71–80 of 155 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s a load of nonsense. They essentially want a bunch of stuff and most importantly funding from the EU and using the FOMO angle to get them to act. This of course is not on merit. They see that no other lab in Europe really exists and are trying to seize an open opportunity.
I hope one day soon EU politicians ask themselves why it might be that there is only one single domestic AI lab that is basically an also-ran at this point.
The 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.
As a UK founder that has raised in the UK, I have seen our US competitors raise substantially more with substantially less traction, so in future I’m significantly more tempted to look across the pond for raising. It has little to do with my culture vs theirs, and all to do with where the opportunity sits.
Many of the other founders I know with the “drive and hunger” as you put it, have already made the same jump.
The 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.
I 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…
I 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 late…
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…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I’m also from the UK and I think this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. As a UK founder that has raised in the UK, I have seen our US competitors raise substantially more with substantially less traction, so in future I’m significantly more tempted to look across the pond for raising. It has little to do with my culture vs theirs, and all to do with where the opportunity sits. Many of the other founders I know with the…
META used to hire in Netherlands until it stopped and left. I wondered why and a few times I heard that it was because it was hard to be dynamic in the country with the stubborn labour laws. The anecdote confirms my own bias but there seems to be not much mention on encouraging risk taking allowing dynamic entrepreneurship in this playbook, which leads me to believe this is a non issue? But messagebird is another exa…
It's hard to read this as anything other than "It's hard to treat your employees like shit when countries have strong labor laws and that just won't do for american megacorps".
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…
I 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 late…
There cannot be echo chamber as long as entrepreneurship is not seen as generally acceptable in European culture
Let's not act like "entrepreneurship" is necessary at all to develop technology. Western governments simply have no ability to find their own destination as any attempt to get off the US big tech ramp comes with threats to destroy defense treaties, weapons contracts, and tariffs with their major ally.
Hardly anything to do with "entrepreneurship" and more about the insidious nature of US imperialism and how damaging neoliberalism is to the world.
Good on Europeans for rejecting this American blight.