[beernet]

Absolutely not, even if Europe was given all of the compute in the world. The issues are much much worse. Starting at "data privacy", continuing with the "EU AI Act" and just an overall mindset of regulation and German angst. Many structures in the EU actively prevent and fight against innovation. Oftentimes more subtle but the consequences stay the same. If you ever had to use one of the "sovereign" AI provides such as StackIT, OVH and the-like, I feel with you. It is just so bad in terms of product and performance, there is no comparison at all with Hyperscalers, and it shows. Eventually, it's a cultural and structural problem along the way and the future here looks horrible.

[rootlocus]

We can debate the details and implementation but EU legislature is, at least in spirit, trying to protect human rights. What does it say about progress that the same laws that protect human rights also stifle innovation?

[JumpCrisscross]

> EU legislature is, at least in spirit, trying to protect human rights. What does it say about progress that the same laws that protect human rights also stifle innovation?

As you said, in spirit. In fact the EU’s AI Act is not really human rights legislation. (It exempts military and national-security uses.) Where it comes close, e.g. in seeking to ban facial recognition or social scoring, it does so clumsily.

So in practice, the EU has passed a series of laws that essentially make AI a monopoly of military and intelligence-community interests while forcing its consumers to use foreign products. Not exactly a win.

[cccbbbaaa]

> (It exempts military and national-security uses.)

The EU cannot legislate on national security matters.

[JumpCrisscross]

> EU cannot legislate on national security matters

Sure. Legally, makes sense. Practically, if you want to do all those things the legislation purports to be doing for human rights, you just have to get the right general or spy or police chief on your side. That makes the whole scheme a bit of a boondoggle. Lots of friction. Remarkably little tangible benefit.

[overfeed]

> Sure. Legally, makes sense. Practically, if you want to do all those things...

If you had just owned up to how you were mistaken about EU legislative limits - confidently stated - I probably would have taken everything else in your initial comment at face value.

Your doubling down into unfalsifiable territory has me thinking your arguments are feelings-based with post-facto justifications.

[JumpCrisscross]

> how you were mistaken about EU legislative limits

I’m not making any legal arguments. The fact that the EU can’t legislate on those issues doesn’t change that its AI Act has those loopholes.

> unfalsifiable territory

No, I’m not. If the AI Act constrained any actual risks, that would falsify my assertion. I’m saying it in practice doesn’t. Those capabilities are still being built, just not in Europe. And they’ll still be sold to Europe, just to its governments to use however they want, not to its people.

The EU doesn’t have the power to write AI legislation for human rights purposes. It does have the power to throw gum into its AI industry’s works. It did what it could. Which is very little of the former (by constraining B2C and B2B, sort of). It did a lot of the latter.

Congress can’t do a lot of things. Passing something stupid and then complaining that the reason it isn’t competently written is because of Constitutional limits doesn’t absolve the stupid bill.

I’m not an expert on EU law or AI. But I do make capital-allocation decisions around this stuff, and I know enough to know that as currently configured the only main AI business to do in the EU is in selling it things that kill or surveil.

[pertymcpert]

I read their post in the way they intended. Regardless of whether they can, the fact that they fail to cover all the bases makes the legislation almost useless.

[lwhi]

I don't think you're able to understand what the alternative looks like.

There is no way I want America's future.

[avemuri]

Please explain. Thanks isn't as self evident as your statement assumes.

[lwhi]

No thanks. If you can't see it for yourself, that's on you.

[boothby]

> What does it say about progress that the same laws that protect human rights also stifle innovation?

Innovative methods to destroy human life are "stifled" by measures intended to preserve human life. What to you mean by "progress" -- the betterment of the human condition, or the enrichment of the few and powerful?

[philipallstar]

If someone gets rich because they provide an affordable useful service to millions then that is definitely progress. They should get rich.

[satvikpendem]

And that is the difference in philosophy between the European and American mindset, and why America actually innovates.

[lwhi]

That's why American will become a full dystopia before Europe.

[philipallstar]

Europe isn't a dystopia because it could import American innovation. There's a reason Germany car manufacturers were never going to electrify by themselves.

[Gud]

Europe innovates too.

[disqard]

This sounds like PG's essay on the front page (today or yesterday).

