If French, German and British nations start competing (like in the old days) for AI supremacy, it will unleash a level of creativity that we long forgot we are capable of in Europe.
DeepMind - the company owned by Google, but behind things like AlphaFold is based on London. And one of the fathers of modern AI - leading the resurgence of research into neural nets - Geoffrey Hinton is British-Canadian.
He moved from Britain originally due to the difficulty in getting his research funded.
So the issue isn't one of intellectual capital - and while it's obviously the case that well place monetary capital is an issue - it's not clear to me what the real underlying issue is.
Perhaps Europe needs a tech/industrial revolution again - where the power shifts from the old guard to the new. Perhaps too many people in charge in Europe are from a certain class that studied history at university.
Sure the ideas go away away back - but most people had given up on neural nets after the initial excitement, and sure others were also working on it - however the difference for me is he used it to solve real world interesting problems - and by showing what was possible - that ignited the resurgence.
Now you could argue that the people in the 60's and 70's didn't have the compute available to make non-toy networks, and it was only applying the same techniques on bigger datasets with more compute that was the real difference.
Sure - but that happens all the time in science - every innovation is building on the shoulders of others and the assignment of the Nobel prize is as a result often rather arbitrary.
Also don't underestimate the value of reducing to practice - the difference between coming up with an idea and actually making it work in practice.
I wouldn't discount the issue of intellectual capital. There are just a handful of universities in the UK that produce world class level work in CS. While there are dozens of such universities in the US. Numbers like that make a big difference.
And if I remember correctly, PhDs in the UK are kind of weird compared to the US. Your thesis has to be research that you haven't published yet.
The most common degree for UK politicians is PPE - politics, philosophy and economics.
I'm not sure the problem is an understanding of economics, it's an understanding of how the real world works, and how to make it better - they are often too easily swayed by big lobby groups with vested interests.
We both know that's not gonna happen. Europe is way too entrenched in its ways by this point. The good ol' glory days that brought in Airbus and Concorde are gone and not transferrable to the modern, dynamic and very internationally competitive SW world, nor are its leaders strong and motivated enough to enact policy changes that favor disruption of the old money guard at the expense of the status quo. Case in point we have no SW giants, no Airbus equivalent of the SW world. All Europe's giants are decades to centuries old. 20 years ago EU's GDP was on par with the US's, now we're only half the US's GDP. We're cooked.
Plus, we first have to prioritize solving more urgent and important topics like affordable housing (WHEN?!), the collapsing pension and welfare systems which is a ticking timebomb, cheap energy, collapsing demographic (see affordable housing), illegal immigration, Putin's war next door, the rise of the right wing (see illegal immigration) before jumping into another pissing contest with the US and China on something that's not gonna help fix the pressing issues we have right fucking now. I don't see how we can recover from this downward spiral when I look at the inactions of our politicians who are just kicking the can down the road and blaming the EU and other countries of the union for their own systemic failures.
Winning the AI race might sound cool but it might also be similar to winning the race to the moon: a cool flex but not super useful to the general population if they can't afford a place to live or getting healthcare in a timely manner. Until ChatGPT can wipe your retired old ass in a care home I doubt many people will see AI investments as being a top priority.
You just wrote my thoughts in polite manner. I am adding up, that German universities have no capability to do applied research. All the time everything “applied” was not worthy for them. “Applied” was the level of Hochschule (higher school) type institutions. Even being good these institutions didn’t had good reputation. So the best and brightest went to universities far away from practical research applications. The system isn’t built for great AI race. Add poor salaries and yearly contracts for research positions and all the smart pupils are gone. Gone to work for Google or Facebook or even Huawei!
Imho death spiral could be turned by providing enough affordable housing. That would be really long term goal, but the democracies do not have long term goals - the time after election ist time before election.
It's not like the US doesn't have a problem with affordable housing, so I don't see how this plays any role in the divide.
Germany has plenty of applied research organizations, from universities (e.g. RWTH) to things like Fraunhofer. The funding schemes behind these organizations are horrible and I would argue that in many ways, they are machines to burn up potential. Even with all this, Germany has been doing okay on the publicly funded AI research front, but that is irrelevant. The US isn't leading because of publicly funded AI effort, but because of privately funded AI effort.
The problem with “build more affordable housing” in countries that are desperately importing the entire world in an attempt to keep welfare programs afloat is that the amount of housing required to be built EVERY YEAR is staggering.
When a new citizen is born, there’s 18+ years for the required housing supply for that person to be created. When a new citizen is imported, they need housing TODAY. It’s just not a sustainable model on a continuous basis, but no one wants to hear that.
Food isn't an apreciating asset who's value grows when you hoard it and is also easily transportable between free markets. I can't import cheaper land from abroad. I'm limited by what's around me. That scarcity gives it value. You can keep growing virtually infinite food in the same land. You can't do that with housing.
Government can't solve affordable housing. It is the problem causing unaffordable housing.
Housing affordability is 100% because we let people tell their neighbors they cannot build as much housing as they want to, where they need to build it more slowly. There's no middle ground, there are no acceptable structures of land use law if you want affordability. If you get to tell your neighbor how much housing they can produce, bureaucracy will form around that and it will drive up the price of housing.
>Government can't solve affordable housing. It is the problem causing unaffordable housing.
They CAN solve housing because, like you said, they're the ones causing it. They just don't want to because the housing bubble is making a lot of people rich.
I think if you drill down you'll find there's no "they" who can. The majority of voters are homeowners who benefit from restricting housing supply. Any state actor who loosens land use regulation enough that it actually lowers housing prices would likely be voted out.
The changes you see - like allowing ADUs - are inherently very limited impact so that they look good to those advocating for more housing without actually lowering prices.
What about SAP? What innovations does SAP make? Nvidia alone is worth 10 SAPS and US has about 20 Nvidias. It's not even a competition. It's like Usain Bolt vs Grandma.
He moved from Britain originally due to the difficulty in getting his research funded.
So the issue isn't one of intellectual capital - and while it's obviously the case that well place monetary capital is an issue - it's not clear to me what the real underlying issue is.
Perhaps Europe needs a tech/industrial revolution again - where the power shifts from the old guard to the new. Perhaps too many people in charge in Europe are from a certain class that studied history at university.