[zmxz]

European here. You're spot on with your question. Europe is an extremely hostile place to start a business compared to USA.

USA embraced capitalism and is geared towards proving concepts FAST and enabling networking. I love that about USA and I miss that in Europe, when it comes to IT/Tech sector in particular.

I'm not aware if Europe produced anything of significance in the past 30 years, we're lagging heavily behind USA/China and that's a fact. One could argue that Linus Torvalds is European hence Linux === European but I won't resort to such petty claims.

We produced very little value. We're having issues due to language discrepancy. Even though a lot of people speak English, it's often the case that we Europeans aren't able to communicate as well using English as we can in our native tongue. The lack of unified language is visible. The diversity in culture drives people to favor their own, we're bad at teamplay (this is from my personal experience and I am guilty of this).

There's many valuable lessons we could have learned from USA but we failed to apply them. We have various freely available systems that are great at, say, education - but education means nothing when it's difficult to apply it once people are done with it.

I worked with plenty of people from USA and I had huge prejudices towards them, in terms of "they talk a lot" or "they are not as competent, they are really slow when it comes to pumping out code" but I learned I was wrong to the point it's not funny. If anything, USA is really good at starting and pushing projects out that actually work.

Ultimately, do we even have a microchip factory (we might, but I'm unaware of it)?

Sorry for the wall of text, I just wanted to explain my POV and agree with you.

Personally, I'd love to see movement in EU's tech sector. We're 30 years behind USA in tech. I won't touch upon quality of life or similar topics because I'm interested in exploring technology.

[deterministic]

Your mobile phone is most likely running a CPU invented in Europe (ARM). The next time you fly you are most likely going to fly on an airplane built in Europe (Airbus). When you buy your Ozempic you are buying a product invented in Europe. When you buy your prestige car you are buying a European car (Porsche, Mercedes, Ferrari, BMW, Roles Royce etc.) When you buy toys for your kids your are typically buying a European product (LEGO). When you buy your furniture you are very likely to buy European products (IKEA). I could go on and on ...

[satyrun]

I am an American but the idea of Germany not having a competitive LLM right now is pretty sad and embarrassing.

As an American, It is really hard to understand how this can be for a country with such an incredible intellectual and engineering tradition.

[mike_hearn]

It's not a lack of local talent. It's a combination of two governance problems:

1. Europe has no large data centers. It has no such datacenters because the Green movement is much more powerful in Europe than in America, and they have systematically blocked the expansion of gas turbine power in favor of over-builds of renewables. The result is Germany having the most expensive electricity in the world. It just isn't affordable to train an LLM in the EU. Notice how Elon Musk has imported gas turbines from around the world to power the xAI datacenter; that just wouldn't be allowed in the EU.

But, still, a German company could do so using US datacenters. Mistral in France has probably done it this way. But then you hit:

2. Copyright laws in Europe are more restrictive. Even in the US it's very unclear whether training an LLM on copyrighted works is actually legal, but the US courts are fairly efficient and US law has the concept of fair use, which is flexible enough to give them the leeway to decide it's legal. In Europe the fair use equivalents are either more restrictive or don't exist at all, and courts follow the local culture of being much less business friendly, so it's much riskier to attempt this. The EU as a set of institutions is much more in hoc to the press than people realize, and MUCH more so than US administrations are. They regularly side with copyright holders over tech companies in disputes in a mostly successful attempt to curry positive PR for the EU project.

It won't win me any friends on HN but both of these factors boil down to a lack of a strong Republican Party equivalent in Europe. I don't think Americans appreciate the extent to which their economic success is dependent on the strength of the Republicans, and they really should. If American conservatism collapsed or was taken over by the left, as has happened in parts of Europe, you'd be seeing the EU-ification of America very quickly.

[aleph_minus_one]

> I am an American but the idea of Germany not having a competitive LLM right now is pretty sad and embarrassing.

> As an American, It is really hard to understand how this can be for a country with such an incredible intellectual and engineering tradition.

As a German, I would claim that getting Germans on a hype train is incredibly hard.

I also cannot see anything that is "intellectual" about these LLMs. To me, the whole LLM scene is rather like "rich alpha tech bros are tech-broing; a lot of sycophants in the inner circle of these tech bros attempts to use the dictate of the moment to become rich fast; and a lot of real or feign AI fanbois attempts to rid the hype wave to make easy money".

[6510]

I think the hype train was the polymath omniscient oracle. With agents sanity seems pretty much restored.

With the absorption of entire markets the sober European view should be that the US approach was correct. Throw things at the wall until you have a wall full of things that stick. It looked pretty stupid until it didn't.

[aleph_minus_one]

> With the absorption of entire markets the sober European view should be that the US approach was correct. Throw things at the wall until you have a wall full of things that stick. It looked pretty stupid until it didn't.

This approach only works if you have an insane amount of capital to waste ...

[6510]

You don't know if it works, that's the whole point. European investors are like: How do I know 100% for sure this company will be a success? Why do I need this product? I have a car with chauffeur, why do I need a taxi app? I have a cook and a butler, why do I need a food delivery app? Pitching the LLM would be outright offending.

[aleph_minus_one]

> You don't know if it works, that's the whole point.

I am aware of that, and this is actually my point:

Since you don't know what will work, you can easily have a long phase of "duds" in your investments until you get one big hit. If you don't have a huge mount of additional capital lying around, as an investor you will go bust during such a long "starvation period".

That is why I wrote that this kind of investment approach only works if you have an insane amount of capital to waste.

[anthk]

Europe backs up tons of hardware design which without that the software companies in the US would crumble like dust.