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Comment by numbers_guy | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile, where are all the ChatGPT competitors of EU origin? I feel ashamed to live on this side of the Atlantic, sometimes.

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You're entirely free to move. The reason why there are no ChatGPT competitors of EU origin is the same reason why there is no SpaceX competitor in Europe. And that's not necessarily anything to be ashamed of, it simply means that the USA has the advantage and that once you reach a certain concentration of wealth it tends to lead to further concentrations of wealth. 400 years ago Europe was ascendant, today it is America and 30 years from now it will be China or India. That's just how it goes, and if it makes you feel ashamed realize then that there are no ChatGPT competitors from any other continent.

In a race like this the first mover advantage is very large, and highly driven by available funding, not by the availability of founders (of which Europe has plenty).

EU has all the ingredients to build a competitor. And the first mover’s advantage can be compensated by other things. The reality is that the EU tech community is just shitting their pants to throw their hat into the ring.

The EU doesn't have the money or the regulatory framework, to begin with. See how quickly they are working to make sure nobody can build this (well, make it work within the EU)

> EU has all the ingredients to build a competitor.

... Except for VC funding from non risk averse investors.

You are not going to build an EU openAI on Horizon2020 grants. Also EU investors are closer to business angels when you compare with the VC funding scene in the US.

Precisely. Anybody ignoring that factor is limiting their understanding of why this keeps happening.

Your mentality is too defeatist. Certainly there are some structures in our countries that make it harder to achieve such successes, but nothing says we cannot restructure our countries and improve. It is really partly a lack of will and partly due to bad leadership.

I'm pretty well versed in how the tech world is financed and based on a very large amount of experience it is plain obvious to me that even if the EU would come up with a viable competitor to ChatGPT before they would be a serious threat they would be bought out by US money. This is what wealth concentration is all about. You can't compete with an advantage like that.

That being said, as you've pointed out the concentration of wealth can (and does) move location over time.

So, clearly there is some way of competing with any "currently established" location. :)

So if Europe has great founders and great engineering culture why doesn’t exactly this happen more often? ;)

Seems to me we’re mostly busy doing what ChatGPT can now do automatically: building mediocre SaaS apps.

It is literally 100X easier to launch an openai competitor than a spacex competitor.

The latter requires massive upfront non-retrievable investment.

100X easier is probably true. That still doesn't make it easy in an absolute sense. Check out the founders of openai and see how many of them are from Europe. Then realize that they are in the United States for one reason only: access to money. No EU VC is going to be able to match the kind of funding that is available in the US, and the longer that situation persists the bigger the chance that there will never be a reversal.

My grandmother had a nice proverb that roughly translates to 'the devil shits on the larger heap'. It is meant to convey the picture that once there is a large pile of money somewhere that that pile will grow faster than a smaller pile of money simply because having access to large amounts of capital means you can place larger bets and absorb more blows. The EU capital climate is comparatively risk averse simply because there is less money to go around.

I think you overemphasize money. Money is part of it, but there’s also a cultural issue. Crab mentality is rampant and encoded in both social norms and legislation/ regulation.

Someone like you probably said that it was too late to launch a Ford’s competitor when they released the T in 1908.

The financial climate in 1908 was entirely different from the one in 2023. Please try to understand that I would love to see an EU competitor to every US firm that operates at scale in Europe for something that Europe could provide itself. Then maybe check out my bio and see that I've been a tech investor since ~2007 and have a significant amount of money on the line to back EU companies and to help them succeed when and where I can.

Even so, I'm realistic enough to know that there is no way the EU VC scene could compete with Sandhill Road when it comes to valuations and that's why any significant success created in Europe will sooner or later be US based. Examples aplenty.

Don't be; look up some of the founders[1] of OpenAI:

  Ilya Sutskever - born in Russia
  Wojciech Zaremba - born in Poland
  Andrej Karpathy - born in Slovakia

[1] according to wikipedia

OP wants a company built and HQ’ed in EU, not a beautiful exposition of brain drain

That just makes it sadder. European talent and knowledge, monetized by the US. Unfortunately the European economic order is incompatible with this kind of startup. We do not have the capital to fund it, because we do not have public markets as developed.

Thankfully we also don't have the mentally that anything less than 60h per week, and no time off, is not being committed enough.

That makes me feel even more ashamed and disappointed.

No, it's the research founding team mostly. The most important was the business team: Sam Altman, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Microsoft with their Azure supercomputers.

Edit: the only supercomputer industry in Europe was developed by France's first* president Charles De Gaulle (plan Calcul) for their country military or civil nuclear strategy which the US deep state did not like very much. A French president unilaterally killed this plan Calcul under US advice and sold Bull to American company (Honeywell) despite the opportunity to merge Bull with a few European computer giants.

The Europeans behind Stable Diffusion (Stability.AI etc.) could have remained closed source and competed with MidJourney. Instead they open sourced their work.

Last I checked MidJourney is valued at $1 billion and Stability.AI is struggling to survive.

> I feel ashamed to live on this side of the Atlantic, sometimes.

Let's not forget that DeepMind is of EU origin, and they were one of the forces that kick started this whole AI renaissance.

But now they are not: the British were smart enough to jump off this sinking ship.

- Aleph Alpha creates LLMs for commercial usage - LAION (German organisation) published open assistant (though after your comment)

- Stable Diffusion was developed in Germany.

Why? It’s a new piece of technology with some major privacy impacts. It has a tendency to straight up make facts and mix them with true pieces of information about even moderately famous people. It makes sense than the privacy watchdog setup a task force to work on the subject. That’s literally why they exist.

Me too. And it’s a more and more common feeling.

What are you waiting for to build it?

There is no source of funding in Europe that can produce the billions raised by OpenAI in the US. Not even close.

Totally untrue. Look at the VC money flowing to EU these days.

> ChatGPT competitors of EU origin?

ChatGPT is not research. If you want real research: https://ai.facebook.com/blog/large-language-model-llama-meta...

Edit: end paper is https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.13971

> Hugo Touvron, Thibaut Lavril, Gautier Izacard, Xavier Martinet, Marie-Anne Lachaux, Timothée Lacroix, Baptiste Rozière, Naman Goyal, Eric Hambro, Faisal Azhar, Aurelien Rodriguez, Armand Joulin, Edouard Grave, Guillaume Lample

> We introduce LLaMA, a collection of foundation language models ranging from 7B to 65B parameters. We train our models on trillions of tokens, and show that it is possible to train state-of-the-art models using publicly available datasets exclusively, without resorting to proprietary and inaccessible datasets. In particular, LLaMA-13B outperforms GPT-3 (175B) on most benchmarks, and LLaMA-65B is competitive with the best models, Chinchilla-70B and PaLM-540B. We release all our models to the research community.

That's a lot of french names there

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