As a European I want mistral and EU to do well. But at the same time, I wouldn’t actually give up my well paid engineering job outside of EU to even entertain working for them in EU. Too low salaries and too high taxes.
This is a pervasive misconception in the industry, and a very dull trope on HN. Your income tax makes it possible to create a livable society in the EU. You get much more free time and are protected from a lot of random life events, even if you work in a McDonalds counter and not as a software engineer. You have rent, healthcare, protection from landlords. Not perfect, but at least the direction is there.
Solely profit-optimizing free market thinking destroys society and the planet.
Plus, even if you do prefer the American way (and I could see why), it seems fanatic for people to not recognize the clear benefits of the European model.
How do you divorce being a European principally from being willing to pay taxes? What part of being uniquely European do you value that does not fundamentally require taxes?
The problem with taxes in Europe are that the ultra-wealthy don't pay them. That burden is particularly focused on those who are high wage earners. If I look at my own country, as a high earner I'm paying close to a 50% effective tax rate (a little less with mortgage interest deductions). However the billionaire families who own the beer brewers, shipping companies and agraculture companies are paying well under 0.5% effective. They pay less than in the US. Due to this reason we're one of the most infamous tax dodge countries in Europe, apparently the Swedish and German billionaires have tax residency to avoid paying it.
Is there a source for the “well under 0.5% effective”? From my Googling, effective tax rates for European ultra rich seem to be ~50x that. Perhaps you’re thinking of wealth taxes rather than effective tax rates?
No but to come to Europa, you get less differences in wealth (essentially) universal healthcare at low/reasonable cost (ie, I can get cancer and not feel it financially), and a lot of state support when you're out of a job. Etc. Thos things cost tax money.
Yes so if you were in the higher percentiles of wealth, like many engineers in the US, you'd end up with less wealth in Europe, while if you were in the lower percentiles then in Europe you'd end up with more wealth. That's how redistribution works, the top 10% of income earners end up with less (even after accounting for healthcare and education; they get back less then they put in), and US software engineers are in the top 10% of income earners.
Getting less benefit than a lower bracket isn't the same as getting less than you put in and conflating them is misleading or, if intentional, deceitful.
Could these software engineers be bankrupt if they are hit by a serious illness? Say progressive MS or a cancer, which will require extensive sick days? It is there protection?
She's not a software engineer, just married to one and worked for software companies, and maybe I don't remember correctly, but she described a bit of her experience with the American system [1]:
> I should have taken medical leave at the first surgery, but my manager was confused about our status – the acquisition was so recent that I didn’t have six months as an Oracle employee, and she said, “You’re not eligible to take paid leave.”
> I couldn’t afford to take unpaid leave, and I was afraid I would lose my job and my health insurance, so I had to power on and pretend I was okay while I was really sick and taking an antibiotic that had horrible side effects.
I have to say, I visited Zurich once, and everything was clean, organized, civilized, and pretty. Friends told me taxes are high but you get great education, great healthcare, decent disposable income, and good transportation. If you get laid off, the state continues paying your previous salary for one (two?) years.
If everything is taken care of me from taxes, why do I need money? Take it all.
Switzerland is the closest you can get to USA without leaving Europe. Taxes in Zurich are lower than in the Bay Area, at will employment, healthcare that is primarily funded by flat fees rather than income tax, etc. Even the constitution was originally inspired by the American one.
Yeah, as an American, I think the thing that breaks the American brain is that you can have taxes that don’t just line the pockets of billionaires—that you can pay taxes and get high quality services as a result. There are so many conservative and libertarian Americans who think that taxes are necessarily squandered while they simultaneously elect politicians who insist on squandering taxes so they can prove that taxes will be squandered.
Not OP but to respond to your question, like everything, there is a scale to this question. Would you give to the state 30% of your income to pay for public services? Most people would say yes.
What about 40%? 50%?
Most people agree that taxes need to be paid for the common good of society. However, many people disagree about the correct amount and increasingly about the usage of said taxes.
> Would you give to the state 30% of your income to pay for public services? Most people would say yes. What about 40%? 50%?
I pay about 6% for public services, around 8% for health insurance, and around 25% for the public pension insurance. The issue isn't taxes, it's almost entirely demographics.
I would become a patriotic European too, but only after our leaders at the national and EU level stop being transatlanticist sellouts... which won't happen any time soon.
But that is a the problem though. You get stronger job protection because its very hard to find a job. If you could find a new job quickly and if the job market was more fluid, you would only rarely need this sort of job protection.
Compared to what I have heard about the US, I'd say it is actually easier to find jobs in (at least Western) Europe. Plenty of jobs, and a way easier interview process. Not 8 rounds of interviews and months of waiting (that I've heard of). But maybe two rounds in the same week and start the next month (if you want).
> ... didn't find any of their models remotely useful.
I daily drive Ministral-3-3B-Reasoning, getting a nice 70 tok/s on my GPU. its actually much faster than Google/DDG searches and I use it a ton when coding to check methods and remember ways to implement things. Its better than the qwen stuff of the same size because its not filled with ccp bs.
It seems fairly plausible that they will become useful. I would not consider coding requiring vastly better AI models than the best we have today. The more interesting question is what advantages excess intelligence provides in the future more generally (warfare, system management, etc)
The trajectory all models are taking, while software development requirements continue to stay fairly level – at least I don't see why they wouldn't. We will still mostly need reliable, boring software.
I don't see why Mistral would stop getting better. It will, just more slowly. Eventually it will be good enough, and continue to be good enough.
>>>> In a world where you import all your digital services from the United States, you have no leverage over the United States
It's a bit deeper than that. If AI becomes as ubiquitous as imagined, which it seems it will, it's not just a "digital service". It's a primary utility - like electricity, water or highways. Because without it your productivity will plummet. We aren't there yet - we will be there in a few years.
> Because without it your productivity will plummet.
Why would it plummet?
Surely we could just keep doing what we've been doing for the past 50 years. That doesn't go away because AI. The promise of AI is a productivity increase after implementing it. It doesn't change the productivity of not implementing it.
In other words, "EU governments please give me money."
Not saying that American companies are better in this regard, but if we interpret each CEO's words with the same scrutiny as how we view Elon or Altman's words... that's pretty much it.
I'd like to regulate them the way American companies are regulated, and then regulate American companies in Europe the way European companies are regulated. Level the playing field.
Not exactly rocket science, it's just copying the things the Americans (and Chinese) are already doing.
A vassal of California. I know we like to say that tech is the US but that's not true. It is almost completely focused around a small part of California. Take that out and Europe and the US are comparable with respect to software tech at least.
Europe has a golden chance with the current mass outflux of talent from the US and I really hope we grasp it. I just don't see my country (NL) doing that as our political class are nearly as stupid as the Americans.
The tech companies could all move to Texas and the power would be there. They've all won. They all have their monopolies / duopolies.
They would never have been the success they were in the first place without California. It was the culture, the conditions (no non-competes) and the lax regulation (non-enforcement of rules aimed at avoiding monopolies which allowed Facebook to buy any emerging competitor not owned by the Chinese government) which created them.
right it totally makes sense because it's the third biggest economy in the world, it has to be a vassal of number one or number two, because there has been a situation where number three in anything tries to move up, if you're third in line you must submit.
