in the world.

Berlin startup scene is a joke compared to the Silicon Valley though. Cambridge, London, Zürich, maybe Munich I would agree to a certain degree - but not Berlin. The rule of thumb is that it's better outside of EU though.

[carom]

OVH is a hosting company. I am not talking about hosting. Where are the companies with knowledge on how to deploy data center scale compute jobs? Where are the pioneers in this?

That knowledge exists now in Europe, but there was easily a lost decade in terms of capability. This is the price. Similar will happen in AI and you will be stuck relying on American products. I hope for your sake that I am wrong.

[hnlmorg]

> That knowledge exists now in Europe, but there was easily a lost decade in terms of capability.

You keep saying this but I’m not seeing any evidence it’s true. There have always been plenty of companies in Europe that have had data centre scale compute too (plus managing a data centre requires that level of understanding as well so I don’t agree with you dismissing OVH.

Plus you keep saying it’s taken a decade for the EU to catch up and on those timescales it would put things before GDPR et al. Thus EU legislation would have no impact even if your point was true.

> Similar will happen in AI and you will be stuck relying on American products.

At risk of sounding repetitive: I work for a European AI firm.

We actually have a lot of American clients — so the exact inverse of the point you’re making.

[carom]

This is a fairly common analysis.

https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate...

[hnlmorg]

This is the key part:

> Although Europe has many high-performing companies, in aggregate European companies underperform relative to those in other major regions: they are growing more slowly, creating lower returns, and investing less in R&D than their US counterparts.

which is exactly what I’ve been saying. There are plenty of high performing companies in Europe, we just aren’t as aggressive in chasing growth for growths sake.

If you want to ask why that is, then I’d argue it’s more a cultural thing than it is to do with legislation.

Should that culture change? Personally I’d rather it didn’t. Personally I think America needs to change to become more customer focused because a lot of American businesses are really shitty to deal with.

I get this point will be an unpopular opinion on a VC forum like HN. But it just goes to demonstrate that the situation isn’t so black and white as you’ve been making out.

[dlkf]

> OVH and BT for example. Both of which predate AWS and GCP.

How is this not an own goal? These companies had a head start and they still lost. Not by a little, but by such a staggering margin that AWS does two OOMs more revenue.

> I literally just said I work for an AI tech company in Europe.

The argument is not ”there are no AI companies in Europe.” The argument is ”there are no competitive AI companies in Europe.” The only one I can think of is DeepMind, and they are A) English (no longer EU) and B) were acquired by Google ten years ago.

What are these European tech companies that are competitive with Nvidia, OpenAI, Google, etc? I’d like to learn more.

> You do realise that London, Berlin and other European tech hubs have their fair share of talented engineers who have moved to that country for work too?

A lot of them work for subsidiaries of American companies.

[hnlmorg]

> How is this not an own goal? These companies had a head start and they still lost.

They’re hugely successful corporations. Saying they’ve “lost” is a tad ridiculous.

Plus monopolies are bad for innovation so you could argue that Europe has a healthier ecosystem because it is tougher on monopolies than America.

> The argument is not ”there are no AI companies in Europe.” The argument is ”there are no competitive AI companies in Europe.”

You phrase that like it was a quote but in fact it wasn’t. The point being argued was that AI start ups couldn’t exist and I demonstrated they could.

Europe is also a hotspot of AI research:

https://odsc.medium.com/top-ten-european-ai-research-labs-fo...

> The only one I can think of is DeepMind, and they are A) English (no longer EU) and B) were acquired by Google ten years ago.

England was in the EU 10 years ago, EU legislations were carried over to English law after “Brexit” and the fact that they were good enough to be bought by Google also demonstrates that European companies can be seen as a threat.

> A lot of them work for subsidiaries of American companies.

And a lot of them don’t. I had my worked for a single American subsidiary in my 20 years of experience in Europe. Same is true for a lot of my friends too.

I really do get fed up with how some Americans believe it’s impossible that any other country could be successful.

[dlkf]

> They’re hugely successful corporations. Saying they’ve “lost” is a tad ridiculous.

