alt Hacker News> so the EU just doesn't have the funds to divert to AI without impacting day to day life of people
The US Government is not a major funder of frontier labs (who are almost exclusively VC and private money funded)...
> as electricity is considerably more expensive here than in the US or China
Yes, there are government policy reasons behind why this is the case. Some would argue that these policy decisions are a net negative for the EU.
> If you ask the people who vote, they'll put safety, grocery and gas prices way above EU's LLM capabilities.
Fair point, these are good things to focus on. However, EU citizens are going to love it when there are no frontier-tech opportunities left in their countries, with everything in this area having to be imported from the US and China (note that just because Chinese firms make open weight models available now, this could easily change very quickly in the future for a variety of reasons).
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> The US Government is not a major funder of frontier labs (who are almost exclusively VC and private money funded)...
There isn't a lot of VC funding available in Europe compared to the US, so without government intervention catching up will be very tricky.
> just because Chinese firms make open weight models available now, this could easily change very quickly in the future for a variety of reasons
China is not providing "open weight" models just because they think it's good for humanity. It is a competitive strategy to stay relevant at the forefront of the industry. The reality is that China is severely compute-constrained mostly due to Nvidia chip and ASML embargo. Nearly all available compute capacity has to go toward training, leaving very little for inference. It is why they release their models openly allowing third parties in EU and USA to host inference for them.
This will change when China reaches a critical scale of domestic AI chip production, which is inevitable.