A quick search of revenue of google and facebook (in billions) 2015-2020. Is that so hard to understand that there is an entire economy wrapped around AI/IOT? Didn´t Europe learn anything from historic data?
Google Facebook
2015 $67.80B* $17.93B Google segment revenue (Alphabet restructuring). Total Alphabet: $74.98B
2016 $81.30B $25.76B Google segment revenue. Total Alphabet: $89.55B
2017 $100.10B $40.65B Google segment revenue. Total Alphabet: $109.46B
2018 $128.90B $55.84B Google segment revenue. Total Alphabet: $136.82B
2019 $143.90B $70.70B Google segment revenue. Total Alphabet: $161.86B
2020 $152.70B $85.97B *Google segment revenue. Total Alphabet: $182.53B
Europe gdp for same years (in trillions): 2015 16.89
2016 16.88
2017 17.88
2018 18.89
2019 19.31
2020 17.42
Now by simple math a healthy gdp growth is around 4%, so just by creating and/or backing up 2 similar companies (in Europe) will revenue ~2.5% of the total entire European gdp.
What is going on, are the European Leaders sabotaging our economy on purpose?
I've read the article and I kind of agree with some of the things he's saying. It's more than just AI though. Energy is the big problem and the big problem there is that we're just not ramping up renewables quickly enough. Why? Corruption of course. We had a big leaded 15-20 years ago but the German car manufactorers and British/Dutch oil companies applied a huge amount of political pressure, aided by American interests, which not just slowed the transition but also helped strangle our solar/wind industry. It's not a lost cause though, at EU level they could absolutely make it happen.
Renewable energy is unreliable without a steady storage capacity and EU would still rely on raw materials for battery production on other countries. Further, regardless of the energy source, what is vital for AI or any other industry is a steady, reliable power source which cannot be provided only through renewables in EU, not only because lack of storage, but also unfavourable geography.
That's only true at the micro level; at the macro level it is surprisingly stable over the EU zone + UK + Norway. There are capacity and interconnect issues but they're small fry. We have a huge amount of capacity for wind and considerable for solar, we just need to get using more of it.
We have one of the largest deposits of rare earth minerals in the world in the EU. Where we suffer is in lack of refining capacity. The US are in a similar situation.
That is not true. Germany shutting down their atomic power plants had a rippling effect on the energy market in whole EU because they thought renewables would be enough to power the German industries. It was criticised by even the Sweden's Minister for Energy (Ebba Busch).
Right now Germany is being de-industrialised because it's far expensive for the industries to produce goods there compared to other EU countries and those companies are moving out. That's the price Germany is paying right now for betting on renewables without any investment on infrastructure or a proper migration plan and blind political guidance.
Even the EU has rare earth minerals, do you really thing the climate activists, nature conservation activists and all other far lefties would actually allow mining those minerals in EU?
Germany shut down their atomic power plants and replaced them with natural gas. They even fiddled the EU environmental rules such that natural gas was considered "part of the green transition". That all back-fired when Russia - the source of that natural gas - attempted to use it as leverage to take Ukraine.
We were screaming at them at the time that it was a very very dumb idea to close their nuclear power and against natural gas. As always we were right.
Climate activits? We've been sending riot police and disappearing them for 5 years now whilst the bands of knife carrying racists thugs, funded by America, roam around our streets causing all hell.
I do agree about China being way ahead and way smarter here, I should add. They've made America, Europe, Japan, India, Russia look really stupid. I've admired their strategic long term thinking for as long as I've been aware of it (~25 years now, they have a long history and deep rich culture and this is part of it).
Europe is bulding consensus on what technology sovereignty means. This is a self-interested statement within that discussion. At some point the EU will appoint at rapporteur to synthesise those viewports into a formal definition. The EC will use that to develop a programme of works which is satisfactory to the member states and other interested states.
The US is often lulled by the seemingly endless discursive nature of pan-European projects to think that they are not serious or effective. And then one day there is an Ariane or Airbus or Galileo.
at those time Europe was growing a lot more in real terms and had one of best engineering in the world. Maybe the best cars with mech. engineering was already made at those times, only Japan was rival for cars. No way Europe now have near best AI engineers and teams, huge difference.
Deepseek is open in the sense that you can run V3 or V4 it is not open in the sense that you have all the tools a Chinese company has to make the V5 that will be needed to keep up with the US.
CPUs, GPUs, operating systems, programming languages toolchains.
Even if you consider open source, the majority of contributions are from US companies.
There are some companies contributing to GCC and clang from UK, GraalVM and V8 are partially in European sites but from American companies nonetheless.
Production price in Europe is between 3.5-4.5cts/kwh averaged. The rest are mainly transport and taxes.
If the EU currently choose to exonerate industrial consummers from these taxes and offload them on citizen (which honestly make sense from a business perspective), they could currently beat most US states in term of pricing while providing lower carbon footprint/kWh
The cost of power is pretty much irrelevant. The TCO of an AI datacenter is dominated by the capex. Over the lifetime of a DC, the capex will be 10x higher than all the opex combined.
Power matters, but what matters is power availability not cost.
If anything the main simplification here is that China is doing a significant amount of innovation too. Otherwise yeah. Europe's main purpose is to serve as a continent-wide historical Disneyland for rich American and Chinese tourists. And maybe we'd be better off admitting that rather than trying to pretend to have any kind of industrial or startup ecosystem.
I mean we are still waiting for the European Apple or Microsoft or Google or anything of that scale aren't we? China has it's own version of all this stuff, where is Europe's?
Americans are just as regulated and with even more egregious regulatory capture (see the American broadband/mobile provider cartel). At least Europeans get a little consumer protection.
america regulates to ensure companies (as few as humanly possible) profit while europe regulates to protect the consumers. the core difference, yea! and americans seemed to be always shitting on europe completely oblivious of what is being done to them, for decades now
I get what you're trying to say, but having just had some meetings on aligning with the latest AI act, as a small startup focusing on adapting open source models for local use, the way it looks now, it seems like we won't have any consumers worth protecting :) (and I'm only half joking. AI act is a joke, and Mistral have been saying this for a while now. We have chinese models launched with permissive licenses, usable everywhere except in the EU. It'd be good comedy if it wouldn't be tragic. ffs! We can't use open source shit!!! It's bananas)
Otoh, you can buy contact lenses OTC in other European countries... not saying Europe isn't over-regulated (try legally building a bike-trail on your own forest-land in Germany!! ...insanity) but it's a bad example.
The thing is that AI is not winner takes all market. AI models and server space is all fungible. It is very valuable, but no one will hold exclusive AI capabilities in the long run.
In the HPC space, it has always been a "winner takes all" market. 90% or more of the business goes to the biggest provider with few exceptions (in terms of dollars, obviously all compute gets used).
And, yeah, quite a bit of that is government having ... suboptimal ... developers who want to run bad code that nobody's allowed to look at. And yes, it is about weapons design, which is why nobody is allowed to look at (and certainly not fix) the code.
I think the idea is that AI will dominate a bunch of industries, from government administration, to intelligence (arguably they have that one already), to software, to insurance, to entertainment (produce 10 new lord of the rings series per day). And the first one to get there will "own" Government administrations, Netflix, Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, ...
