[Insanity]

It's a tricky balance to strike. I don't want EU to fall behind further in the AI race, and I do want them to be more competitive in the tech landscape. At the moment, EU really isn't competitive in tech (and neither in tech salaries) and it leads to a certain amount of 'brain drain' as people move abroad.

So while I do understand the need for regulations, they shouldn't regulate themselves into irrelevance. I don't think there's an easy solution to this.

[mrtksn]

I don't think its about regulation, its the mindset. Since some time there's this trend of indie European developers with some who managed to make themselves a name like Peter Levels and be hosted on big podcasters and these people keep calling their projects "startups" and making about as much as a high street kebab shop(in this community they like to boost about their revenues). Levels is famous enough to be interviewed by Lex Friedman and in this 4 hours talk they mention how an American company just took his idea and copied his ways and made 30 million dollars by making an iOS app of it and Levels talks as if it never crossed his mind to be the person who did it and make serious money.

Also he constantly complains about regulations etc but some striking things come out of it from time to time. For example he complains that its hard to get access to the EU's supercomputer and compares this to US where you can just buy tens of thousands of GPUs from Nvidia and not go through the EUs bureaucracy and never occurs to him that you can do the same in EU and the the EU funded supercomputer is just an extra.

Its just so weird, the mentality is very different. Maybe it works when you are working on a niche and it is a good way of making a living or even getting rich but that's not how you build empires.

The regulations are just a meme at this point, no one seems to know what regulation stopped them from doing the thing they will do. IMHO the reality is that you can just built the thing in USA and access EU markets from there and there's no need for replication in EU, therefore EU has plenty of startups but very few scale ups and unicorns and that's not going to change unless EU closes its markets to USA.

[mentalgear]

Levels is all hype, no depth. It’s absurd that he frames himself as somehow “disadvantaged” by the EU’s HPC access rules, when those systems are explicitly reserved for scientific research, not for cranking out AI avatars or the latest “AI-generated game” cash-grab. Complaining that you can’t use taxpayer-funded supercomputers for your next hype cycle isn’t a sign of innovation - it’s Levels' so often displayed self-entitlement and pseudo-intellectualism.

[mrtksn]

Sure but he became the poster child of a certain trend. Besides, you can see the mentality all over the place.

Contrary to what the social media makes you believe, EU isn't run on tickets income for old building - the place is packed with high tech niche businesses but they don't seem to be interested much in scaling.

Even the Ruby on Rails guy, David Heinemeier Hansson, never went for dominating an industry, becoming a platform with investor money and become an Unicorn. They just keep making money. It's really cool, he loves his life and He's probably much happier than Zuck or Musk but with that approach you end up staying a niche instead of a behemoth like the American companies. In USA the instinct seems to be how to make this global and take all the money. The European approach is good for society IMHO, no enshitification once you circle the market however when your market is open to people who are willing to do the put a lot of money first, kill the competition be a monopoly or duopoly and then screw everyone and and make filthy level of money then you become one of those killed.

[pzo]

> Even the Ruby on Rails guy, David Heinemeier Hansson, never went for dominating an industry, becoming a platform with investor money and become an Unicorn

If something in europe has potential to dominate then it's eventually being bought by US capital, see Skype, Nokia. If someone is throwing at you 10+ digit check then it's hard to resist and even if you want to resist good luck with persuading your early investors about not taking the money.

EU doesn't have petro-dollar and as good money printer as US. EU doesn't also have citizens & big funds that ape savings into local stocks, another reason most companies IPO in US.

[logifail]

> I don't want EU to fall behind further in the AI race

Unless something changes, that's going to continue :(

According to Jensen Huang, "the AI race" will be determined primarily by the price of electricity.[0]

Until very recently the EU stated that being carbon neutral by 2050 was of overriding importance[1].

Which is it?

[0] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell... [1] https://climate.ec.europa.eu/eu-action/climate-strategies-ta...

[basisword]

>> Until very recently the EU stated that being carbon neutral by 2050 was of overriding importance[1].

I'm ok with that. Not every continent/country/economic bloc has to have the same goals. Competing with the US or China in the 'AI race' is a race you're probably going to lose anyway. And it's going to make fuck all difference to the vast majority of the population anyway. Healthcare, education, life/work balance. All much more important and don't require competing in the 'AI race'. The EU has made some missteps with its tech regs but it's worth it to be able to download or delete my data from any service and that's something Americans are also benefiting from as most companies didn't bother geo-locking it.

You could argue economic success has a knock on effect on everything else in a country and it does to some extent. But, while many European countries have their problems socially and politically over the last decade none of them have come anywhere close to the train wreck that is US.