[philipallstar]

It's just a very obvious point, evidenced by where most companies end up being created. Europe's main innovation failure is a failure to recognise the value in taking a risk, and instead to reward people who don't from the people who do. But that still makes it a good place to do bread and better work - old school fabrication of cheap, old-process chips is a good example.

[mmarq]

EU legislature is an actual corpus of laws. It’s imperfect, but it’s arguably better than having a guy that can block a model or threat companies because they crossed him.

[bluegatty]

No it's not.

Europe has no models to even block.

The US has a guy who occasionally can screw things up for a few weeks, but who will be gone in a while.

You have it upside down: the innovation and the stuff is the valuable thing, the laws are there to help us organize ourselves a bit after the fact. They're always a secondary concern to the extent that the vast majority of civilization is working with one another, doing material things wherein the law usually is there as a backstop.

There are some ugly things here and there but by and large - 'cookie settings' has not materially improved people's lives - and not nearly as much as the innovations on the web themselves.

Doing is primacy, regulating is always secondary, with only a few exceptions.

The EU is in really really bad shape on industrial issues on a continental scale - 'too many regulations' is actually not a root cause (it's a big drag, but not root), but it's also not for the most part some kind of advantage.

You see the same thing play out with defence and other things.

Having to beg the US for help with Ukraine, for Patriot munitions, Starlink, advanced intel, for 5th Gen gear, mid range ballistic missiles - it's an existentially disempowering posture.

Human rights won't matter in the areas where the Russians have conquerd or destroyed. Again, here EU/Euro governance issues loom large.

'Do the thing' then as you go along, think about some guardrails or whatever, but the 'do the thing' is the hard part that deserves most of the focus.

[satvikpendem]

Exactly. Europe makes the process and bureaucracy the end itself rather than understanding that they are one part of a means to an end, of actual innovation. People don't call Europe a mausoleum for nothing.

[bluegatty]

Nobody calls Europe a mausoleum.

It's vibrant and productive, just not at the 'next level' and it lacks some industrial dynamism.

[sajithdilshan]

Exactly, it’s quite funny that everyone equate US and US legal system to Trump. The founding fathers created a constitution that can whit-stand and survive people like Trump and still the Republic would thrive. Trump would be gone in few years but US would still be there like it has been for the past 250 years for the people by the people.

On the other hand EU started as an economic union and has rotten into a behemoth that tries to control every aspect of Europeans. It was not created by the people for the people, rather a bunch of bureaucrats to exert their power and establish authority. At the start EU has done a lot of good things as an economic union, but at its current form, it does more harm for the growth of Europe rather than helping

[sumeno]

The founding fathers created a document that was already struggling with modern realities prior to Trump. 250 years is not a particularly impressive amount of time for a country to not fall apart.

[virissimo]

The U.S. Constitution is older than the current constitution of every EU member state and has remained continuously in force longer than any of them.

[joe_mamba]

>250 years is not a particularly impressive amount of time for a country to not fall apart.

250 years is older than almost every country in Europe (by that I mean current borders and form of government, not the ancient historical ones).

Most were monarchies or various forms of dictatorship till only a few decades ago and finally settled on their current borders only after WW2 or the fall of the USSR or the Yugoslav wars.

For example Spain had its first democratic elections in 1977 and then the UK was dealing with "The Troubles" sectarian conflict in northern Ireland. Europe always was a powder keg around forms of governance, culture, religion and sects. All that is not something that goes away overnight just because EU membership happened.

In contrast, 250 years of continuous governance and conflict free stability is super impressive by that standard.

[sajithdilshan]

Care to elaborate on concrete examples on where it struggled? 250 years is quite impressive even if you don't believe it or not because only a handful of countries in the whole world has an older constitution.

[frollogaston]

US Constitution has aged pretty well. Some things in there don't seem as relevant today, but some are more relevant now than ever.

[bluegatty]

"250 years is not a particularly impressive amount of time for a country to not fall apart." ?

Sure it is, it's very impressive.

What other nations have lasted that long?

Chinese Dynasties usually collapse within that range.

Aside from the UK, maybe Sweden (?) which have been fairly contiguous, most nations are more short-lived. France is on it's 5th Republic in the same time-frame.

America is way more than the gong show in charge right now.

Most of the 'tests' of it's integrity are due to really just that one guy.