If the past 20 years have taught us anything, it's that the first one to have a great popular success wins. Not in one market, on ALL of them.
Very few governments outside of the US will let a US company "own" them. It is a national security issue. They just take a good enough locally made model.
> They just take a good enough locally made model.
You're right that the question if that is an expensive mistake or not ... is for now an open question. However, even if Europe starts using it's own models, they'll be running on US chips.
The only thing that can “save Europe” is US embargo, otherwise doesn’t make sense to do replication of the US effort whatsoever. In US the AI is a private effort, in Europe there are no businesses that are interested in investing such large amounts of money when they can benefit from US made AI. In China they don’t have this option to use the US offerings so they must invest, be it the government or the business that will be protected from US competition.
Unless Trump invades Greenland and EU makes sure that US tech is off limits for at least a decade to come, a revolution happens in UK or France goes full nationalistic there won’t be “European tech” beyond niche. Currently the “American AI” isn’t American, it’s bunch of Europeans, Canadians and Asians building the AI that will serve US and EU customers under the supervision of Americans using European, Arab, Russian and American money.
It is incorporated in America but as Musk demonstrates, if you increase taxes or allow certain sexual relationships that CEO’s don’t approve they can just take it somewhere else.
The China example was such a massive blunder (from the perspective of US soft power). Like you say, it created a captive market for Chinese chips where Chinese companies might've otherwise bought foreign chips. That's inbuilt demand. But China also has something Europe doesn't and that's central planning. China has realized that chipmaking and AI are issues of national security. Europe just doesn't have that level of governance and forethought. Within 5 years China will be producing their own EUV chips despite the ASML export ban.
And you know who realizes all this? The Nvidia CEO [1][2].
There is now a 70 year history of Europe being designed as and becoming comfortable with being a US vassal state, from the end of WW2 to Bretton-Woods, the Marshall Plan and NATO.
I don't see fascist takeovers in the UK, France or Germany as changing any of this. If anything, it'll just fracture any semblance of European unity. It'll be the enemy within as those forces will be most aligned with the US.
> don't see fascist takeovers in the UK, France or Germany
The horseshoe theory is in full swing lately, in UK after right wing libertarian rule came the left wing labour and now it’s once again the right wingers. They again won’t solve anything and more swings will happen until someone realizes that it’s the US trade that isn’t working.
The rest of Europe is similar, they just happen to have more damping as most have fractured parliaments with no one having majority but the general direction change is happening regardless. People aren’t going to be like “tough luck, we choose poorly to rely on US and we will be permanent underclass from now on”.
I just have to respond to this: I'm not sure how you meant this but, to be clear, horseshow theory is BS.
For one thing, there's nothing remotely left wing about Starmer's Labor government. Labor is firmly a center-right party. So were the Blair and Brown governments. So we've had unbroken right-wing rule in the UK since Thatcher was elected almost 50 years ago.
If Jeremy Corbyn had been elected, he may well have been a left-wing PM but he wasn't. Instead, the threat of that caused Labor insiders to engage in a vile character assassination scheme that brought Keir Starmer to power, all to support US imperialism. There's nothing remotely left-wing about that.
> There's nothing remotely left wing about Starmer's Labor government
And that's why they lost support so quickly. Centrism does't work anymore and being slightly to the right for left wing voter base and the far right voter base its unacceptable. Frankly it isn't even right vs left, people don't realize that Lenin were right and then that Hitler was right every 2 years, its a different dynamic.
Probably the best description is that they all want "Having the cake and eat it too", every few years someone comes up with an idea like we can have our cake and eat it too if we take immigrants, get rid of the immigrants, allow gay sex ban gay sex, increase tax decrease tax, increase regulation decrease regulations and so on.
The hilarious irony is that Trump has been yelling at Europe since ~2017 to stop being so reliant on the US for everything, to pay more for its own defense, stop regulating and start innovating, etc.
Basically everything that's in the Draghi report.
Meanwhile, EU bureaucrats' heads appear to remain firmly buried in the sand.
Another hilarious fact: Trump has warned about Nord Stream 2, called it "a tool of coercion."[0] At this point it almost seems like Trump cares Europe more than EU leaders.
He was reflecting, what he meant was if I had a pipeline to you that you are dependent on I would coerce you. He kept trying coerce EU with whatever US had on EU.
EU isn’t governed by the china communist party, the only way to stop being reliant to US is to stop trade with US and the cost of it will be enormous. Trump needs to create such a high political risk that the economic damage be justified.
He definitely did a lot to help, but the damage needs to be irreparable so that business can feel safe from US competition. He needs to do do something so outrageous that Germany would not mind losing the US car market for example.
I think one could argue that he tried this "the easy way" in his first term. He vented against Nord Stream with NATO, he vented against the regulations and the energy dependence and closing the nuke reactors. But he didn't actually do anything about it.
The difference now is that he's turning the screws and putting the pressure on. Call this "the hard way". I can understand why EU leaders do not like this one bit. But also, they had their chance...
The Nord Stream is epic but he didn't argue for independence, he is arguing for US-dependence instead of Russia-dependence so this isn't flying as well as Americans believe it is because that was actually German issue, not EU wide thing at all. EU wide policy was renewables and as it turns out they are the right direction for independence.
In general, local governments are very unpopular in EU and Europe, everyone likes EU more than they like their governments.
The EU created a € 94 billion fund for exactly this a couple of years ago. And then they put in charge a lawyer who is the daughter of a powerful Spanish media mogul.
I tried registering a couple of years ago, but it required a female co-founder, N employees in the EU, and a laundry list of ridiculous demands unrelated to technology or real startups.
And even the paperwork to start a company in the EU is a PITA. You have to incorporate in Bulgaria or something if you want anything in reasonable times. And good luck with Social Security and tax agencies.
I do believe that due to security concerns, European countries at the state level will try to detach themselves from relying on US infrastructure. Not only AI, but all critical things.
For decades we've lived under the pretense that US is our main ally, and that realistically we'd never end up in a position where:
A) They'd become enemies.
B) They could just turn off access.
One silver lining with Trump becoming president, is that he forced European leaders to revisit those assumptions. Sure, Trump will not be around forever, but we know what types of leaders the US public is able to vote to the top, and what they are capable of doing.
The important key word in your comment is "will try", they will try, but fail miserably. They have built a wall of bureaucracy to keep them prisoners and even trying to change an infrastructure provider would need cutting 100 red tapes and 5 years. Not to mention, even if they want to switch, that's huge capital investment and that's not something EU can afford given the social economical state they are at the moment.
Becoming? We all live under the American empire. Pretty much every international institution is dominated by American money, most high level positions in such institutions are cleared by Americans before they are appointed, they have military bases in almost every other western country and a law that allows them to invade the Netherlands if the international court ever tries someone they don't want to be tried. What illusion are we under?
It's ok to think it's a benevolent dictator type situation but it is what it is. In fact the usual reply to this isn't a rebuttal but rather "what alternative is better?" to which I have no answer.
Because most people in the EU outside of the tech field care more about the welfare policies and overall quality of life than some ambitious tech projects of a few random private companies, from which they're unlikely to directly benefit from, especially when those are located outside of their member state.
