41–50 of 118 posts
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The US banning those people from working on frontier models is perhaps the exact thing that would give you an opportunity, you would think.
The tech billionaires won't let such a ban stand. They may not GAF about random Latinos being deported from a field in Texas, but they won't simply give up people like Andrej Karpathy. Jared Kushner will get a sweet package of private Anthropic shares and everything will be forgotten.
I think due to a variety of reasons EU and US are on a road to divorce. EU will be wise to make that happen on their terms, but they do not seem to be ready. - Monopolies and related regulation. Of course US has its own companies being treated as monopolies so they will try to save them - Social systems including healthcare - Russia being next door vs far away (for US) - The whole AI buildout - A little bit of Libre…
>EU will be wise to make that happen on their terms, but they do not seem to be ready. It's too late for this. The time to execute this was 20 years ago when EU had leverage (the EU stock market was bigger than the US one in 2004, now it's half). Now that leverage is gone and EU is bogged down with massive domestic issues it can't recover from (some of which you mentioned), and starting a massive tech IP/trade war no…
I feel this is mostly to do with the EU having more companies that stay private for longer and partly to do with the USA's currency manipulation which maintains the dollar value artificially high.
This is a wake up call for EU, but it’s already too late IMO. ChatGPT was launched in 2022 and since then only company in EU which has released a model that is even closer to a frontiers is Mistral. With strong data protection, copyright and privacy laws, it would be a nightmare for any company to train models because activists lawyers would sue left and right. Even by some miracle they come up with the model, again…
To build frontier models you need VC money. There’s no VC money because VC believe that there is no market for a ‘EU Champion’.
There’s no market for a EU champion because internal EU market is not big enough for VC returns. Why invest in EU champion when the US champion is guaranteed to have better returns ?
And there’s no public alternative to VC either because that’s national level and national investment in EU doesnt cross national boundaries
Mistral actions reflect this, they need returns and they target the market where they can be competitive, which is the scraps the US labs cannot address. This is not enough to fund frontier lab research
Also the legal context on regulations is quite different from the US. In the US you can have unlimited damage, that is not the case in the EU, where regulation penalty can never as a matter of principle put the existence of the company in danger, and thus the application of the regulations is always a matter of negociation with the government. You don't have to respect everything all at once, size of the company and ability to actually implement the regulations are taken into account, which means that sartups are usually excempt.
Our best hope for non US citizens is for the Chinese companies to continue to improve their models.
Additonally, the Chinese AI industry is shifting away from open models and to American-style commercialization as well [2].
[0] - https://www.scmp.com/economy/global-economy/article/3351292/...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/eu-firms-brace-more-shut...
Our best hope for non US citizens is for the Chinese companies to continue to improve their models.
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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.
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.
The only problem is - when US services are available, there's no incentive to bring anything to the market.
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Arguably, it was Anthropic's decision to abide by their Government's orders. They could have not done so, but that would likely have consequences they weren't willing to face.
I choose to follow the law, but it’s an obligation not a decision. Framing it like this just misses the big picture entirely. A few words from a tech CEO is all it takes for this government to take extreme measures like this.
EU will maybe never be like the US and maybe the US will be stronger and richer than the EU... But us EU people have nice weather and lots of good things like small cars and bike lanes and soccer teams and socker teams and suckerteams and lots and lots of windmills and sea windmills small tiny farms that are super cosy!!!
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Arguably, it was Anthropic's decision to abide by their Government's orders. They could have not done so, but that would likely have consequences they weren't willing to face.
At the end of the day it's not really a decision at all, the government has a lot of men with guns, Anthropic has (presumably) low numbers to zero of men with guns. You don't really have a choice if the government decides to play hardball
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If there is a divorce the very obvious reason is Trump
No responsibilities in the EU at all? I feel trump is more of an accelerant/trigger.. but where two parties fight etc. We did not get to this situation (or Trump for that matter) from a vacuum.