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European AI. A playbook to own it

europe.mistral.ai

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Re: European AI. A playbook to own it

#111

Post by kilpikaarna »

weakened_malloc wrote: post #102
r-w wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? Who do you know who isn't working in tech and finds something to celebrate in entrepreneurship?

In Australia one of the most common paths to wealth outside of owning property is literally taking up a trade as an apprentice, then after a couple of years beginning your own plumbing/electrician/brick laying/etc business. That's still very highly celebrated. Interestingly enough, people with Mediterranean backgrounds also feel this way (there's lots of crossover here btw). Owning your own business is one of the bes…

Europe is obviously full of sole proprietor tradesmen, shop and restaurant owners etc. It's completely orthogonal to the apparent shortage of VC-funded startup unicorn hustle culture.

Re: European AI. A playbook to own it

#113

Post by ivan_gammel »

valkmit wrote: post #92
shimman wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, let's ignore regulations that provide people with stable jobs, societies, and countries. Afterall what good is democracy when the alternative is making more money?

A lot of these are mostly well-meaning but have backfired. The only way an international business is going to consider investing in French workers, for example, is with relatively low salaries to offset the inability to fire them. It's counterintuitive but if you allow "failing fast", you lower risk of new engagements, and this allows for more speculative bets on ideas and people. Make it difficult to evict tenants?…

I would push back on a few things from what you mentioned.

> The only way an international business is going to consider investing in French workers, for example, is with relatively low salaries to offset the inability to fire them.

> Strong worker protection? Expect fewer highly paid roles (wage compression)

For European startups it’s different motivation. Lower salaries than in USA are an advantage, but job security isn’t a show stopper. First team is hired in fixed contracts, which may be converted to permanent with growth. In scaling phase you add external support, with e.c. 20% of workforce coming from outstaffing, so that you can react on the market and scale down when needed. If you are big enough to be called international business, you will not hire in one of the most expensive locations in the world (USA) unless you have a good reason. There exist other easy-to-fire tech hubs, and it’s not a big problem in Europe anyway (it’s just some more effort to execute, but even with payouts it’s probably cheaper than in US).

> Make it difficult to evict tenants? Expect more stringent requirements from landlords

In Europe there’s less homeless people. It doesn’t work like that.

>Enact rent control? Initial rents are going up, new builds are disincentivized.

It’s not rent controls that make markets inefficient. They are reaction to NIMBY regulations and disincentivized home ownership like in Germany. Root cause is uncontrolled extraction of scarce resource (land) and the solution is actually to scale down for-profit rental market while aggressively subsidizing ownership and construction.

Re: European AI. A playbook to own it

#114

Post by mstaoru »

Sehr gut! I need to show it to my colleagues. Unfortunately half of them are on vacation currently and another half on sick leave. We decided to make a Teams call in August to discuss how to proceed with this.

Re: European AI. A playbook to own it

#115

Post by mgrund »

outside1234 wrote: post #88

We also need to talk about work schedules. Nobody at Anthropic is taking a 5 week summer break or working a 35 hour week. Europe can be a top player in AI —- but there is a cost.

There is but I don’t think this is it.

I’ve worked most of my career in US tech satellite offices and I have not experienced EU team members to be less productive than US team members, nor spend less time on work (if anything, more really since they also need to be available for US time zone overlap).

It’s true there are chill jobs here, as there are in the US.

But ambitious people tend to work as much as ambitious US people (and it’s really more like 40 hours work weeks - 39,5 where I live since lunch is not work time). But again, many are not really counting, it’s just a full time job.

Vacations (typically 3 weeks summer holiday and additional weeks to distribute over the year) does create longer time on skeleton crew. Skilled tech labour is also cheaper so you can just hire more to make up for it.

Re: European AI. A playbook to own it

#116

Post by seabass-labrax »

simianwords wrote: post #22

I feel like Europe needs to remove barriers and let people do things freely rather than stuff like "Empower AI students". Ambitious people will naturally find a way to get stuff done and you just have to allow it to happen and not get in the way. At least "EU AI talent visa" sounds like it can work by removing barriers to relocate.

I don't see the AI talent visa as a serious suggestion. There's already the Blue Card, which is pretty easy for software engineers to obtain; for an AI talent visa to be anything special, it would have to loosen the already fairly lax requirements. To manage to persuade the whole EU to create a special visa for an emerging field that doesn't even have commonly-agreed-upon qualifications would be a unrealistic feat when many EU member states are looking to close down immigration opportunities, not create them.

Re: European AI. A playbook to own it

#117

Post by laffOr »

sva_ wrote: post #29

There'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…

Is really a compete XOR lobby the government? The AI companies in the US do both, and nobody says "OpenAI can't compete so they do lobbying" or "Anthropoic can't compete so they do lobbying".

Re: European AI. A playbook to own it

#118

Post by latexr »

peyton wrote: post #89
enejej wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not all that convinced on the regulation part. Ultimately it’s all about investing money to create real assets that generate cash flows. One can side step regulations to some extent whilst developing a product (nobody cares/notices until you are actually growing fast) and then deal with regulations later. Uber already showed this and the leading AI firms are following the same act - having ripped off a lot of con…

Makes sense. You’re saying why would regulations matter when clearly they can just be ignored. For venture ultimately it’s a soulless moneyman’s game. Really they have to pick winners, and anybody can look at the landscape and see there’s just not gonna be a Pierre Zuckerberg or a Klaus Kalanick. And if there ever is, he’ll need to raise lots of money anyway, which would come from venture.

> there’s just not gonna be a Pierre Zuckerberg or a Klaus Kalanick

Which is very much a positive. Those two aren’t a boon to humanity, they very much made everything worse at a global scale. We need fewer people emulating them, not more.

Re: European AI. A playbook to own it

#119

Post by martin-t »

nl wrote: post #76
martin-t wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have written a bunch of (A)GPL code too and I'm 100% supportive of AI learning from it.

Great, you have that right.

But it begs the question why you chose (A)GPL instead of a permissive license in the first place. If you are OK with people training and using LLMs on top of your work not giving users the right to inspect and modify, you must have logically been OK with it before. The existence of LLMs or even AI is irrelevant to your position.

Re: European AI. A playbook to own it

#120

Post by martin-t »

abletonlive wrote: post #87
martin-t wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> LLM companies and redistribute it to the people who did the actual work fueling the models, such as myself. Okay this is a new level of narcissism and gatekeeping, thanks for the laugh.

If you think the belief that people should be rewarded pro productive and useful work is narcissism, then you need to either learn about work or narcissism.
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