[logifail]

> Not every continent/country/economic bloc has to have the same goals.

One potential outcome of that would appear to be a mostly deindustrialised Europe with low carbon emissions and no growth, and the rest of the world politely trying not to laugh?

> And it's going to make fuck all difference to the vast majority of the population anyway

https://joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/jrc-news-and-upda...

"In 2024, the eight highest emitting economies - China, USA, India, EU, Russia, Indonesia, Brazil and Japan - collectively contributed to 66.2% of global GHG emissions. Only the European Union and Japan decreased their emissions compared to the previous year (-1.8% and -2.8% respectively), while all others either kept them rather stable (China: +0.8%; USA: +0.4%; Brazil +0.2%) or increased them (India: +3.9%; Russia: +2.4%, Indonesia: +5% - the highest relative increase).

In absolute terms, India has the largest increase with 164.8 Mt CO2eq more emissions released in 2024 compared to 2023."

[naIak]

>Healthcare, education, life/work balance. All much more important and don't require competing in the 'AI race'.

Neither of which will improve by us being "carbon neutral".

[fyrn_]

Europe not being dependent on foreign oil is a worthy goal as well, it's not the US whcih could supply it's oil use domestically.

A lot of green infrastructure is also expensive upfront, but cheaper over the full lifespan. It's the kind of investment I like to see goverment making.

[logifail]

> Europe not being dependent on foreign oil is a worthy goal as well

Forget oil, Europe is going to be dependent on foreign everything.

[basisword]

I think taking care of the environment rather than burning through resources needlessly will improve life for us. But if you're looking for a more specific example, moving to renewable energy and getting off Russian gas and oil would be beneficial in many ways for Europe and at a most basic level would hopefully eventually lead to lower and more predictable energy prices for consumers.

[miohtama]

Finland, France and other countries can lower the price of electricity just by disconnecting neighbours like Germany from their grid.

[siva7]

Germany can be a leader in Green AI or emission neutral Chatbots.

[bootsmann]

Nuclear energy is carbon neutral according to the EU definition

[Arch-TK]

Is it not? What is it instead? Carbon negative?

[spwa4]

Greenpeace was founded to oppose nuclear energy, because it would lead to nuclear war (that was their position at least), which illustrates that, even now, nuclear power is considered not-green.

[Muromec]

Greenpeace is a big part of the problem, especially with most of the European left being aligned with them on nuclear hate.

[Arch-TK]

Being "green" is like being "organic" compared to being carbon-neutral which is something you can just calculate.

[telotortium]

Germany turned down all of its nuclear plants and is actively demolishing them. Good luck with that.

[andrepd]

Keeping the planet habitable, or making line go up? Truly a difficult choice...

More seriously: what is the benefit for the citizens of Europe to chase trends? AI is shaping up to be a bubble. Even if "market remains irrational longer than you stay solvent", what is the purpose? Clean air, clean water, all that has value. Line going up, what does it give me?

[Muromec]

>More seriously: what is the benefit for the citizens of Europe to chase trends?

If you sit out the trend, somebody else will have more money (or bigger army, or just an army that can actually shoot at things and people) and you will not be able to choose what trends to chase.

[wkat4242]

Exactly. Also, whatever those AI leaders invent, two months later the whole world has it.

I mean when GPT 3.5 came out it seemed amazing, but requiring a 8x Nvidia N100 or whatever guaranteed that id never have it at home. A year or so later llama 3.1 accomplished similar results on pc at home. It's a race but the winners are only slightly ahead and wasting a lot of money doing it.

[flir]

China's target is 2060.

[philjohn]

China doesn't have one side of the political spectrum trying to shutter any talk of renewables, they're just installing them at breakneck speed.

[naIak]

We just need to execute the side of the political spectrum that we don't like. That way society will really get ahead.

[logifail]

> China's target is 2060

"China plans to keep building coal-fired power plants through 2027 in regions where they are needed to meet peak power demand or stabilise the grid, according to government guidelines"

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/china-...

[flir]

And yet they used less coal in 2024 than they did in 2023.

Maybe it's just an economic downturn. But... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/26/china-breaks-m...

I just don't buy that carbon neutrality necessarily results in expensive electricity.

[l5870uoo9y]

Another factor in being competitive in artificial intelligence is the price of electricity, which is four times higher in the EU than in the US. Changing this would require a break with the “green industrial complex”, which is close to untouchable (to many EU politicians).

[whimsicalism]

I think there are plenty of ways to provide cheaper green power in Europe, if it is permitted.