But you're right to point out inherent problems with the Union.

Because EU is not a 'right wing flag waving' entity, we don't really think about it in terms of 'nationalism', but the EU has among the loudest, most clearly visceral and virulent nationalist supporters.

You can say anything you want about national governments but critique of the EU is met with a lot of rancour.

I've worked for EU bodies, it's full of well meaning people and it has tremendous value as an economic unions, but as a political entity it has existential flaws, too many to name, and it is absolutely an elitist project and it absolutely has a 'regulate first' attitude, which is quite upside down.

'Doing The Stuff' matters 10x more than 'Talking About The Stuff'.

[mmarq]

> The US has a guy who occasionally can screw things up for a few weeks, but who will be gone in a while.

We have all just realized that the American Constitution is the jurisprudential analogue of the Albanian virus (https://github.com/AriBjornOlafsson/Albanian-Virus). I wouldn’t take it for granted that what has happened up to now, before this new twist, will continue to happen in a world where being Trump’s friend is enough to change the NASDAQ listing rules.

[frollogaston]

The cookie stuff is hilarious. I went to the EU recently, and the banners were so bad that I started using a US VPN.

[nekitamo]

You can protect human rights without stifling progress. It's not a "pick one of the above" situation.

The EU can and should reform many parts of its sclerotic laws and bureaucracies. Whether it can do so before it becomes a subservient puppet state which serves as a battleground for competing powers remains to be seen.

[cess11]

The usian 'frontier' "AI" corporations are involved in severe human rights abuses and war crimes.

I'm not so sure the ideal should be to substitute for those.

[poszlem]

That's a bit like arguing that the USSR was, in spirit, trying to defend workers' rights, and therefore we should not have opposed it. At some point, the gap between what something claims to be "in spirit" and what it actually is in practice becomes too large to ignore.

[noddybear]

Right, the purpose of a system is what it does.

[red75prime]

> EU legislature is, at least in spirit, trying to protect human rights

Protect human rights as defined by EU legislature, obviously. And privacy in public places, for example, doesn't seem to be an undebatable human right.

Heck, I hate street views disfigured by huge privacy blobs.

[mopsi]

  > Heck, I hate street views disfigured by huge privacy blobs.

Why should you - from the other side of the planet - have an unrestricted view into my front garden at your fingertips?

[red75prime]

Why shouldn't I? Your garden is not of a particular interest to me. It's just one of millions of gardens that I might look at as a part of scenery, or to get my bearings if I happen to be in the area. You'd be better off fighting street views in general, unless you are OK with the Streisand effect.

[mopsi]

I prefer not to have views of my home permanently archived and made available to anyone in the world, unless they can present a reasonable need for it. City planners? Go ahead. Local people for navigation purposes? Go ahead. But some random bloke from another continent? That's clearly too far.

Services like Street View should have distance-based friction to preserve privacy. The further you are, the less (or at lower quality) should be available, to keep it proportional with the effort required to inspect the place in the real world.

[zarzavat]

This is just NIMBYism, literally.

Street View is one of the most amazing technologies ever invented. It brings humanity closer together. No longer do you need to get a visa and get on a plane to see what the world is like in a particular place. You can just look on street view. Throughout history people have given up their lives for that kind of world knowledge.

Your inclination to ruin one of humanity's greatest achievements with distance-based blurring to protect the privacy of what is already visible at street level is just sad.

[warkdarrior]

> Services like Street View should have distance-based friction to preserve privacy. The further you are, the less (or at lower quality) should be available, to keep it proportional with the effort required to inspect the place in the real world.

How would the website validate how far I am from your neighborhood? What if I am your neighbor but I am traveling this week? Can I still check Street View of my neighborhood? This is how we get websites to require ID-based verification for everything.

[red75prime]

OK, feel free to ruin experience for millions of people.

[lwhi]

> Your garden is not of a particular interest to me.

They why on earth do you care?

[jimbokun]

That bureaucrats can kill any kind of progress with the best of intentions.

[nxm]

"I'm from the government, and I'm here to help"

[yeoyeo42]

this is true, but in practice the EU and its local governments have a giant issue with incompetence when it comes to the specifics of regulation. it's overregulated and sometimes even in such ways that it doesn't even achieve the protection it seeks to generate, so a net loss in both directions.

