[this_user]

That would imply that the EU has the ability to build its own, competitive AI ecosystem. At the moment, it's mostly just Mistral, and they have been way behind SOTA for a while now.

You can't just legislate this into existence, you also need the money and talent to do it, not to mention the hardware.

[rippeltippel]

Hopefully, EU-based Yann LeCunn's AMI Labs will develop foundational world models at some point. As I see it, the main problem in EU is not lack of talent: it's lack of investments. Mistral itself recently secured 4B, which is 50 times less than what it could have made in the US.

[includenotfound]

Investing in the EU is like burning cash. Excessive regulation, high costs and taxes (especially of human labor), and investors get punished for creating and growing companies.

Even if you overcome all of this and become successful, you'll get chased by politicians for having too much money (which is not allowed in the EU).

And even if you don't, today, it will be tomorrow.

Easier to just take a long haul flight to your favorite US coast and do it there.

[frabcus]

However true that is, it now has only to compete with the US, where any model could be shut down by the Government on a whim with no clear rules at any time.

It's happened once, could happen any time.

Not good for business!

[dgellow]

We have billionaires too in the EU, they obviously aren’t chased by politicians… wtf are you talking about

[includenotfound]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/10/super-rich-aba...

The rest who are not chased are usually deeply intertwined with politicians, and are running corruption schemes along them.

I'm not one to hate rich people (I'm a capitalist myself), but if any billionaires are to be looked at with skepticism, it's EU billionaires with significant political ties.

[dgellow]

Norway isn’t in the EU. A wealth tax isn’t „chasing billionaires“. It’s a local political issue…

[toxik]

You _can_ legislate it _out_ of existence though. The competence is there, no doubt. Just not the complete disregard for copyright law that is step 1 of training an LLM. Rules for thee but not for me, classic colonialism. The EU is so intertwined with the US that even Trump isn't enough to force a clean break.

[wg0]

Flip the rules put a blanket ban on US digital services and see what comes out of Europe within couple of years.

The only problem is - when US services are available, there's no incentive to bring anything to the market.

[joe_mamba]

>Just not the complete disregard for copyright law that is step 1 of training an LLM.

I guess you forgot that EU's unicorn champion, Spotify, started by distributing pirated music they stole off the torrents before getting the rights to that music.

Which invalidates everything you just said.

[toxik]

I think that proves the point more than anything. Spotify was allowed to live on because the music industry bought in.

[joe_mamba]

Except they could have killed spotify legally if they wanted to. Their luck was that Stockholm was the capital of the music recording industry so they had easy lines to negotiate with record label execs face to face to not get buried by the Swedish, EU and US laws they broke and would have sent them to jail.

Same thing will happen with the LLMs. Publishing companies will cut a deal with the LLM companies to get a cut off the books and IP they used for the training data.

So this is a very poor cope/excuse of why the EU doesn't have cutting edge models, because it's illegal to steal IP in Europe vs US.