[antirez]

I really want Europe to be part of the AI development and research. And I strongly cheered for Mistral. But they are accumulating too much technological delay. This needs to be fixed, otherwise it will turn into yet another proof we are not able to run large tech with good results. Basically any Chinese lab is doing much better. It's not Mistral that created I don't want to say DeepSeek, but MiMo 2.5, Minimax 2.7, and so forth. There are only weaker and/or larger and slower (no MoE) models. Not good.

[sbinnee]

When it comes to MoE, to me, I remember Mixtral model that showed the viability of MoE for the first time. I was impressed by their technical report. To be clear, MoE idea was already out there, if I am not mistaken. If they have pushed Mixtral model family further, who knows they might have achieved the reputation of what the current Qwen family has. A missed opportunity.

[GaProgMan]

Compared to the UK Government which recently announced 10 million GBP for AI research, which will likely be scooped up by consultants. I think Europe is doing fine considering.

[antirez]

The first step would be indeed to join forces with UK, in order to don't be two entities, which is very unnatural to me.

[kergonath]

That Brexit ship sailed. It’s very difficult to do anything with the UK currently.

[gregorygoc]

No, we don’t need US’s Trojan horse in the EU

[foo42]

Interesting. Could you elaborate. As a pro Europe Brit I'm interested to understand this viewpoint. Is it a widely held perspective do you know?

[vrganj]

I think that while y'all were appreciated members and definitely had a lot to offer, you also had a lot of annoying carve-outs and kept stalling needed measures to federalize and strengthen the EU more so we can be a proper superpower in our own right.

Maybe it's good you left for now, maybe we can finally get these things done. And once that's accomplished and enough of the gammon has died off, you can always rejoin :-)

[disgruntledphd2]

The UK was a useful stalking horse for lots of smaller countries to push back against federalisation, it's not just them.

They also have the obvious place for any common EU market (which is desperately needed). Brexit has been bad for everyone involved.

[gregorygoc]

Exactly, well put!

[snowpid]

Jumping in and most people in Germany wouldnt see UK as an American trojan hourse. I dont think anti American countries like France and Danemark have a problem with UK being in the EU per se.

I can see most people want that UK wouldnt just get special treatment any more.

[kubb]

> But they are accumulating too much technological delay.

How so? Catching up is easier and cheaper than spearheading the lead.

[b65e8bee43c2ed0]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_Intelligence_Act#Pe...

Europe shot itself in the dick with this hastily implemented at the height of mass hysteria bullshit and now no sane company will build anything there. an AI startup in the US or China can be a boy and his computer. in Europe, the boy needs a dozen lawyers.

Mistral's sinking into irrelevancy despite the head start they had, the very promising early models they released, and the funding they receive, might very well be the consequence of trying to comply with all that crap.

[mhitza]

So let me get this straight. You think that Europe "shot itself in the dick" by making it harder to deploy AI that:

- manipulates, including subliminally (hope you'll like your subliminal Ads mixed into your LLM output)

- profiling for social scoring

- automated thread labeling as an individual, with no human supervision

- facetracking databases

- emotional and "well-being" monitoring at work or in schools

- + many other kinds of surveillance tools.

I hope you are joking.

edit:

For context this was a snippet of prohibited use, which the fines listed on Wikipedia (theoretically apply to), https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/5/

[disgruntledphd2]

No, all of that stuff is fine (I have read the AI act).

It's all the compliance stuff that will cause issues, particularly in non financial services businesses.

Each EU country will end up badly implementing a national regulator, and these will mostly be bad and stop good stuff from happening.

[Epa095]

You don't compete with anthrophopic from the basement. For that you need either a shit loads of money, or a government which are not afraid of getting very very involved.

There is a lot of Europeans working on AI, it's just that a lot of them work for American companies. Because of money.

[alecco]

I think both of you are correct.