[BjoernKW]

> We can debate the details and implementation but EU legislature is, at least in spirit, trying to protect human rights

That's an unfounded assertion. Of course, politicians will claim this to be the case. I don't see how patronising citizens protects their human rights, though.

[moffkalast]

It's certainly a good question. On the idealistic side it's the right choice, people should have the right to have a say in their own data since it's implicitly copyrighted. GDPR has done wonders to prevent careless personal data leaks that are so common in the US, and other kinds of abuse.

In a more practical view though I'm not sure if it'll do anything to stop job replacement from automation as such. Most corporations seem all to eager to make deals with OAI or Anthropic here anyway, and if not that it'll be Chinese ones.

There is a question of "representation", like if a model cannot be trained on the data of one specific country with a specific language, then it does not learn it and the people of that country are now at a disadvantage when trying to leverage the result. Maybe that's a good thing, maybe not, depending on the perspective of how the model is being applied relative to the average person. If it's something that makes their job easier then it's a negative, if it's used by the government to automate scanning all chats then it would be beneficial for it to suck. For widespread languages that doesn't apply of course, so the UK and Spain might as well be exempt.

In general I think it's good for the EU to try and slow down adoption of bleeding edge tech so the US population with its lack of regulations can act as guinea pigs and absorb most of the early damage until we figure out what is the best approach when we get around to adopting it. Even if that means missing out on potential early upsides too. An old example is lots of late adopters going straight to gigabit fiber instead of being stuck on copper DSL.

[BjoernKW]

> GDPR has done wonders to prevent careless personal data leaks that are so common in the US, and other kinds of abuse.

Has it? I still have to see evidence of that. What GDPR definitely has achieved, though, is people engaging in pointless busywork out of fear some busybody is trying to have them fined for being in violation of GDPR.

> In a more practical view though I'm not sure if it'll do anything to stop job replacement from automation as such.

Again, I fail to see how automating jobs is supposed to be something negative. If a job can be automated that means humans ultimately can engage in more worthwhile endeavours. Most modern jobs would have been completely alien to someone from the 19th century. The same applies conversely. How many farriers do you know personally?

> In general I think it's good for the EU to try and slow down adoption of bleeding edge tech so the US population with its lack of regulations can act as guinea pigs and absorb most of the early damage until we figure out what is the best approach when we get around to adopting it.

Quite frankly, by that point there might be not be enough left of the EU to make such a (very) late adoption possible or even relevant at all. We're talking about a timescale of just a few years for a revolution that'll dwarf the Industrial Revolution (which took an entire century, give or take). Up until now, the benefits by far outweigh the downsides and if we're talking about catastrophic damage (essentially, the SkyNet scenario), EU regulation certainly won't stop a US AI from killing Europeans.

> An old example is lots of late adopters going straight to gigabit fiber instead of being stuck on copper DSL.

That's actually a very good example of how overly cautious behaviour in European countries leads to those countries being left behind. Up until very recently, for example, Germany's last mile Internet infrastructure was largely DSL-based (perhaps, still is; at least they're trying to make more use of fibre optics now).

[moffkalast]

Hmm well the practical point of GDPR is twofold from where I see it: the process being too convoluted and risky turns off some corporations from storing data entirely (maybe it's not complicated enough yet in that regard), and the deletion requests where I can send anyone holding my data an email saying they have to delete it all. I do it sometimes, maybe it's just a placebo and half I secretly hope it is because once someone inevitably whistleblows it, they'll be appropriately fined in the billions like Google gets regularly.

> If a job can be automated that means humans ultimately can engage in more worthwhile endeavours

Yeah if that were actually the case. Seems like the plan is to just automate everything we can in broad strokes, then wait if anything happens to turns up to occupy that portion of the workforce. Nobody seems to have any idea what to do with vast amounts of unemployed people who aren't qualified to do anything anymore.

I think the very possible end result is that there won't be any immediate new jobs in a meaningful volume in the time span when they're needed. As you say, the timeline can be very short, and in the US it certainly will be. The idealistic future is that UBI gets implemented, automation gets taxed and redistributed, so the economy continues to work. But that's a fantasy with the current ring wing wave across the world where any kind of social service is seen as communist money burning for some reason, pocketing that extra wealth through corruption will be the priority. We've seen this again and again in countries where most of the income is dug from the ground in some form, which is economically the same as a few companies making it all through automation. The end result is usually not great for the population. With the AI Act being very anti-authoritarian, banning credits cores, facial recognition, etc. it's a step in the right direction to compensate.