Let’s quantify it so it’s not ridiculous. Since getting their head start, they have ”lost” about 90% of total market share to American companies who are doing a better job. And this is before the new transfer framework that cane out this month. What is the value prop of OVH without regulatory capture?

> Europe is also a hotspot of AI research

This is absolutely true. Amsterdam for example produces outstanding ML research. But where do their freshly minted phds go? American companies!

> I really do get fed up with how some Americans believe it’s impossible that any other country could be successful.

For what it’s worth, I live in northern Europe. As you point out, European universities are great. They are an AI research hotbed and they produce highly capable undergrads. But this clearly isn’t translating into world class tech companies, and we should ask ourselves why.

[hnlmorg]

> Let’s quantify it so it’s not ridiculous. Since getting their head start, they have ”lost” about 90% of total market share to American companies who are doing a better job. And this is before the new transfer framework that cane out this month. What is the value prop of OVH without regulatory capture?

This is a different argument to the one originally pitched though. And you cannot just assume the reason OVH hadn’t exploded like AWS did was due to EU regulation.

> But where do their freshly minted phds go? American companies

Again, I work for a European AI tech firm.

> But this clearly isn’t translating into world class tech companies, and we should ask ourselves why.

I think it is. I just think European tech firms are generally happier to grow organically. I think it’s more a case of different cultures. America is all about growth above all else. Whereas Europe is often more about user experience. European firms are often less aggressive at advertising outside of Europe too (maybe that’s a language barrier?)

I do honestly think the European tech market is healthy. It’s just different to the US market. The problem is the American school of capitalism is all about market dominance whereas European companies seem a little less obsessed with that. But that doesn’t mean Europe isn’t doing some exceedingly good work.

As a European, I value the fact that we have such a vibrant ecosystem.

[FirmwareBurner]

>European developer brain drain will continue with the brightest minds coming to America.

No need to deal with all the US emigration issues and challenges. US big-tech already have offices in Europe where European devs, scientists and researchers contribute to the prosperity of the US tech sector because they get paid more than at EU companies, while still getting to enjoy the benefits of living in Europe vs the US.

[YetAnotherNick]

Paying 1/3rd for the same cost of living.

[hnlmorg]

I’ve hired and worked in both California and Europe. The cost of living is definitely not the same.

[YetAnotherNick]

What's your point? There are places in California more expensive than most of Europe, and there are places in Europe which is more expensive than most of California.

What I said was that if you take two cities which have same cost of living, the salary is like 2-3x higher in US.

[hnlmorg]

I thought my point was pretty clear: there isn’t two cities with the same cost of living AND where the US still pays 2-3x higher in the US.

Every time this conversation comes up on HN, the only examples people can cite is when remote working is taken into account. Which isn’t a fair comparison at all.

[jdthedisciple]

Haha, sad but seems true on the face of it?

[fxtentacle]

European LLM beating OpenAI davinci at NLP: https://www.aleph-alpha.com/luminous-performance-benchmarks

It'll probably be "good enough" for most industry usecases ;) And you can run it offline and on-prem, which is a big deal to the many companies who DO NOT want their internal data leaking to OpenAI.

And the Carrefour AI stuff is hosted on OVH cloud (in France), I believe: https://www.carrefour.com/en/news/artificial-intelligence-op...

OVH has roughly 15% of the revenue that Google Cloud makes in Europe. So I'd put them at a similar size to Oracle Cloud, but clearly larger than DigitalOcean.

[zirgs]

Not everyone wants to uproot their life and leave their friends and family behind.

[l5870uoo9y]

I haven't spoken to a single technical person in Europe who doesn't despise the GDPR. It is only praised by the Eurocrats themselves or the whole pack of NGOs/think tanks who lives off EU funding. As a guy with a startup I naturally fear this will be as counterproductive as GDPR or the decades of lawsuits against various foreign tech corporations. The fundamental problem is however with the political class.

