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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

#81

Post by petcat »

WhatsName wrote: post #4

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…

> as much as people complain about EU regulations and bureaucracy, at least they are highly predictable.

Hasn't the EU basically already regulated any potential "unsafe" AI in Europe out of existence?

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

#82

Post by general1465 »

felipeerias wrote: post #71
WhatsName wrote: post #4

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…

Anthropic have raised roughly $100 billion just in the first half of this year. Capital markets in the EU are simply unable to operate at that speed and scale.

> Capital markets in the EU are simply unable to operate at that speed and scale.

Yeah that's true, getting investment of few million EUR to your company takes years and investors are looking at you like they are giving you their whole national budget. It is comical to the point that businesses rarely seek investments in general in Europe and you just need to grow naturally.

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

#83

Post by logicchains »

vrganj wrote: post #78
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> But Americans expect law to in general work more like a list of checkboxes To me as a European, this is a very low-trust view of lawmaking that assumes a hostile relationship between a government and its people. The European approach is a bit more of a living conversation. In the implementation period there's workshops where you figure out how to best comply in a way that makes sense for your business. There's a lo…

>It works out pretty well in general

How can you say that when Europe has completely failed at producing any big, successful tech companies in the past couple decades? China and even India have a lot more staetups-turned-bigtech companies.

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

#84

Post by tancop »

killercup wrote: post #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.

nextbit in spain is hosting deepseek but its the most expensive provider on openrouter. inceptron in sweden for glm and nebius in the netherlands hosting smaller models like nemotron. mistral hosting their own models obviously. its not a big market.

the problem is big chunks of europe have expensive power and insane red tape for building data centers (or anything else really). i think france is the best option with cheap nuclear but its years before any large buildout can even start.

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

#85

Post by dcrazy »

re-framer wrote: post #74
dcrazy wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many facets of “viability”: technical, economic, political. There is obviously some reason why new gas plants are being built instead of renewables with storage.

Yes, and I'm still interested in better understanding that reason. My previous response just noted that the explanation you gave seemed overly simplistic to me in that it did not address that renewable energy can be stored, making it less volatile.

I live near one of the world’s largest grid scale battery facilities. It was in the news last year for catching fire and filling the air with lithium. [0] So I’m aware of the technology’s existence. But I also know that it’s still a very young technology, with battery chemistry constantly improving. There are also inherent losses going to and from AC power, which is what the grid operates on and which most plants produce.

[0] https://www.readymontereycounty.org/emergency/2025-moss-land...

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

#87

Post by 2143 »

dcrazy wrote: post #54
re-framer wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My understanding is that you can turn gas plants on and off very quickly, and they can run at any time of day. That makes them excellent suppliers for peak demand. For much of the year, the evening peak occurs when the sun is not shining and the winds have died down, so renewables are not viable.

Actually I’m not so sure about that. The turning on and off quickly part.

Because in my country (in Asia) there’s surplus energy from renewables (solar, wind) during the daytime, so much so that they’re having to shut things down because the grid can’t handle it (yet).

However at night we need power from traditional sources (coal, basically. We do have hydroelectric and nuclear power also, but that’s not sufficient).

They cannot shut down the coal plants during the day because apparently turning it back on is a tricky time consuming process.

They cannot run the coal plants at reduced capacity because that reduces the efficiency and increases the wear and tear of the equipment.

And the renewables also brought up another problem in that the power that comes is not steady (unlike the traditional sources).

All that is putting pressure on the grid.

The long term solution is to upgrade the grid to handle all this. And the government is working on it (I think). But that’ll take time to do. At least a decade.

Uhh, I don’t know much more technical details about all this. Maybe more knowledgeable members can contribute.

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

#88

Post by skybrian »

2143 wrote: post #87
dcrazy wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that you can turn gas plants on and off very quickly, and they can run at any time of day. That makes them excellent suppliers for peak demand. For much of the year, the evening peak occurs when the sun is not shining and the winds have died down, so renewables are not viable.

Actually I’m not so sure about that. The turning on and off quickly part. Because in my country (in Asia) there’s surplus energy from renewables (solar, wind) during the daytime, so much so that they’re having to shut things down because the grid can’t handle it (yet). However at night we need power from traditional sources (coal, basically. We do have hydroelectric and nuclear power also, but that’s not sufficient).…

Coal is different. Natural gas is commonly used for peaker plants that provide electricity only when needed. They’re a better fit for using along with other intermittent sources.

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

#89

Post by dcrazy »

2143 wrote: post #87
dcrazy wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that you can turn gas plants on and off very quickly, and they can run at any time of day. That makes them excellent suppliers for peak demand. For much of the year, the evening peak occurs when the sun is not shining and the winds have died down, so renewables are not viable.

Actually I’m not so sure about that. The turning on and off quickly part. Because in my country (in Asia) there’s surplus energy from renewables (solar, wind) during the daytime, so much so that they’re having to shut things down because the grid can’t handle it (yet). However at night we need power from traditional sources (coal, basically. We do have hydroelectric and nuclear power also, but that’s not sufficient).…

Yes, coal takes very long to start up. Natural gas is very quick.

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

#90

Post by impossiblefork »

sajithdilshan wrote: post #79
impossiblefork wrote: post #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 chi…

The big question is who is going to fund it? Is it tax payers money? If so how can they guarantee it’s not going to be another waste and corrupted disaster. Also EU is already late to the AI race and by the time the lawmakers starts to think about this, it would be game over

I think the chips alone are 10B minimum. It'd be way bigger than CERN.

Provided that the systems work, they can at least be repurposed to other things. If the organizations that are to train public LLMs can't do it, we can rent the system out to Mistral or something.

So I think something like 5B, starting with 10B to get started, in public money per year, the chip firms are private, some of the LLM firms will be private, but the system is available to train European LLMs-- that's I think a realistic approach.

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