The likely result is probably gonna be some kind of army service and an increase of international tensions to justify a draft when we realize there's only so many extra Wolt drivers a population needs, and then those will go to Starship too. With a war economy you can do pretty much anything to maintain stability, the numbers are made up and the protests don't matter.

If a delay in adoption can help bridge this intermediate gap without complete chaos, millions will suffer a lot less.

[BjoernKW]

> the process being too convoluted and risky turns off some corporations from storing data entirely (maybe it's not complicated enough yet in that regard)

This is a common misconception by people who never had to deal with GDPR in a business capacity (including the politicians who have caused this mess). Corporations either simply don't care or they have their legal department deal with this. It's the small companies and self-employed solo entrepreneurs that suffer.

As for the economic ramifications, there will certainly be a massive short-term upheaval. However, going all Luddite - or even just slowing down the process locally - won't help. Regulation doesn't generate wealth, after all (although EU politicians would like you to believe that), and for something like UBI we need massive wealth generation.

[bluefirebrand]

You don't see how protecting the commons from being exploited by hypercapitalists for their own profit is protecting the rights of the average person?

[frollogaston]

It's not even doing that

[BjoernKW]

I don't subscribe to ideological categories such as "hypercapitalists". So, no, I don't see that.

[frollogaston]

These questions are getting more loaded each time. "You don't see how the EU fighting pure evil is a good thing?"

[michaelt]

> What does it say about progress that the same laws that protect human rights also stifle innovation?

Perhaps it merely says that certain good positive things stifle other good, positive things?

Having 24 languages is a good, positive thing for the EU's cultural distinctiveness, respect for citizens' heritage, and the fairness of the nexus of power not excluding speakers of any country's language.

And yet it's a major barrier to cross-border trade, military cooperation, popular support of closer political ties, and the prospects of any EU companies growing large enough to counterbalance the amazons and facebooks of the world.

A ban on cracking eggs serves the interests of eggs, while stifling the omelette industry.

[frollogaston]

That's a loaded question.

[MattDamonSpace]

“Human rights” as defined by the continent that brought you both The Enlightenment and The Holocaust

Feels like a reaaaaal roll of the dice

[frollogaston]

It's ok, they fixed the second one by making hatred illegal

[nradov]

And yet the EU legislature seems to be actively hostile to some human rights, such as the right to free expression and the right to keep and bear arms. How do you account for that discrepancy?

[mnewme]

European countries have higher freedom of press than the US. Bearing arms is not a human right in Europe, different culture.

Europe has more human rights protections than the US and stronger enforcement of them, even against the state, by many metrics. Freedom of expression ends where other human rights begin, is protecting hate speech and Holocaust denial really something worthwhile?

[nradov]

So are you claiming that human rights are subjective and not universal? Or that it's acceptable for the EU to violate human rights if the USA is worse in some ways?

Belarus is a European country. How is freedom of the press doing there?

[mnewme]

I don’t know why you think the American definition of human rights is universal?

It is. Look at the freedom of press index for example. And as the US doesn’t accept foreign courts, there is not really a legal apparatus against the state outside of the US, which many European countries do have.

Belarus is not part of the EU, nor did it sign many of the international human rights

[nradov]

I don't know why you think the EU definition of human rights matters at all?

The comment I responded to was about Europe. Belarus is part of Europe. As are Serbia, Moldova, etc.

[seb1204]

It's doing fine

[beernet]

> What does it say about progress that the same laws that protect human rights also stifle innovation?

Claiming that GDPR and the EU AI Act "protect human rights" is very, very far-fetched. How does the training of, say, Claude or GPT-X models, hurt human rights?

[atraac]

We forgot already that getting paid for your work is your right and LLMs were trained on stolen property?

[vintermann]

I didn't "forget". I never agreed that I had some natural right to exclude anyone from or demand payment for using bits of information I "made".

It's not also actually "getting paid for your work" when you're talking about copyright. It's "collecting rent for your property".