Overall quality of life goes down if you just keep cutting up the pie without growing it, especially when you go into debt to buy more pie. The current youth in Europe are the first generation in decades to see worse living standards than their parents; Europeans' disdain for economic growth is already catching up with them.
> The current youth in Europe are the first generation in decades to see worse living standards than their parents
This just isn’t the case in my country and most of Central/Eastern Europe at all. I’m under 30, when my parents were my age, this country had just started recovering from communism.
Besides, there’s more to economy than just AI. If anything, I’d rather see my tax money invested into multiple different fields than having it gambled on a single hyped tech field that might as well turn out to not be so easily profitable or world changing in the end.
Unfortunately Europe is already far behind. OpenAI started over a decade ago. How can Europe catch up? Maybe if progress slows down and they have time to at least get into the same position as Chinese models, but they also need to invest in it. But with what money? And why would talented people stay there instead of going to America where they can get a fairer share of their hard earned money?
There’s so much more to say, but it’s a big mess. And European voters and politicians are far too slow and unfocused to change their system drastically. By the time those incentives and problems are fixed it will be too late to be anything but a vassal state.
The most telling part is when he explains that in order to grant stock options he had to navigate each and every single different legal setup for each one of the member states.
I felt for a while the "European Union" has been turned into a foil for nations that had absolutely no intention to really integrate.
Unless actual integration, simple one rule for all on the continent, happens within the next handfuls of months, then this ship's going down and I organize to exit stage left, Trump ain't Xi.
Each EU member state has their own stock market and you often can't trade the stocks from one country through the stock exchange in another. This means that if you want to offer EU-wide stock options, you either have to convince everyone to fly to your country and register at your country's stock exchange (which few will bother doing), or go through the process of filing and managing stocks of your company at 20+ different stock exchanges.
It's one of the things that have been recently brought up again in the EU parliament, but getting everyone to agree on a common stock market is not going to be easy.
I didn’t understand the “Trump ain’t Xi” part. As in he’s not as bad as the authoritarian nature of the CCP? Or that America is fading and China is a better ally?
London has incredible AI talent but yeah, unfortunately most of them work on American tech. In another life Deepmind would not be owned by Google but alas.
If we could just do something, anything about being so aggressively colonised by the Palantirs and the neoliberal think tanks and the Christian far-right money, and ISDS-littered trade agreements, then the rest would just follow. Sadly though, I don't think we stand a chance.
He is trying to justify the continued existence of the AI bubble in his country, claiming that, somehow, us Americans have figured it out and made LLMs work. We haven't, nobody has.
LLMs don't work. They cannot think. They do not understand what you are asking them to do. They statistically reproduce text written by other people, and they cannot do so well. They are not good assistants, they are not good code authors, they are not good debuggers, they cannot help you find security exploits... they can only mimic what it'd look like if they did, as long as you don't squint too hard.
All of the LLM startups are very quickly running out of runway, and will most likely never become profitable. OpenAI may collapse next year. Anthropic may collapse in 2028. Microsoft/Github seems to be pulling back on their Copilot bullshit and may just end up killing it entirely.
Arthur Mensch is just trying to keep Mistral alive a little bit longer until the bubble pops, and is saying whatever whatever it takes to get a little more blood from that stone.
> They statistically reproduce text written by other people
explain why they can do multiplication problems they've never seen before?
I can give them two 50 digit numbers right now and they'll multiply them. its because they generalize from previous data.
You just need to work on your agent design and prompting skills, modern LLMs are crazy good at all the things you listed with the right context and tools.
Europe can totally do this. this is a race about talent, not vram, and Europe has asml + universities; both. if they want to compete they can.
deepseek v1 was "built in a cave with a box of scraps". now that they have actual hardware v4 is huge, but what really matters is talent.
As a European I want mistral and EU to do well. But at the same time, I wouldn’t actually give up my well paid engineering job outside of EU to even entertain working for them in EU. Too low salaries and too high taxes.
This is a pervasive misconception in the industry, and a very dull trope on HN. Your income tax makes it possible to create a livable society in the EU. You get much more free time and are protected from a lot of random life events, even if you work in a McDonalds counter and not as a software engineer. You have rent, healthcare, protection from landlords. Not perfect, but at least the direction is there.
Solely profit-optimizing free market thinking destroys society and the planet.
Plus, even if you do prefer the American way (and I could see why), it seems fanatic for people to not recognize the clear benefits of the European model.
How do you divorce being a European principally from being willing to pay taxes? What part of being uniquely European do you value that does not fundamentally require taxes?
The problem with taxes in Europe are that the ultra-wealthy don't pay them. That burden is particularly focused on those who are high wage earners. If I look at my own country, as a high earner I'm paying close to a 50% effective tax rate (a little less with mortgage interest deductions). However the billionaire families who own the beer brewers, shipping companies and agraculture companies are paying well under 0.5% effective. They pay less than in the US. Due to this reason we're one of the most infamous tax dodge countries in Europe, apparently the Swedish and German billionaires have tax residency to avoid paying it.
Is there a source for the “well under 0.5% effective”? From my Googling, effective tax rates for European ultra rich seem to be ~50x that. Perhaps you’re thinking of wealth taxes rather than effective tax rates?
So just because someone is born in Europe they should automatically believe that the taxation system is flawless and salaries sufficient?
No
No but to come to Europa, you get less differences in wealth (essentially) universal healthcare at low/reasonable cost (ie, I can get cancer and not feel it financially), and a lot of state support when you're out of a job. Etc. Thos things cost tax money.
>you get less differences in wealth
Yes so if you were in the higher percentiles of wealth, like many engineers in the US, you'd end up with less wealth in Europe, while if you were in the lower percentiles then in Europe you'd end up with more wealth. That's how redistribution works, the top 10% of income earners end up with less (even after accounting for healthcare and education; they get back less then they put in), and US software engineers are in the top 10% of income earners.
Getting less benefit than a lower bracket isn't the same as getting less than you put in and conflating them is misleading or, if intentional, deceitful.
Could these software engineers be bankrupt if they are hit by a serious illness? Say progressive MS or a cancer, which will require extensive sick days? It is there protection?
(this is an actual question, not an ironic one)
She's not a software engineer, just married to one and worked for software companies, and maybe I don't remember correctly, but she described a bit of her experience with the American system [1]:
> I should have taken medical leave at the first surgery, but my manager was confused about our status – the acquisition was so recent that I didn’t have six months as an Oracle employee, and she said, “You’re not eligible to take paid leave.”
> I couldn’t afford to take unpaid leave, and I was afraid I would lose my job and my health insurance, so I had to power on and pretend I was okay while I was really sick and taking an antibiotic that had horrible side effects.
> ...
[1] https://techiesproject.com/deirdre-straughan/
Not every EU country has a high tax burden. Rates are generally much fairer in Eastern Europe and the Baltics.
So I wouldn’t say high taxes are fundamentally European.
I have to say, I visited Zurich once, and everything was clean, organized, civilized, and pretty. Friends told me taxes are high but you get great education, great healthcare, decent disposable income, and good transportation. If you get laid off, the state continues paying your previous salary for one (two?) years.
If everything is taken care of me from taxes, why do I need money? Take it all.
Well, Zurich is everything but representative of Europe. Switzerland has much lower taxes and higher salaries than the rest of Europe.
