alt Hacker NewsI don't believe Europe can build models that can compete with American ones.
1. In order to build competitive models, you need to offer competitive salaries and equity. Europe has very old and inadequate corporate law virtually everywhere but in UK. European labs cannot attract talent that can build such competitive models with the proper lack of incentives.
2. In order to build competitive models, you need gargantuan amounts of compute. And thus capital. How can you compete when big tech can just cough a handful of equity and raise $ 85 B like Alphabet is doing right now?
3. In order to have these datacenters financially feasible you need cheap energy. We don't have it. Some places like France have clean one, but it's still not cheap enough, you're still paying a 45-50% premium over some random South Carolina.
What Europe should do is to finally tackle its fundamental issues with corporate laws, startups and incentivize more money to flow into venture capital.
Essentially we need a bunch of Mistrals, but with more competition and better incentives.
There's plenty of brilliant European engineers and scientists that would gladly take some pay cut to work in Europe instead of US and could bring their expertise here, but you still need the right incentives.
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> you need to offer competitive salaries and equity
This has always been an argument for "peace time" underperformance of european tech sector but I don't buy this argument for critical national security needs. Historically countries never needed to top the compensation charts to get talent. What they do need is a clear mission and ambition. This is what is missing in Europe
> In order to build competitive models, you need to offer competitive salaries and equity. Europe has very old and inadequate corporate law virtually everywhere but in UK.
It is a fact that a much smaller amount of money is available in the EU for startup investments.
But in which sense it the corporate law inadequate? As far as I am aware the laws allow quite a lot of freedom in setting up the corporate governance for many forms of companies.
> 1. In order to build competitive models, you need to offer competitive salaries and equity.
FWIW, for the equity part there's a proposal expected to pass for next year: https://www.eu-inc.org/ (but it doesn't address taxes, cross-border employment, or anything significant so it's mostly moot). The main goal is to attract native VCs.
AFAIK it's designed by lawyers and old money, with little to no input from tech entrepreneurs.
Just as a reminder, Google DeepMind is right here in the UK, and there are hundreds, thousands of top AI researchers that are foundational to everything that the US is doing, as much, if more so than the Chinese contributions.
We need compute, yes, but we certainly aren't short of talent if we put our minds to it, and many of them are already here.
As per your points, Europe really can't compete, particularly when power is considered. However, frontier models that require city-sized data centres might not be all they are cracked up to be.
In China they seem to be nonchalantly doing a lot with AI for specific rather than 'ask me anything' tasks. To them, they are quite used to everyday applications that work well within limited domains, no vast data centre needed, just on-device. Hence the hype is no big deal.
Europe needs to think again about what can be done to make Europe attractive for software development, and I have seen no helpful encouragement from UK or European governments over the last few decades. No word of a lie, all we got in the UK was the BBC Micro, way back in the early 1980s, and since then tech has been culturally uncool.
This cultural aspect has not gone away, if a guy is a software engineer then he isn't going to get lucky with the lasses, they will run a mile.
What gets me is that the UK or places in Europe such as those places where finance matters, could have had active policing and law enforcement of data breaches and hacking, with sensible standards for storing customer data, making Europe the best place to host your data, purely for the legal protections. But we ended up with cookie notices and anti-slavery statements.
You also need to scrape huge amounts of data with no regard for copyright which is:
1. No longer possible the same way it was for openai and anthropic and
2. Much more regulated in the EU
Also the EU would need state backing since we don't have the same private capital, meaning the regulations are even tighter.