Once upon a time, artists and writers got conned into thinking that was a good deal for them, forgoing payment for work in return for a dangling promise of rent extraction. The vast majority of them were wrong.

[fragmede]

It might or might not be legal, but who's getting paid when ChatGPT uses knowledge from a phpbb forum from 2008? Is that human person well taken care of in today's society? I use ChatGPT too, but if ChatGPT's coming for all jobs, don't the humans that fed the machine have a right to not be lost and forgotten?

[JumpCrisscross]

> don't the humans that fed the machine have a right to not be lost and forgotten?

Honest answer, no, not if it was publicly published and available for free, not indefinitely.

From an ethical (not legal) perspective, 18 years seems long enough for something like that to enter the public domain.

[beernet]

Exactly. Even the German "Urheberrecht" has a deadline (70 years afaik, outdated and too long obviously).

[retinaros]

no its not. its about mass surveillance and mass population control. regulating, watching, punishing and jailing the taxpayers while letting millions of people enter illegally and destroy the society from both sides.

europe is huxley nightmarish utopia worst parts without any of the bright ones.

[LastTrain]

Some of those seem like good things TBH.

[throw-the-towel]

Yes, but they are incompatible with being on the forefront of AI.

[LastTrain]

Yep. I wonder if being at the forefront of AI makes for a better & more free society.

[pptr]

You can only make money if you produce value. If you stop producing value because your old industries decline/collapse and you miss out on new industries, your wealth will trend towards that of a third world country.

[noddybear]

Maybe. I would contend that wealth accumulation over the long term is a function of the strength of local institutions e.g educational, judiciary etc. This is effectively the thesis of ‘Why nations fail’. Europes relative decline will only continue if the institutions of the US (and others) continue to be robust and healthy. I am not sure if this can be relied on into the future.

[LastTrain]

Yes there are those two very extreme things and then there is every position in between.

[Yeask]

Italy sells bags made in China for 5k. We know how to produce value.

[bpodgursky]

The current question is whether being the minor partner in a relationship with the US or China makes for a better & more free society.

Westphalian norms are falling apart and countries will need to make hard tradeoffs about how to build enough economic heft to maintain their cultural values.

[Eupolemos]

Being on the backfoot will make us vulnerable to those who are not.

I do not understand how this can not be self evident.

[LastTrain]

Sure, but clearly you don’t mean at any cost, right?

[moffkalast]

It's not about how large the models are, it's how you use them in society ;)

[ux266478]

Not at all, they can just use the petabytes of data sold on the cheap by American and Chinese companies instead of their own.

[fxtentacle]

The thing that nobody talks about is how many EU citizens already are working on frontier models, just inside US companies. That’s why the prohibition was so crippling for Anthropic.

And, btw, the bang per buck that I got from OVH was better than EC2.

[signatoremo]

> The thing that nobody talks about is how many EU citizens already are working on frontier models, just inside US companies

Why don't you ask yourself: how come those brilliant European minds couldn't find a job that pays well enough at home? Why could they in the US? There are many more Chinese and Indian, and other internationals working for US companies, outnumbering Europeans. It's not like Europe was intentionally targeted by US companies.

Real GDP has grown 84% in the US since 2000 [0]. EU grown 40-45% in the same span. The two regions were basically had the same economic output in 2000. Europe has been left behind economically.

Living in Europe is nice (I love Europe by the way), but the question is why EU can't compete with the US and increasingly China. Sooner or later that'd affect your living standard as well. Look at how much China has caught up with the West in terms of quality of life.

[0] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1

[lava_pidgeon]

This questions are discussed a lot. I just refer to the draghi report and also in the start up field the underdeveloped financial market in the EU. Finance markets have a negative vibe (rich people, greed, causing huge problems like 2008, antisemitism) so most politicians didn't care.

[TacticalCoder]

> The two regions were basically had the same economic output in 2000. Europe has been left behind economically.

Which basically coincides with the introduction of the Euro currency. The dumbest currency ever created: a common currency for countries with different fiscal laws/different tax rates and different economic outputs. Since then one the Eurozone state already (partially) defaulted on its public debt: Greece.

My beloved EU is fucked. And not just because of that ultra-poorly and very probably short-lived currency that the Euro is: the EU is a socialist construction, by socialists, for socialists.