Switzerland is the closest you can get to USA without leaving Europe. Taxes in Zurich are lower than in the Bay Area, at will employment, healthcare that is primarily funded by flat fees rather than income tax, etc. Even the constitution was originally inspired by the American one.
FWIW Zurich feels like that to me too, and I'm from the Netherlands :)
Yeah, as an American, I think the thing that breaks the American brain is that you can have taxes that don’t just line the pockets of billionaires—that you can pay taxes and get high quality services as a result. There are so many conservative and libertarian Americans who think that taxes are necessarily squandered while they simultaneously elect politicians who insist on squandering taxes so they can prove that taxes will be squandered.
Not OP but to respond to your question, like everything, there is a scale to this question. Would you give to the state 30% of your income to pay for public services? Most people would say yes.
What about 40%? 50%?
Most people agree that taxes need to be paid for the common good of society. However, many people disagree about the correct amount and increasingly about the usage of said taxes.
That is the real problem in my opinion.
> Would you give to the state 30% of your income to pay for public services? Most people would say yes. What about 40%? 50%?
I pay about 6% for public services, around 8% for health insurance, and around 25% for the public pension insurance. The issue isn't taxes, it's almost entirely demographics.
I wonder why googles biggest European office is in the low tax high salary country of Switzerland
That's the biggest engineering office, but not the biggest overall European Google office, right? That would be in low tax low salary Ireland.
Zurich is third behind Dublin (definitely for tax reasons) and London.
I would become a patriotic European too, but only after our leaders at the national and EU level stop being transatlanticist sellouts... which won't happen any time soon.
What's a "transatlanticist sellout"?
But working in UE gives you much stronger job protection.
So, in a way, you get what you pay for.
This is a fair point to be honest. But I about 4x’d my take-home salary and get to work on more cutting edge tech, with more impact than in EU.
I did work on some cool medical device and ML tech back in EU, associated with a university and later a start up. But regulation became a PITA.
But that is a the problem though. You get stronger job protection because its very hard to find a job. If you could find a new job quickly and if the job market was more fluid, you would only rarely need this sort of job protection.
Compared to what I have heard about the US, I'd say it is actually easier to find jobs in (at least Western) Europe. Plenty of jobs, and a way easier interview process. Not 8 rounds of interviews and months of waiting (that I've heard of). But maybe two rounds in the same week and start the next month (if you want).
you get much more for your taxes than in the US though
True, I agree. But it does suck working in tech on a “medium” salary when your overseas colleagues do the same work and earn much more.
What I probably miss the most about EU (apart from family) is good food.
> and a challenger to OpenAI
Big claim. Apart from Mistral OCR, I didn't find any of their models remotely useful.
They do have a chance to become sole AI provider for France as French are trying to break from US tech, not because their product is useful.
Sounds like a cry to raise more money, which is inline with their initial pitch [0]
[0] https://sifted.eu/articles/pitch-deck-mistral
> ... didn't find any of their models remotely useful.
I daily drive Ministral-3-3B-Reasoning, getting a nice 70 tok/s on my GPU. its actually much faster than Google/DDG searches and I use it a ton when coding to check methods and remember ways to implement things. Its better than the qwen stuff of the same size because its not filled with ccp bs.
It seems fairly plausible that they will become useful. I would not consider coding requiring vastly better AI models than the best we have today. The more interesting question is what advantages excess intelligence provides in the future more generally (warfare, system management, etc)
> fairly plausible
Based on what? is that a feeling or based on evidence?
The trajectory all models are taking, while software development requirements continue to stay fairly level – at least I don't see why they wouldn't. We will still mostly need reliable, boring software.
I don't see why Mistral would stop getting better. It will, just more slowly. Eventually it will be good enough, and continue to be good enough.
Their transcription (STT) models are good IMO
>>>> In a world where you import all your digital services from the United States, you have no leverage over the United States
It's a bit deeper than that. If AI becomes as ubiquitous as imagined, which it seems it will, it's not just a "digital service". It's a primary utility - like electricity, water or highways. Because without it your productivity will plummet. We aren't there yet - we will be there in a few years.
Comparing AI to resources it highly depends on is a bit far fetched.
Only somewhat. I’d argue the internet could be considered a basic utility to function in the modern world, yet that just builds on electricity.
Those are all mutually dependent. Turn off the electric grid and close all the roads and see how long municipal water supplies last.
What resource isn't interdependent with at least one other resource?
Water depends on AI?
Not really. Unless those resources are going to disappear?
> Because without it your productivity will plummet.
Why would it plummet?
Surely we could just keep doing what we've been doing for the past 50 years. That doesn't go away because AI. The promise of AI is a productivity increase after implementing it. It doesn't change the productivity of not implementing it.
skill atrophy. also AI is actually helpful sometimes, by a very large degree.
It would plummet relative to those using 'AI', not in absolute terms. That in turn would impact your employability compared to those who do use it.
In other words, "EU governments please give me money."
Not saying that American companies are better in this regard, but if we interpret each CEO's words with the same scrutiny as how we view Elon or Altman's words... that's pretty much it.
I think he's asking to cut red tapes than money. EU was the first to regulate AI even without any company in EU producing a frontier model.
I'd like to regulate them the way American companies are regulated, and then regulate American companies in Europe the way European companies are regulated. Level the playing field.
Not exactly rocket science, it's just copying the things the Americans (and Chinese) are already doing.
Europe is never going to have sovereignty in a lot of areas. A vassal of the US or a vassal of China. Pick your poison.
If Europe were smart they’d play both parties against each other.
A vassal of California. I know we like to say that tech is the US but that's not true. It is almost completely focused around a small part of California. Take that out and Europe and the US are comparable with respect to software tech at least.
Europe has a golden chance with the current mass outflux of talent from the US and I really hope we grasp it. I just don't see my country (NL) doing that as our political class are nearly as stupid as the Americans.
This is wildly out of touch. More than half the jobs in software in the USA are not even on the west coast, let alone California.
The broader business world isn't "big tech", but it's still bigger than it.
If California would burn down, the scene would recreate itself somewhere else (ny, austin, boston).
The tech companies could all move to Texas and the power would be there. They've all won. They all have their monopolies / duopolies.
They would never have been the success they were in the first place without California. It was the culture, the conditions (no non-competes) and the lax regulation (non-enforcement of rules aimed at avoiding monopolies which allowed Facebook to buy any emerging competitor not owned by the Chinese government) which created them.
right it totally makes sense because it's the third biggest economy in the world, it has to be a vassal of number one or number two, because there has been a situation where number three in anything tries to move up, if you're third in line you must submit.
If it ever comes to that, we'll pick China, thanks
So you’d enjoy being like the free and happy people of Tibet then, eh?
Lesser of two evils etc. How about south america as a counterexample?
Is it lesser?
Up until the 2010s the US was generally pretty good with EU & EU adjacent. It’s likely to return too, as there remains a strong societal will for it.
I ask this - which has the more persistent track record of a free or more free society?
I think recency bias and online discourse has polluted perceptions.
