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Comment by MrThoughtful | Hacker News Reader

Europe dug itself deep into a hole.

At first, we missed the internet. Because of way too much regulation.

Then we found ourselves using only US software and digital services.

What did we do? We created more regulation. Way more regulation. Burying all hope Europe could ever get a foot in the door of the internet.

Now we are about to miss AI.

OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Tesla, NVIDIA .. all AI players are in the US again.

I don't think more governmental intervention is the right way.

In fact, I think it is counterproductive.

What should we do?

Well, it's a long process. We would have to get to a mindset that gives small entrepreneurs more freedom. Less bureaucracy and less regulation, step by step. I don't think it will happen. The reaction in Europe is always "more regulation". The thought of removing some regulation is probably terrifying to our leaders.

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I think this has a lot more to do with the US having a larger english speaking population under one legal framework. All of the capital goes here first since it has the most upside and makes it easier to expand to other english speaking countries.

I'm Polish and would never build a tech business targeting the Polish market first over the US, and it has nothing to do with regulations getting in my way.

Building ChatGPT or Google for EU citizens is a lot harder than doing it for English speakers.

Also most of the leading figures in AI are from Europe or Asia but followed the money to the US.

EDIT 3: Americans underestimate the value of being surrounded by oceans instead of Russia and Germany, which they end up attributing to their ingenuity or libertarian leaning version of capitalism.

I believe you are driving the conversation off the course here.

> We would have to get to a mindset that gives small entrepreneurs more freedom. Less bureaucracy and less regulation, step by step.

Can you explain me, how the small entrepreneurs will get their hand on billions to train 175B models which we have now and the next ones wich will have order of magnitude or even 3 orders of magnitude more weights???

You can't do this without collaboration and lot, lot of money. This requires huge infrastructure for the training, the fine tuning and incremental training. BLOOM is one of the examples that was made using your taxes, but it lacks RLHF and RLMF. The later two require dedication and dedicated work on the models.

And this is what the CENRN's petition is about. I do not give less sht about regulations at this point, as I'm really worrying about big corps having a sole control and huge advantage on the technologies of the paradigm shift.

That is why such Open Source initiatives must be perused.

If you live in Europe vote for the CENR petition now.

Don't know about regulation, but the development of the internet was initially subsidised by the US government [1]. AI research has also been subsidised in the past. The famous MNIST handwriting dataset being a good example here [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET

[2] https://www.nist.gov/srd/nist-special-database-19

Deepmind is headquartered in the UK (but owned and funded by Google). Graphcore are also UK based.

So, from a regulatory perspective neither of these are in the EU either ;)

Only theoretically; the UK, as half the country said would happen, is currently deciding to use its post-Brexit sovereignty to repeatedly freely choose to (almost?) always do whatever the EU decides to do, only without any of the free trade advantages that come with guaranteeing they always will.

> but owned and funded by Google

I remember Demis Hassabis(Deepmind founder) said in some podcast that they had lot of troubles getting decent funding in Europe. In general it seems Europe has much less appetite for funding private research groups than US, which I think it boils down directly or indirectly to regulations.

This is true, it all comes down to money.

Europe is as capable if not more capable of being the center of engineering, tech and software. However there is no huge hotbed of VC money that allows huge risks.

Europe has much less appetite for funding anything.

Except particle physics - which I guess is why they are trying to sell it this way.

This. The EU prides itself in being the 'regulatory superpower'.

Now the EU gets GDPR, while the US gets GPT-4. I cannot think of any influential EU AI companies, except for DeepL. While even the UK has two (Deepmind, Stability). I cannot see a more damning indictment of EU's tech policy than this.

But this seems to be the future that Europeans want, aging, resentful of changes, yet somehow mass importing immigrants to serve the pensioners. Italy now has 50% GDP per capita compared to the US, I think it'll end up being 33% by 2050.

A pretty large majority (79%) of Americans are concerned about how their data is being used by companies. 75% would like some kind of regulation on what companies can do with their data [0]. The fact that the US government is so unwilling/unable to do anything despite such popular support is an indictment of the idea that Americans are better off just because the economy is doing well.

The problem with comparing economies is that something which is a net positive for GDP can still be a net negative for most of the actual people living under that economy. The resource curse of petro states is a classic example, but in the US one could look at synthetic opioids, casinos, strip mining, or even social media. More money is moving but are most people better off? The US (economy) is the richest it's ever been but despite this there seems to be a rising tide of pessimism, unafordability, and distrust of institutions.

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/11/15/key-takeawa...

Where is equivalent survey for EU citizens?

The US stock market it’s self is like 2x more than Europe combine that itself deter cooperation greediness and also innovation

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