In 25 years of introducing the Euro they manage to kill the first industry of the most important economy of the EU: the car industry in Germany.

> Sooner or later that'd affect your living standard as well.

Oh but the EU is making sure the standard of living falls really quick.

For as if the EU wasn't falling into poverty quickly enough, politicians are at hard at work at importing millions upons millions of very poor people from africa and the middle-east. For the most part totally unemployable people (a politicians in Germany talked about 93% migrants without a job, that cannot speak the language and unemployable and used the term "a lost generation").

In my native city, Brussels ("head" of the EU), a recent report from a Belgian university estimates that 5% of the population of the city are undocumented migrants: undocumented means they aren't working. It's impossible to work without a shitload of paperwork in the EU. One out of every 20 people is an unemployable, unaccounted, undocumented, migrant. Let that sink in.

The EU is fucked way more than people imagine.

And anyone who thinks that the millions and tens of millions of migrants coming without any education are going to be the ones that shall save the EU economically is totally delusional.

I raised my kid in english, only every going to british school and now british college, and wife is working towards acquiring a new citizenship. Thankfully we've also got family in Japan (a country notoriously hard to get in), so we've got that option too.

We moved to a new country four times already, but now we're planning to leave the sinking ship that the EU is.

There's no future in the EU: the only way forward is that major european cities are going to keep turning ever more into slums.

[brailsafe]

Imo useful long-term innovation comes about during the conflict of fighting for and against the rate of technological change, and whatever proves inherently better is what's left after the dust settles. There's a point at which there's so much opposition that nothing innovative happens for too long, but uncontested innovation isn't something most people want either. If the future is uncompetitive but lagging behind the U.S and China, I'd struggle to see the problem

[matt-p]

Are we talking about the EU or Europe?

The UK, for example, is outside the EU and arguably Europes strongest AI hub birthing DeepMind, Stability and others. Home to top universities etc.

I think compute is certainly our weakest point but it should be possible to train a frontier-ish model on Isambard-AI if you supplement it with other London based commercial compute for post-training.

[mnewme]

Bullshit. The AI Act is not the problem, Mistral models are definitely usable and some were/are competitive.

European future looks bright compared to the political landscape the US has now

[sajithdilshan]

Political landscape of the US right now will change in few years like it has been changing for the last 250 years. USA does not equate to its current political situation. But EU would keep on rotting from inside and I would eat my hat if Mistral doesn’t go out of business in next 5 years

[noddybear]

It’s an interesting contrast that you claim that the USA does not equate to its current political situation, whereas conversely the EU is ‘rotting’ from the inside. Do you think this is a balanced and reasonable claim?

[sajithdilshan]

it is a reasonable claim. Trump would be gone in few years and the constitution guarantees it. What does EU has? more bureaucrats? EU doesn't even has a constitution and yet it interfere with the politics of sovereign nations till they bend the knee to Brussels

[lava_pidgeon]

There is a constant change in politicians and parties and views among people (hello 2022!) about policy topics inside the EU all the time. Do you seriously think politics in the EU stays the same?

[sajithdilshan]

It absolutely has. It's always more regulation, more bureaucracy and more red tapes. They are just creating more barriers to keep themselves employed and to expand the reach of their authority.

[weakened_malloc]

> I would eat my hat if Mistral doesn’t go out of business in next 5 years

Hope you're hungry. The Mistral are going to what most great European companies are good at - regulatory arbitrage. They're going to insert themselves everywhere within EU (French govt, etc) and extract value that way whilst delivering subpar services to what open weight Chinese models can deliver. Honestly they'll probably be profitable before most other AI providers are simply because there's very little pressure to improve models.

[sajithdilshan]

It could be true that French government might use it, but I hardly think Germans or Italians or any other government would trust Mistral or use it. Even though they are part of EU, they still don’t trust each other completely when it comes to national security and sharing intelligence. I can easily imagine BND fine tuning some Chinese model or still relying on American models

[HDThoreaun]

There will always be a place for domestically sourced AI I think. Even if Mistral models suck theyll get enough defense revenue that they wont go out of business

[sajithdilshan]

Sums up EU in a nutshell, if it cannot compete in the open market, fund it by tax payers money (defence budgets are funded by tax payers money)

[mnewme]

They do in many other areas. Look at ASML or look at chemicals

[HDThoreaun]

I mean US is doing the same thing with intel so not like this is EU exclusive

[sajithdilshan]

You cannot be seriously comparing Mistral to Intel. Intel might be falling behind right now, but they were pioneers in 90s and 2000s. When has Mistral ever been a pioneer on anything?