[antirez]

Possibly yes but let me remember you that France, Italy Germany were against the AI act, so here something very odd is happening, that the EU funding nations are getting marginalized by the countries they welcomed on key topics for our future, and I believe corruption could be a big part of what is happening, both internal to those three countries and at an even more alarming rate in other countries.

[gregorygoc]

EU big nations getting marginalized: haha. The only reason there’s no US-like tariff on Chinese cars is because Germany was too scared it would lose its access to Chinese market.

[neonstatic]

> the EU funding nations are getting marginalized by the countries they welcomed

Thank you for reminding us that all animals are equal, but some are more equal

[antirez]

It's not a matter of importance, but that bad actors as they tried to do in Italy, corrupting EU parliament, may be doing the same with counties are have less visibility. A weak EU is not also in the best interest of countries that wanted the AI act, and surely not in the interest of their citizens, but there could be pressures.

[neonstatic]

I understand your point, I just object to the language and dividing the EU into more and less important blocks. If a voting mechanism is broken, that's where the issue is.

[alecco]

Who put a nepo-baby lawyer in charge of the big €95bn AI fund? EU bureaucrats living the 6-figure high life with chauffeurs and private jets in a bubble completely isolated from reality.

I hate the fake European foreign-backed right-wing parties but they didn't cause the current situation.

But I'm afraid it might be too late as the cancer spread and did too much damage. Insane regulations, no energy, looming demographic/pension crisis, tax hell, and collapsing industries.

[tardedmeme]

Way more important than this act are the police raids. Someone used your SaaS to send phishing (see today's front page HN)? They'll just take all your servers away. Goodbye business. Unless they think the general public would riot, so established companies are okay. You can't build a castle on a foundation of quicksand.

[sofixa]

Did you read even a summary of the AI Act?

The gist of it is very simple - depending on the risk of what you're doing with AI, you have to document why it did what it did, and be able to explain it; or you can't use it at all. So if you're using AI for mass surveillance, you can't; if you're using it for treating loan applications you need to be able to explain why it approved/denied; if it's a customer service chatbot, do whatever, nobody cares.

Not only is burden of the legislation fairly low (and a lot of it hasn't come into force yet), it is extremely reasonable. No, sorry, we don't want a UnitedHealthcare using a broken algorithm on purpose to deny as much care as possible and hiding behind computer says no.

[darkamaul]

Well , there isn’t also the opposite take from TechCrunch where they say: Why Paris may be the most important AI city outside Silicon Valley. [0]

While the EU loves its regulation, I still feel it’s too early to write it down in the AI race. It will not replace Anthropic or OpenAI any time soon, but even Google and Meta fail to do that.

If AI continue to grow and expand, there is enough space for many more unicorns.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/28/why-paris-may-be-the-most-...

[ggrelet]

Tbh, that article is not a take, rather an ad for Viva Tech and TechCrunch own tech gathering

[throw-the-towel]

As someone who has actually experienced the hiring market in Paris, I have a hard time believing this. The salaries are, unfortunately, pathetic.

[djvdq]

It's yet another time when EU is killing our own possibilities to build real competition to US or Chinese tech.

And yet another time they will be thinking aloud in few year "what happened that we are fully dependent on USA?"

[gspr]

So you're saying AI models should be allowed to freely "manipulate human behavior"?

[cm2012]

That is almost a meaningless sentence. Cats and traffic lights both manipulate human behavior.

[gspr]

You know exactly what the intent of the lawmakers was.

[cm2012]

No, I definitely dont. And neither do they, its hundreds of law makers. Meaning is usually sussed out through case law.

[disgruntledphd2]

In common law countries, yes. Most of the EU runs on civil law though.

[xienze]

The problem is that statement is a bit too open to interpretation. Ever had Claude piss you off by being stupid and talking in circles? Sounds like manipulation of human behavior!

[gspr]

No reasonable person would find a system's annoying behavior on its own manipulative. It could, however, be considered manipulative if it was made that way on purpose.