A quick search of revenue of google and facebook (in billions) 2015-2020. Is that so hard to understand that there is an entire economy wrapped around AI/IOT? Didn´t Europe learn anything from historic data? Google Facebook 2015 $67.80B* $17.93B Google segment revenue (Alphabet restructuring). Total Alphabet: $74.98B 2016 $81.30B $25.76B Google segment revenue. Total Alphabet: $89.55B 2017 $100.10B $40.65B Google segment revenue. Total Alphabet: $109.46B 2018 $128.90B $55.84B Google segment revenue. Total Alphabet: $136.82B 2019 $143.90B $70.70B Google segment revenue. Total Alphabet: $161.86B 2020 $152.70B $85.97B *Google segment revenue. Total Alphabet: $182.53B
Europe gdp for same years (in trillions): 2015 16.89 2016 16.88 2017 17.88 2018 18.89 2019 19.31 2020 17.42 Now by simple math a healthy gdp growth is around 4%, so just by creating and/or backing up 2 similar companies (in Europe) will revenue ~2.5% of the total entire European gdp. What is going on, are the European Leaders sabotaging our economy on purpose?
Only mistral could re rerelease deepseeks model and do a worse job.
I've read the article and I kind of agree with some of the things he's saying. It's more than just AI though. Energy is the big problem and the big problem there is that we're just not ramping up renewables quickly enough. Why? Corruption of course. We had a big leaded 15-20 years ago but the German car manufactorers and British/Dutch oil companies applied a huge amount of political pressure, aided by American interests, which not just slowed the transition but also helped strangle our solar/wind industry. It's not a lost cause though, at EU level they could absolutely make it happen.
Renewable energy is unreliable without a steady storage capacity and EU would still rely on raw materials for battery production on other countries. Further, regardless of the energy source, what is vital for AI or any other industry is a steady, reliable power source which cannot be provided only through renewables in EU, not only because lack of storage, but also unfavourable geography.
That's only true at the micro level; at the macro level it is surprisingly stable over the EU zone + UK + Norway. There are capacity and interconnect issues but they're small fry. We have a huge amount of capacity for wind and considerable for solar, we just need to get using more of it.
We have one of the largest deposits of rare earth minerals in the world in the EU. Where we suffer is in lack of refining capacity. The US are in a similar situation.
That is not true. Germany shutting down their atomic power plants had a rippling effect on the energy market in whole EU because they thought renewables would be enough to power the German industries. It was criticised by even the Sweden's Minister for Energy (Ebba Busch).
Right now Germany is being de-industrialised because it's far expensive for the industries to produce goods there compared to other EU countries and those companies are moving out. That's the price Germany is paying right now for betting on renewables without any investment on infrastructure or a proper migration plan and blind political guidance.
Even the EU has rare earth minerals, do you really thing the climate activists, nature conservation activists and all other far lefties would actually allow mining those minerals in EU?
Germany shut down their atomic power plants and replaced them with natural gas. They even fiddled the EU environmental rules such that natural gas was considered "part of the green transition". That all back-fired when Russia - the source of that natural gas - attempted to use it as leverage to take Ukraine.
We were screaming at them at the time that it was a very very dumb idea to close their nuclear power and against natural gas. As always we were right.
Climate activits? We've been sending riot police and disappearing them for 5 years now whilst the bands of knife carrying racists thugs, funded by America, roam around our streets causing all hell.
I do agree about China being way ahead and way smarter here, I should add. They've made America, Europe, Japan, India, Russia look really stupid. I've admired their strategic long term thinking for as long as I've been aware of it (~25 years now, they have a long history and deep rich culture and this is part of it).
They just buckled on tariffs right?
Politically they seem willing…
they already lost it but I guess it takes time to acknowledge it? Europe does not have capital or structures to catch up, it can't change in 2 years
Consider that Boeing once had no European rival.
Europe is bulding consensus on what technology sovereignty means. This is a self-interested statement within that discussion. At some point the EU will appoint at rapporteur to synthesise those viewports into a formal definition. The EC will use that to develop a programme of works which is satisfactory to the member states and other interested states.
The US is often lulled by the seemingly endless discursive nature of pan-European projects to think that they are not serious or effective. And then one day there is an Ariane or Airbus or Galileo.
at those time Europe was growing a lot more in real terms and had one of best engineering in the world. Maybe the best cars with mech. engineering was already made at those times, only Japan was rival for cars. No way Europe now have near best AI engineers and teams, huge difference.
Deepseek is open source. Whats stopping them from distilling it and releasing their own model today? Where is the reliance on America? Gpus?
Deepseek is open in the sense that you can run V3 or V4 it is not open in the sense that you have all the tools a Chinese company has to make the V5 that will be needed to keep up with the US.
CPUs, GPUs, operating systems, programming languages toolchains.
Even if you consider open source, the majority of contributions are from US companies.
There are some companies contributing to GCC and clang from UK, GraalVM and V8 are partially in European sites but from American companies nonetheless.
There is OCaml in France, more no idea.
There is VideoLan in France (VLC, x264, DAV1D)
Deepseek is open-weight, not open-source afaik.
Recent DeepSeek models are MIT and Apache 2.0. You can see the licenses here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepSeek#Development_and_relea....
Potato potatoe
the problem is not the model, but the infrastructure needed to run the model. so yeah, gpus, cpus, network, etc etc
Power is 2-3x as expensive in Europe than American. They're toast.
> Power is 2-3x as expensive in Europe than American. They're toast.
Europe is not Germany.
Electricity price is 2-3x times more expensive in Germany.
Electricity price for electricity intensive professional is around 12-14cts/kWh in France and can be reduce under 10cts/kWh for big consummers.
Which is competitive with the cost in several US states (it is still higher than Texas but not 3x).
Nordic countries should be able to align on that too.
Electricity price in Germany for industries was ~16,7ct/kWh in 2026, special ones pay 11-12ct today and will pay a capped 5ct soon.
> will pay a capped 5ct soon.
Make sense.
Production price in Europe is between 3.5-4.5cts/kwh averaged. The rest are mainly transport and taxes.
If the EU currently choose to exonerate industrial consummers from these taxes and offload them on citizen (which honestly make sense from a business perspective), they could currently beat most US states in term of pricing while providing lower carbon footprint/kWh
The cost of power is pretty much irrelevant. The TCO of an AI datacenter is dominated by the capex. Over the lifetime of a DC, the capex will be 10x higher than all the opex combined.
Power matters, but what matters is power availability not cost.
it's actually about the same in most countries, solar and wind is coming down in price every single day. germany is an outlier at this point.
It's not. France: €0.149/kWh (~$0.175) US: ~$0.12–$0.14/kWh https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/France/electricity_prices...
America innovates, China replicates, Europe regulates.
If anything the main simplification here is that China is doing a significant amount of innovation too. Otherwise yeah. Europe's main purpose is to serve as a continent-wide historical Disneyland for rich American and Chinese tourists. And maybe we'd be better off admitting that rather than trying to pretend to have any kind of industrial or startup ecosystem.
A bit dramatic isn't it? I'd rather live in this Disneyland than in a suburban shit hole surrounded by parking lots and obese people.
Always the same ridiculous statement.
Because it is ridiculously true.
It's ridiculously unoriginal and oversimplified.
I mean we are still waiting for the European Apple or Microsoft or Google or anything of that scale aren't we? China has it's own version of all this stuff, where is Europe's?
The issue is what kind of better service would move people over ?
