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Austria Lobbies EU to Host Anthropic After US Access Curbs

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Re: Austria Lobbies EU to Host Anthropic After US Access Curbs

#41
post #23

To be honest, as much as people complain about EU regulations and bureaucracy, at least they are highly predictable. Every relevant piece of regulation, like the GDPR and the AI Act, was probably more than five years in the making and then added another year or two to take effect. If I were a frontier lab with a billion-dollar investment under my belt, I wouldn't want to operate in a regulatory environment with the s…

5 years in the making AI act?

The AI Act Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 was introduced as a proposal on January 6th, 2021, so it took a bit over three years for that specific piece of legislation until it had the final vote in May 2024.

Re: Austria Lobbies EU to Host Anthropic After US Access Curbs

#42
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a fundamentally different definition of how laws are supposed to work. EU law isn't a list of checkboxes that you can technically check while going counter to the spirit, it is a philosophical direction, the details of following it are up to you. The spirit matters, not the letter. > When interpreting EU law, the CJEU pays particular attention to the aim and purpose of EU law (teleological interpretation), ra…

Right! Thanks for the link, I remembered reading that quote but couldn't find it. European regulators don't need hyper-specific definitions, because to them it's entirely normal to tell a company that they must do X or can't do Y even though the rules as written seem to authorize their current course of action Z. All regulatory systems have some informal edge cases, of course. But Americans expect law to in general w…

The EU has pretty good documentation for the various regulations. For example for GDPR they do provide checklists:

- https://www.edpb.europa.eu/sme/be-compliant/respect-individu...

- https://www.edpb.europa.eu/sme/be-compliant/secure-personal-...

And guidance: https://www.edpb.europa.eu/system/files/2026-04/edpb-summary...

Re: Austria Lobbies EU to Host Anthropic After US Access Curbs

#43
I think what's actually needed is two things: an EU training infrastructure that allows training of 10T+ models, and an EU inference infrastructure that is sufficient that it's possible to do RL on them.

This effectively reduces the problem to a specialized supercomputing infrastructure problem which I think is relatively easy to solve. I think the chips are coming. I think Euclyd will be able to do the inference chip and I think the training chip won't be harder. It's just a matter of accepting the need to order a huge number of them, being willing to think a little bit like the kind of people who operate corners. So we can be there next year, I think. What we then lack is a training chip-- maybe OpenChip can do it, maybe they can't, but there are reasonable but still unfinished projects. Maybe if Euclyd finishes an inference chip in 2027 we can have the state pay them to make a training version, put in fp32, put in communication tiles. If their design is real and works (which it should, since it's basically a fancier version of Groq, as it's described, and since even Groq works) I think the advantage these chips is likely to have would be enough that a training version would be NVIDIA-beating.

We probably need some solution for the data-- i.e. to allow people to do things that are against copyright law in a limited way, but I think it's a better idea to start EU firms than to try to attract Anthropic.

Because of the need for capital the hardware-software carousel is necessary. We can't pay for NVIDIA chips and then have NVIDIA feed that money into US firms. We have to feed money into EU chips that either carousel the money into EU AI firms or who just offer cheap chips.

Re: Austria Lobbies EU to Host Anthropic After US Access Curbs

#44
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't go on random personalist whims (so far!), but they also tend to be much less specific in a way that can frustrate US businesses. The GDPR definition of "personal data" is just a couple of lines long; the California definition of "personal information" lists out twelve categories, one of which is "sensitive personal information" with eight more categories.

There's a fundamentally different definition of how laws are supposed to work. EU law isn't a list of checkboxes that you can technically check while going counter to the spirit, it is a philosophical direction, the details of following it are up to you. The spirit matters, not the letter. > When interpreting EU law, the CJEU pays particular attention to the aim and purpose of EU law (teleological interpretation), ra…

Unfortunately individual courts in some EU countries don’t care about the spirit but are fixated on the letter.

Re: Austria Lobbies EU to Host Anthropic After US Access Curbs

#45
post #8

To stay near the frontier of AI without being subject to the discretion of foreign countries the EU has to stay near the frontier of R&D themselves. Even if they can get around ITAR now and self-host, they would be stuck with having to repeatedly negotiate permission to use each new advance. If they do relax regulation (especially on energy generation) sufficiently to unleash the continent's big brained boffins and e…

What is it that makes gas power plants so much more attractive than renewable energy? From what I heard, it's a bit easier to build them very fast and they reliably produce energy on demand (as long as gas is available of course). But I imaging one could replicate this using solar/wind and storage units. I could imagine that the challenge is that that having enough solar panels for a few gigawatts of consumption is h…

It is hard to operate renewables 24/7. At night and winter, you need a big array of generators and LED lights to shine on solars. Very inefficient.

Or for every solar you need a generator as a backup!

Re: Austria Lobbies EU to Host Anthropic After US Access Curbs

#46
post #7

Interesting country lobbying this. So this is either the OPEC effect or some active measures "another country" to sow division (because I don't think the Austrians were smart enough of think that for themselves)

> I don't think the Austrians were smart enough of think that for themselves Leave your fascist remarks out of here

So is recognizing the fact that one of the most luddite countries in Europe who can't ask ChatGPT for directions is incapable of thinking forward with AI, is "fascism" now? Cool

Re: Austria Lobbies EU to Host Anthropic After US Access Curbs

#47

To be honest, as much as people complain about EU regulations and bureaucracy, at least they are highly predictable. Every relevant piece of regulation, like the GDPR and the AI Act, was probably more than five years in the making and then added another year or two to take effect. If I were a frontier lab with a billion-dollar investment under my belt, I wouldn't want to operate in a regulatory environment with the s…

EU regulation is not the problem, it's the national governments. They are the ones who create red tape and high taxation almost every step of the way, and create years of delays when even one crazy person complains.

Re: Austria Lobbies EU to Host Anthropic After US Access Curbs

#49
post #38
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anthropic engineering is in London and the US. The other offices in Europe are sales oriented

Zurich is also Engineering (any many staff in Zurich and London will be from other countries temporarily working there).

Which makes it even more difficult to limit access to Americans. Deepmind was originally a British company and has R & D in multiple countries to it will be even more awkward with them.

I have always thought the UK was too liberal in allowing foreign takeovers of key businesses. Arm and Deepmind are great examples of why.

Re: Austria Lobbies EU to Host Anthropic After US Access Curbs

#50
Is this the way forward for the EU? Genuinely curious: Are there any EU providers that host the very good recent Chinese open weight models? Like, an EU-based alternative to DeepSeek's own API offering? To me, that sounds like an easier business to turn profitable, albeit maybe less impressive.
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