In general, I don't understand the need to colocate data centers with the companies programming them - I'm sure there are many jurisdictions other than the US or EU that could spin up cheaper power.

[bpodgursky]

To start, EU data protection laws make it almost impossible to store customer PII overseas or send it to overseas data centers for inference.

[1718627440]

And as an EU citizen I like that they do. After all this is what they are for.

[whimsicalism]

interesting. sounds like the EU is getting the growth trajectory its voters desire, then - best of luck!

[andrepd]

Oh no, I live more years, work less hours, and breathe cleaner air, but unfortunately line goes up slightly less than in the US of A.

[1718627440]

Have you expected otherwise? What does the commoner gain from having there PII in the hands of large surveillance companies? In my expectation people that are not oblivious to that issue and don't have stake in such a company would be for such a regulation.

[xienze]

> Changing this would require a break with the “green industrial complex”, which is close to untouchable (to many EU politicians).

I’m sure like with everything “green” they can get around having to use cheaper, dirty energy by buying enough indulgences^w carbon offsets.

[whimsicalism]

Depending on the class of carbon offset, I think the comparison with indulgences is unnecessarily critical when it actually does net fewer emissions.

[Muromec]

The comparison is spot on -- if you smoke sigs and pay somebody who doesn't, you will still get cancer and the other person can get it too if you breath it out into their face.

Until there is no commercial carbon capture, it's all scam and accounting tricks. Sure, paying somebody else to decarbonise instead of yourself works in decarbonisign somebody else, but the emissions should drop across the board all the way to zero.

[whimsicalism]

> The comparison is spot on -- if you smoke sigs and pay somebody who doesn't, you will still get cancer and the other person can get it too if you breath it out into their face.

Right - carbon emissions aren't internalized in the same way as cigarettes.

[mjburgess]

But what is 'tech'? When we say the EU isn't competitive in 'tech', what technology capacity do they lack?

I think 'tech' as a category doesnt make much sense any more. It's like saying 'road-based business'. Most companies are 'tech' companies.

Ignoring the technical element, what are US megacorps that account for all the GDP growth of the last while?

Mostly ad market monopolies, then mostly massive-scale IP theft, etc.

I think the EU is 'behind' the US only in it's inability to be well-positioned to build massive rent-seeking megacorps. I dont see where-else this gap is supposed to be.

What, on 'tech' should the EU be doing differently? Just allowing megacorps to add 30% to every transaction?

If this US tech bubble bursts, it's not clear that the EU won't be better positioned to pick up the pieces.

[Muromec]

> what technology capacity do they lack?

Giving money to random tech schmoocks and seeing the valuation of their thing gettign to 1B, then lobbying for laws to make it monopoly. This kind of thing.

That and selling icecream flavor preferences of 1B people to guess who is more susceptible to brainwashing, so you friends can get reelected.

All very nice technology, including the one which destroys entire solar system to make a sacrifice big enough to summon Cthulhu.

[whimsicalism]

> Mostly ad market monopolies, then mostly massive-scale IP theft, etc.

Good point. I think that the EU has an opportunity to really grow here by focusing on intellectual property enforcement, patents, copyright, and generally more strict enforcement on making sure returns for ideas go to the first person to think of them. The EU already has a pretty strong governance lead and should double down on where its strengths lie.

[immibis]

Definitely! Preventing as much innovation as possible is always good for an economy.

[whimsicalism]

Sorry, I think I saw a similar comment recently - did you pay royalties?

[piva00]

Define "innovation", it's such an overused umbrella term that it's lost any meaning, usually when I read it in comments like yours I simply have no idea what you mean by it.

[chronciger]

>I don't want EU to fall behind further in the AI race

Buddy, EU didn’t even sign up for the race

[wkat4242]

It's not a race anyway. The Americans always make things into one. But it's mainly their obsession with being "number one". Being number two or three is just fine. We will catch up.

What I'm more worried about is that they'll drag us down into another financial crash like in 2007 when the AI bubble bursts and investors get pissed that they've spent trillions on hot air.

I don't mean to be a dick but I'm getting a bit tired of all this constant survival of the fittest mentality and the idea that they have the best country in the world when in fact it is pretty awful if you're not rich (especially when in poor health). There's a lot of things we do a lot better in Europe and I'm glad to live here. Especially the last year. I don't want Europe to become more like the US.

[gulfofamerica]

"If you're not first you're last"

Ricky Bobby

[chronciger]

> I don't want Europe to become more like the US.

Well, we will see. Seems to be happening anyway. Best of luck

[LunaSea]

I just hope that Europe won't have to pay for your fuckup like we did last time with your real estate bubble.

[Insanity]

Well there is Mistral.