They're monopolies or quasi monopolies.
China has their own because they block Apple Microsoft and Google, they are not competing with them.
truth hurts right?
I, too, cannot wait when it finally stops being true, so people can stop saying it.
Americans are just as regulated and with even more egregious regulatory capture (see the American broadband/mobile provider cartel). At least Europeans get a little consumer protection.
america regulates to ensure companies (as few as humanly possible) profit while europe regulates to protect the consumers. the core difference, yea! and americans seemed to be always shitting on europe completely oblivious of what is being done to them, for decades now
> while europe regulates to protect the consumers
I get what you're trying to say, but having just had some meetings on aligning with the latest AI act, as a small startup focusing on adapting open source models for local use, the way it looks now, it seems like we won't have any consumers worth protecting :) (and I'm only half joking. AI act is a joke, and Mistral have been saying this for a while now. We have chinese models launched with permissive licenses, usable everywhere except in the EU. It'd be good comedy if it wouldn't be tragic. ffs! We can't use open source shit!!! It's bananas)
You need a doctor's note to buy contact lens solution in Holland.
The level of regulation isn't close.
That's just... false? You just go to Etos or Kruidvat for that.
Otoh, you can buy contact lenses OTC in other European countries... not saying Europe isn't over-regulated (try legally building a bike-trail on your own forest-land in Germany!! ...insanity) but it's a bad example.
You cannot build mixed used buildings in most of due to ridiculous housing zoning, can you?
I rather have European regulations to US wild west anything goes, and who cannot keep up isn't worth keeping around mentality.
Immigrants innovate, US declines and isolates, and Europe is waking up to the new world order where the west needs new leadership.
I am sceptical of the AI world dominance race.
The thing is that AI is not winner takes all market. AI models and server space is all fungible. It is very valuable, but no one will hold exclusive AI capabilities in the long run.
Agreed. I’ve switched to local models for many of my simpler workloads because they’re good enough. Coding is still through a frontier model though
In the HPC space, it has always been a "winner takes all" market. 90% or more of the business goes to the biggest provider with few exceptions (in terms of dollars, obviously all compute gets used).
And, yeah, quite a bit of that is government having ... suboptimal ... developers who want to run bad code that nobody's allowed to look at. And yes, it is about weapons design, which is why nobody is allowed to look at (and certainly not fix) the code.
I think the idea is that AI will dominate a bunch of industries, from government administration, to intelligence (arguably they have that one already), to software, to insurance, to entertainment (produce 10 new lord of the rings series per day). And the first one to get there will "own" Government administrations, Netflix, Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, ...
If the past 20 years have taught us anything, it's that the first one to have a great popular success wins. Not in one market, on ALL of them.
Very few governments outside of the US will let a US company "own" them. It is a national security issue. They just take a good enough locally made model.
The UK will
Poland will
NATO will
> They just take a good enough locally made model.
You're right that the question if that is an expensive mistake or not ... is for now an open question. However, even if Europe starts using it's own models, they'll be running on US chips.
The only thing that can “save Europe” is US embargo, otherwise doesn’t make sense to do replication of the US effort whatsoever. In US the AI is a private effort, in Europe there are no businesses that are interested in investing such large amounts of money when they can benefit from US made AI. In China they don’t have this option to use the US offerings so they must invest, be it the government or the business that will be protected from US competition.
Unless Trump invades Greenland and EU makes sure that US tech is off limits for at least a decade to come, a revolution happens in UK or France goes full nationalistic there won’t be “European tech” beyond niche. Currently the “American AI” isn’t American, it’s bunch of Europeans, Canadians and Asians building the AI that will serve US and EU customers under the supervision of Americans using European, Arab, Russian and American money.
It is incorporated in America but as Musk demonstrates, if you increase taxes or allow certain sexual relationships that CEO’s don’t approve they can just take it somewhere else.
The China example was such a massive blunder (from the perspective of US soft power). Like you say, it created a captive market for Chinese chips where Chinese companies might've otherwise bought foreign chips. That's inbuilt demand. But China also has something Europe doesn't and that's central planning. China has realized that chipmaking and AI are issues of national security. Europe just doesn't have that level of governance and forethought. Within 5 years China will be producing their own EUV chips despite the ASML export ban.
And you know who realizes all this? The Nvidia CEO [1][2].
There is now a 70 year history of Europe being designed as and becoming comfortable with being a US vassal state, from the end of WW2 to Bretton-Woods, the Marshall Plan and NATO.
I don't see fascist takeovers in the UK, France or Germany as changing any of this. If anything, it'll just fracture any semblance of European unity. It'll be the enemy within as those forces will be most aligned with the US.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJmHfmrRMUE
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hrbq66XqtCo
> don't see fascist takeovers in the UK, France or Germany
The horseshoe theory is in full swing lately, in UK after right wing libertarian rule came the left wing labour and now it’s once again the right wingers. They again won’t solve anything and more swings will happen until someone realizes that it’s the US trade that isn’t working.
The rest of Europe is similar, they just happen to have more damping as most have fractured parliaments with no one having majority but the general direction change is happening regardless. People aren’t going to be like “tough luck, we choose poorly to rely on US and we will be permanent underclass from now on”.
I just have to respond to this: I'm not sure how you meant this but, to be clear, horseshow theory is BS.
For one thing, there's nothing remotely left wing about Starmer's Labor government. Labor is firmly a center-right party. So were the Blair and Brown governments. So we've had unbroken right-wing rule in the UK since Thatcher was elected almost 50 years ago.
If Jeremy Corbyn had been elected, he may well have been a left-wing PM but he wasn't. Instead, the threat of that caused Labor insiders to engage in a vile character assassination scheme that brought Keir Starmer to power, all to support US imperialism. There's nothing remotely left-wing about that.
> There's nothing remotely left wing about Starmer's Labor government
And that's why they lost support so quickly. Centrism does't work anymore and being slightly to the right for left wing voter base and the far right voter base its unacceptable. Frankly it isn't even right vs left, people don't realize that Lenin were right and then that Hitler was right every 2 years, its a different dynamic.
Probably the best description is that they all want "Having the cake and eat it too", every few years someone comes up with an idea like we can have our cake and eat it too if we take immigrants, get rid of the immigrants, allow gay sex ban gay sex, increase tax decrease tax, increase regulation decrease regulations and so on.
The hilarious irony is that Trump has been yelling at Europe since ~2017 to stop being so reliant on the US for everything, to pay more for its own defense, stop regulating and start innovating, etc.
Basically everything that's in the Draghi report.
Meanwhile, EU bureaucrats' heads appear to remain firmly buried in the sand.
Another hilarious fact: Trump has warned about Nord Stream 2, called it "a tool of coercion."[0] At this point it almost seems like Trump cares Europe more than EU leaders.
[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50879435
He was reflecting, what he meant was if I had a pipeline to you that you are dependent on I would coerce you. He kept trying coerce EU with whatever US had on EU.
EU isn’t governed by the china communist party, the only way to stop being reliant to US is to stop trade with US and the cost of it will be enormous. Trump needs to create such a high political risk that the economic damage be justified.
He definitely did a lot to help, but the damage needs to be irreparable so that business can feel safe from US competition. He needs to do do something so outrageous that Germany would not mind losing the US car market for example.