[sensanaty]

> I haven't spoken to a single technical person in Europe who doesn't despise the GDPR

Then I suspect you haven't spoken to anyone technical. Every single person in my company on the dev team (myself included) is extremely pro GDPR, not the least because it provides us safety from leeches that would try to impose some horrid user-violating tracking in the app we make.

The greedy suit wants us to track every millimeter of the user's mouse on the page? Nope, thanks, better luck next time!

> As a guy with a startup...

If your startup can't exist without hoovering infinite user data in perpetuity, then your startup shouldn't exist.

[panzi]

I agree. I just wish there would be a browser setting where you could say "only ever functional cookies" and never see a cookie banner again. But I guess that would need to be forced on companies via another legislation. The free marked doesn't do such a user friendly thing.

[viraptor]

Consent-o-matic does that https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-mat...

[panzi]

I want it to be standardized and guaranteed that it works with every website and every browsers. E.g. if something like the `DNT: 1` header is set don't even show me a consent banner, only give me functional cookies. And a law that requires websites to do that. Then there is no need for an add-on that constantly has to play cat and mouse with all websites and that only is available for certain browsers.

[snordgren]

The problem is that many European startups don't exist because potential founders don't want to have to deal with GDPR when they could focus on building a good product first.

And yes, tracking what users focus on is very relevant to building a good product. But that kind of entrepreneurial mindset is largely absent in Europe - my guess is most Europeans with such a mindset eventually go to America, whether they were born in 1850 or 1985.

[sensanaty]

> ...when they could focus on building a good product first

So not tracking every single molecule of detail about your users is incompatible with building a good product?

If being entrepreneurial means that I have to violate my user's privacy then I'd rather not be an entrepreneur, thanks. And again, if your business can't survive without being invasive and malicious to your users, then your business shouldn't exist. You won't see me or anyone else reasonable weeping about the dissolution of such entities, either.

[ahzhou]

If you’re building B2B software, It’s not that you can’t track but rather that you need to spend time building data retention infrastructure before customers would even consider trialing your solution.

[hnlmorg]

There are no shortage of European startups and GDPR is really doesn’t prohibit a startup…unless your business model is trading personal data. And if it is, then you deserve to be regulated.

[astura]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16954306

[hnlmorg]

One press announcement from 5 years ago isn’t proof. Companies shutdown all the time and cite reasons beyond “our business model just wasn’t profitable”. Many other companies are just Trojan horses for data harvesting — and if those get shut down then good riddance because they’re exactly who GDPR was intended to protect us from.

If GDPR was really that problematic then it would be all over the news instead of a few nationalists outside of EU arguing about hypotheticals on random message boards.

[omnimus]

If your product requires selling user data then maybe its not so good of a product.

GDPR doesnt prohibit you from monitoring your product. It just gets very serious when you abuse users without them agreeing.

Like Threads not launching in EU because of that.

[squarefoot]

> I haven't spoken to a single technical person in Europe who doesn't despise the GDPR.

I'd like to know those people, especially if their job is connected in any way to the practices the GDPR is fighting against, because, although it may have been created better, I can't find a single reason why ordinary honest people should believe the GDPR shouldn't exist.

[csunbird]

I am a technical person living in EU and I approve GDPR wholeheartedly. Many of my colleagues are also approve the law to full extent.

[nforgerit]

I am a technical person living in EU and changed my mind about GDPR and the upcoming laws like AI Act and CRA, now thinking it is embarrassingly stupid trying to achieve any means of personal privacy that way.

Let alone Mozilla (non-EU) and browser extensions (like ublock) did more for personal privacy than any of the aforementioned laws. And in contrast to creating a "level playing field with Big Tech" they made tech business in the EU a morass of legal insecurities for small businesses while big corps are still happily intruding individual's privacy in ways that our current legal system cannot even cover.

[paulluuk]

How so? GDPR has done so much for personal privacy, I can't see why you would think it's stupid. It's been a pain to implement when it was introduced, sure, but since then it's pretty much become routine and privacy has become a key value of nearly all (EU) tech companies.

[PartiallyTyped]

Adding a few more data points here, my colleagues and friends (all of us technical people), approve of GDPR.