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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

#91

Post by WarmWash »

shimman wrote: post #80
miohtama wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There cannot be echo chamber as long as entrepreneurship is not seen as generally acceptable in European culture

Looking at the US culture, it's not hard to see entrepreneurship as a societal disease. 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 "e…

>Good on Europeans for rejecting this American blight.

Reject it? They pay hundreds of billions for it. Every year. For decades now.

Europe runs on American tech, using American and Chinese hardware, powered by American energy, and protected by American defense.

Surely you're confused here, because Europe didn't reject these things, they offshored them and then teased Americans about working so hard. Europe's economic situation right now is borderline catastrophic, mostly because they built a society on someone else's support in the uncannily calm times after the wall fell.

Re: European AI. A playbook to own it

#92

Post by valkmit »

shimman wrote: post #81
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…

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? Expect more stringent requirements from landlords

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

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

I'm not saying these regulations are unilaterally bad - I'm saying don't be surprised that there are 2nd-order effects that are arguably just as bad, if not worse.

Re: European AI. A playbook to own it

#93

Post by roenxi »

kjellsbells wrote: post #82
miohtama wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There cannot be echo chamber as long as entrepreneurship is not seen as generally acceptable in European culture

I hate that I agree, and yet, I agree. The EU has a giant single market, has a pipeline of elite tech talent from everywhere from Finland in the North on down, has long since settled on English as the lingua franca of business but has plenty of tools to solve i18n, and yet...culturally is just hostile to entrepreneurship in a way that goes beyond reasonable suspicion of fakery. what's that all about? I don't think it…

Brain drain I expect. All the people who believed in freedom and entrepreneurship have had maybe a century of incentives to leave Europe and head for the US.

Society seems to rely on a tiny pool of overly-motivated people to do most of the work. There has historically been a healthy pipeline and many good reasons to convince them to leave Europe. And apparently sufficient safeguards to stop them building too much if they stay, based on the lack of success the EU has had in tech.

Re: European AI. A playbook to own it

#94

Post by r-w »

abletonlive wrote: post #84
shimman wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at the US culture, it's not hard to see entrepreneurship as a societal disease. 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 "e…

> Looking at the US culture, it's not hard to see entrepreneurship as a societal disease. It's easy if you're in some nihilistic and cynical echochamber like reddit. For everybody else, entrepreneurship is still quite celebrated and seen as a positive for society.

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

Re: European AI. A playbook to own it

#95

Post by dcrazy »

r-w wrote: post #94
abletonlive wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Looking at the US culture, it's not hard to see entrepreneurship as a societal disease. It's easy if you're in some nihilistic and cynical echochamber like reddit. For everybody else, entrepreneurship is still quite celebrated and seen as a positive for society.

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

I am thoroughly perplexed by this statement. Every single person who starts their own restaurant, painting company, events planning company, etc. is an entrepreneur. The appeal of saving up enough to break free of your job and start working for yourself is so pervasive as to be almost entirely unspoken. It’s something that, being raised as an American, you simply believe is good in the same way you believe that stealing is bad.

And yet I can’t name a single entrepreneur that I know personally outside of tech.

Re: European AI. A playbook to own it

#96

Post by kriops »

shimman wrote: post #81
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…

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?

You can not regulate either of the above into existence. What good are rhetorical questions when they are nonsensical?

Re: European AI. A playbook to own it

#97

Post by exiguus »

zmmmmm wrote: post #49

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…

That's why Mistral is not focused on raising venture capital. Instead, they prioritize securing government contracts; hence their significant political lobbying efforts.

Re: European AI. A playbook to own it

#98

Post by re-thc »

zmmmmm wrote: post #59
enejej wrote: post #52

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.

Yet the UK did produce Deepmind. Which you can look at both ways since it got gobbled up by Google. But it at least came from the UK. I assume the article excludes the UK, I feel like UK has much more of a startup and VC scene than Europe does and I wonder if that is part of the issue : if you do want to create a startup, the London is a better place than mainland Europe. So even startups that for whatever reason won…

> Yet the UK did produce Deepmind

That was a long time ago. That UK is not the UK of today.

Re: European AI. A playbook to own it

#99

Post by LelouBil »

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.

Maybe they should.

Taking a break and looking at the direction AI is advancing won't hurt.

Re: European AI. A playbook to own it

#100

Post by weakened_malloc »

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?…

This is something you talk to people about that are in the western world but outside of the US (which includes me) but whenever I have the conversation people just can't grasp it.

The US, by having bad worker protections and privacy abusing tech companies, etc. have been able to pave the way for extreme amounts of innovation that just wouldn't happen anywhere else. The rest of the world then effectively has innovation subsidized since they import the finished product.

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