I think one could argue that he tried this "the easy way" in his first term. He vented against Nord Stream with NATO, he vented against the regulations and the energy dependence and closing the nuke reactors. But he didn't actually do anything about it.
The difference now is that he's turning the screws and putting the pressure on. Call this "the hard way". I can understand why EU leaders do not like this one bit. But also, they had their chance...
The Nord Stream is epic but he didn't argue for independence, he is arguing for US-dependence instead of Russia-dependence so this isn't flying as well as Americans believe it is because that was actually German issue, not EU wide thing at all. EU wide policy was renewables and as it turns out they are the right direction for independence.
In general, local governments are very unpopular in EU and Europe, everyone likes EU more than they like their governments.
The EU created a € 94 billion fund for exactly this a couple of years ago. And then they put in charge a lawyer who is the daughter of a powerful Spanish media mogul.
I tried registering a couple of years ago, but it required a female co-founder, N employees in the EU, and a laundry list of ridiculous demands unrelated to technology or real startups.
And even the paperwork to start a company in the EU is a PITA. You have to incorporate in Bulgaria or something if you want anything in reasonable times. And good luck with Social Security and tax agencies.
Forget it.
I do believe that due to security concerns, European countries at the state level will try to detach themselves from relying on US infrastructure. Not only AI, but all critical things.
For decades we've lived under the pretense that US is our main ally, and that realistically we'd never end up in a position where:
A) They'd become enemies.
B) They could just turn off access.
One silver lining with Trump becoming president, is that he forced European leaders to revisit those assumptions. Sure, Trump will not be around forever, but we know what types of leaders the US public is able to vote to the top, and what they are capable of doing.
The important key word in your comment is "will try", they will try, but fail miserably. They have built a wall of bureaucracy to keep them prisoners and even trying to change an infrastructure provider would need cutting 100 red tapes and 5 years. Not to mention, even if they want to switch, that's huge capital investment and that's not something EU can afford given the social economical state they are at the moment.
Becoming? We all live under the American empire. Pretty much every international institution is dominated by American money, most high level positions in such institutions are cleared by Americans before they are appointed, they have military bases in almost every other western country and a law that allows them to invade the Netherlands if the international court ever tries someone they don't want to be tried. What illusion are we under?
It's ok to think it's a benevolent dictator type situation but it is what it is. In fact the usual reply to this isn't a rebuttal but rather "what alternative is better?" to which I have no answer.
i always forget EU exists when it comes to tech
they’re so hostile to it (lawfare) and have seemingly little innovation comparatively
why is that?
Because most people in the EU outside of the tech field care more about the welfare policies and overall quality of life than some ambitious tech projects of a few random private companies, from which they're unlikely to directly benefit from, especially when those are located outside of their member state.
Overall quality of life goes down if you just keep cutting up the pie without growing it, especially when you go into debt to buy more pie. The current youth in Europe are the first generation in decades to see worse living standards than their parents; Europeans' disdain for economic growth is already catching up with them.
> The current youth in Europe are the first generation in decades to see worse living standards than their parents
This just isn’t the case in my country and most of Central/Eastern Europe at all. I’m under 30, when my parents were my age, this country had just started recovering from communism.
Besides, there’s more to economy than just AI. If anything, I’d rather see my tax money invested into multiple different fields than having it gambled on a single hyped tech field that might as well turn out to not be so easily profitable or world changing in the end.
That's the same in the USA! lol
Every time you have to dismiss a cookie banner, thank a European.
China's AI vassal state. But so far in a good way because it's open source and everyone benefits.
Unfortunately Europe is already far behind. OpenAI started over a decade ago. How can Europe catch up? Maybe if progress slows down and they have time to at least get into the same position as Chinese models, but they also need to invest in it. But with what money? And why would talented people stay there instead of going to America where they can get a fairer share of their hard earned money?
There’s so much more to say, but it’s a big mess. And European voters and politicians are far too slow and unfocused to change their system drastically. By the time those incentives and problems are fixed it will be too late to be anything but a vassal state.
The most telling part is when he explains that in order to grant stock options he had to navigate each and every single different legal setup for each one of the member states.
I felt for a while the "European Union" has been turned into a foil for nations that had absolutely no intention to really integrate. Unless actual integration, simple one rule for all on the continent, happens within the next handfuls of months, then this ship's going down and I organize to exit stage left, Trump ain't Xi.
I don't think this argument holds much water. Each state in the US has their own legislation and taxes and it works just fine.
Each EU member state has their own stock market and you often can't trade the stocks from one country through the stock exchange in another. This means that if you want to offer EU-wide stock options, you either have to convince everyone to fly to your country and register at your country's stock exchange (which few will bother doing), or go through the process of filing and managing stocks of your company at 20+ different stock exchanges.
It's one of the things that have been recently brought up again in the EU parliament, but getting everyone to agree on a common stock market is not going to be easy.
I didn’t understand the “Trump ain’t Xi” part. As in he’s not as bad as the authoritarian nature of the CCP? Or that America is fading and China is a better ally?
Big tech bro CEO Stokes nationalistic fears to justify corporate handouts for his company. Europe is more like America every day.
Typical EU response. Seems Europeans have stumbled to 2nd or 3rd place in the A I race, if even that.
2nd would be China imho...so 3rd at best
If you include the UK and Switzerland in Europe then Europe is clearly doing ahead of China.
The 1st and 3rd AI nations in Europe are not in the EU though, so if you restrict it to just the EU it falls well behind china
What does UK and Switzerland have that even remotely compares to what China has in terms of AI?
London has incredible AI talent but yeah, unfortunately most of them work on American tech. In another life Deepmind would not be owned by Google but alas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_DeepMind
Thats American
If we could just do something, anything about being so aggressively colonised by the Palantirs and the neoliberal think tanks and the Christian far-right money, and ISDS-littered trade agreements, then the rest would just follow. Sadly though, I don't think we stand a chance.
This is mostly a performance by the Mistral CEO.
He is trying to justify the continued existence of the AI bubble in his country, claiming that, somehow, us Americans have figured it out and made LLMs work. We haven't, nobody has.
LLMs don't work. They cannot think. They do not understand what you are asking them to do. They statistically reproduce text written by other people, and they cannot do so well. They are not good assistants, they are not good code authors, they are not good debuggers, they cannot help you find security exploits... they can only mimic what it'd look like if they did, as long as you don't squint too hard.
All of the LLM startups are very quickly running out of runway, and will most likely never become profitable. OpenAI may collapse next year. Anthropic may collapse in 2028. Microsoft/Github seems to be pulling back on their Copilot bullshit and may just end up killing it entirely.
Arthur Mensch is just trying to keep Mistral alive a little bit longer until the bubble pops, and is saying whatever whatever it takes to get a little more blood from that stone.
> They statistically reproduce text written by other people
explain why they can do multiplication problems they've never seen before? I can give them two 50 digit numbers right now and they'll multiply them. its because they generalize from previous data.
> they cannot help you find security exploits.
What is the reason for the recent deluge of CVEs with working exploits to open source projects then?
Tales of YOUR incompetence do not interest us.
You just need to work on your agent design and prompting skills, modern LLMs are crazy good at all the things you listed with the right context and tools.