[Saline9515]

Do you think that companies and States will use "usable" models from Mistral (who has left the race anyway), or frontiers/near frontier ? It's akin to say that walking a good enough means of transportation and we don't need anything else. One day the guys in charriots will remind you of the dire reality.

[mnewme]

I am not denying Mistral is not top tier anymore, (except OCR and STT for speed/efficency) just that the AI Act is not the reason they are not.

But we will see, they have very interesting Enterpise Use Cases, like with Mistral Forge.

And YannLeCun decided to build in Europe as well

[0x3f]

> And YannLeCun decided to build in Europe as well

AMI has offices across the world. Fact is, companies often have at least an office where the CEO lives. Same when Musk kicked up a stink about 'leaving California'. It wasn't really anything of substance.

[mnewme]

Yes but you can make the reverse argument as well: many US companies have offices in Europe and often their research departments.

This whole US vs Europe discussions are fruitless anyways

[ToucanLoucan]

If your product can't function in a way that respects humans' right to privacy, your product is the problem, not the humans' rights.

[aspenmartin]

You can grumble about the way things are but Europe being so far behind a technological race with important geopolitical ramifications means that you guys are cutting off your nose to spite your face. Have fun with zero of European regulations impacting frontier development and then eventually having to depend on it.

[ToucanLoucan]

I am dying to know what the important geopolitical consequences are of not having a ChatGPT lolol

Oh gods our politicians will have to read their own emails, and write them too! We may never recover. Clearly there is no path forward apart from mass surveillance.

[aspenmartin]

You are totally right, reading emails and vibe coding saas apps is all we can do. Omg why didn’t we think of that? Someone get the pentagon on the phone and cancel the drone warfare technology they’re already using and proving out in the battlefield with Palintir. Someone also call the NSA: we don’t need to hack nor do we need surveillance and spying nor do we need robust defenses against all of this. Ah!! Also the president, we can surely cede the market benefits to other countries that’s totally fine.

[FridgeSeal]

LLM’s are nice. But if push came to shove, we could very easily continue on without them, or without them involved in every aspect.

Being able to write cutesy SaaS apps faster is neat, but not like, essential, the way water is.

[aspenmartin]

LLMs are a “nice to have” blows my mind. LLMs power autonomous drones that kill real people in real wars. Coding agents are the primary way people code. That and we get a GPT4->5 jump every 18 months. Are we on the same planet?

[garte]

LLMs conduct strikes on children which a human may not have done. so wow, you got a frontier model but you lost something there in the process.

[aspenmartin]

Why are we missing the point here: LLMs are of major geopolitical significance. Autonomous drones kill children, now what? Would you rather have a home grown frontier model capability to defend yourself? Or would you prefer to rely on the good graces of tech CEOs?

[fragmede]

If that's all you're using LLMs for, you've definitely fallen behind.

[FridgeSeal]

I like how “you’ve fallen behind” is the ai version of “you’re not gonna make it” from the crypto-bro days.

[aspenmartin]

My favorite part is how people compare AI to crypto as if they are remotely in the same universe of importance and impact

[0x3f]

Europe lost religion and gained this instead.

[throwaway-blaze]

Dont make the assumption that the laws and regulations in place respect human rights and are a 100% good. They also entrench EU bureaucratic power (and thus the power of the ministers) without regards to future technology.

State regs often fail to grapple with the future, and at best slow it down and at worst smother it.

[niemandhier]

Kimi was trained at cost, so were other models.

Sure some things are a hurdle, but in the end, being the first just means doing all the work.

[killerpopiller]

Did you read the AI Act?

AI Act regulates high risk AI systems and banns AI systems like social scoring. Most of the AI applications are not regulated.

Did you read the GDPR and follow court rulings regarding AI training. OLG Köln saw no violation in Meta‘s training of user data in Insta and FB.

It is obvious that you don’t know what you are taking about.

I’am tired of unfounded EU bashing. The guardrails in place are not hindering

[kgwxd]

"Innovation"