The paper has plenty of things, but seems to me the gist of it is that they want to secure the public procurement cash flow in lieu of venture capital? I may be reading this wrong, but all the labels and normative proposals listed point to that.
European AI. A playbook to own it
61–70 of 155 posts
Re: European AI. A playbook to own it
#62I've tried Mistral a few times, at first it seemed promising (though lagging) but at some point it seems like they stopped focusing on AI and shifted their focus to being a mouthpiece for EU policy and pushing for regulation. I can't really take any of their announcements seriously anymore. A couple of weeks ago they were calling for a European AI tax to pay creatives.
Sounds like the tax on recordable CDs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy Ridiculous, and it didn't take money from the right people or give it to the right people. I would expect the same from an AI tax.
Recordable CDs involved individuals making copies. AI is run by a couple of dozen people who give full access to other people's work, metered by the syllable.
It was never legal for massive corporations to record other people's work on CDs and sell them; that's the opposite of copyright. The comparison is absurd.
Re: European AI. A playbook to own it
#63I lead a European owned and operated Data/AI company, Hopsworks. We are the only competitor to Databricks/Snowflake/etc based-in and from Europe. We can still compete, as we have a deep research/industry background (ex-MySQL and KTH folks).
Crossing the chasm is harder from here. Even if you build a great product (we are best at real-time AI) - we had a paper at SIGMOD 2024 where we showed higher thoughput/lower latency by a factor of 4-40X Databricks, AWS Sagemaker, and GCP vertex - we lack the echo chamber. (Try the mental exercise where Databricks' peers acknowledge massive over-performance through a peer-reviewed paper and imagine how much noise it would generate). Still, we can replace our competitor at their largest European customer, Zalando, for real-time AI. But it's a much harder slog than it should be due to the 10X lower round sizes (due to 10X smaller VC fund sizes). European pension funds place way more money in US VC funds than in EU VC funds - that is self-defeating.
Re: European AI. A playbook to own it
#64I don't understand why European providers can't just host open-weight models developed by the Chinese, or distill Google/OpenAI/Anthropic models to produce their own models on the the cheap. Nobody acts like you need to invent steel to have a steel mill.
what's the point? The Chinese, Google and OpenAI are burning money and we get to use the service. Having AI providers locally barely creates any jobs, it's an easily substitutable service and it has (contrary to the claims by the AI crazies) very few national security implications.
Steel is a great example because we don't pollute our rivers with steel mills any more either. As Milton Friedman said, if someone wants to give you steel and you give them green sheets of paper, be thankful, nothing's easier to make than paper.
What are you losing, the bragging rights among nerds on the internet? Right now Americans are paying the energy bills, Sam Altman is paying for the compute, they make no money off it, and they're even publishing the models! So if push comes to shove, we can deploy them. But until then how is that not a great deal
Re: European AI. A playbook to own it
#65Cynical. Start by allowing remote positions in Mistral across Europe.
[deleted]
Re: European AI. A playbook to own it
#66> The question is no longer whether Europe can compete
What a nice tagline lol. You really can read it both ways.
Re: European AI. A playbook to own it
#67The glaring number to me is only 5% of VC funds vs 52% in the US. That's 10x more opportunity despite roughly comparable economies. As long as that is true, it seems like it will always be impossible to get an organic startup industry working in the EU. Any startup that is any good will almost certainly end up getting a round of investment from the US and most likely move their base of operations there. I wonder if r…
The funding allocation is a reflection of different cultures really. I’m from the UK but there’s no way there’s the same density, drive, and hunger to take risk, to the extent that you find in US. Also there’s a lot more synergy in the US vs a fragmented Europe.
There are places with the same entrepreneurial drive that are part of the EU. But look at an LP-facing deck for a VC fund in Europe, and I can't recall ever seeing an investment with a little flag of Poland.
My belief is the underlying dynamics are less about, generalizing about cultures. Like you're right that that's what US VCs say, and collective belief is truth in markets even if it is not truth in reality. The bigger factor is EU, meaning French, Dutch, German, Swiss and Italian capital, are concentrated into the hands of large, opaque family trusts, structured primarily around tax evasion first and foremost, and other feudal issues, rather than minimizing the downsides of real risk or whatever, and that feudal stuff means, why do early stage investing? Without that there's little innovation. Hence Mistral, a growth stage company that everyone is happy making the growth stage, "dot AI" and "dot EU" winner. Presumably for EU sovereign wealth to be forced to buy.
Re: European AI. A playbook to own it
#68The site starts with > The question is no longer whether Europe can compete, ... But it, too, do not ask myself this question any more. Since EU seems to have already lost completely. Even Proton's new local AI service uses Ollama, which was developed in USA and is pretty outclassed. Does HN say europe can do more than hope to catch up in five to ten years, if the race is still on then?
The best the EU can do is things like Proton, which is to say pretty old, mature services that all the difficult innovation has been done on in the US, and all the risk-taking done there as well on what's a good idea and what's not, reimplemented in simpler forms and sold at a reasonable price. It's like how after patents expire, generic drugs can sometimes be produced very cheaply.
Re: European AI. A playbook to own it
#69There's this sentiment in Germany that if you can't make in industry, you work for the government or - even worse - become a politician. It seems like Mistral took that to the next level; they can't compete so they do lobbying instead. Being European, I love the idea of European AI labs. But I wish there was more competition. That being said, as a German for example, I can't think of an AI company successfully traini…
In that case, hopefully the copyright mafia will take the money from US and Chinese LLM companies and redistribute it to the people who did the actual work fueling the models, such as myself. I did not spend 10 years writing (A)GPL code for all of it to be stripped of its license, remixed and sold for profit. Of course in a truly just world, the LLM companies who took my code without permission would beg with offers…
Can you prove your work was used in any of these models? And if so what percentage of your work constitutes the model?
Re: European AI. A playbook to own it
#70The glaring number to me is only 5% of VC funds vs 52% in the US. That's 10x more opportunity despite roughly comparable economies. As long as that is true, it seems like it will always be impossible to get an organic startup industry working in the EU. Any startup that is any good will almost certainly end up getting a round of investment from the US and most likely move their base of operations there. I wonder if r…
Not just startups or funding. Google alone has more AI compute than China and the EU combined. There's no shortage of capital in Europe. But nobody wants to take the risk. Meanwhile in the US, people are putting 10-100x the capital at risk. So you can say what you want about it looking scary to you to invest in the US, but the people with capital to invest clearly don't see it that way. More often when you hear VCs g…
[deleted]