The “EU bad” line gets rolled out so often on HN it has become its own truth. “Everyone knows” that the EU tech industry is getting strangled by its technocratic regulators and that’s why the EU fails at tech har har look at these idiots. Etc.
European developer brain drain will continue with the brightest minds coming to America.
No need to deal with all the US emigration issues and challenges. US big-tech already have offices in Europe where European devs, scientists and researchers contribute to the prosperity of the US tech sector because they get paid more than at EU companies, while still getting to enjoy the benefits of living in Europe vs the US.
What I said was that if you take two cities which have same cost of living, the salary is like 2-3x higher in US.
Every time this conversation comes up on HN, the only examples people can cite is when remote working is taken into account. Which isn’t a fair comparison at all.
There are loads. OVH and BT for example. Both of which predate AWS and GCP.
> How many decades did it take for that to arrive there?
Less time than the US. We also have, in general, faster internet at cheaper prices and better rural connectivity too.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting Europe is better than the US. Just stating that this “innovation could only happen in the US” meme is bullshit.
> It will be the same story with AI.
I literally just said I work for an AI tech company in Europe. And my company is hardly an isolated case.
> European developer brain drain will continue with the brightest minds coming to America.
You do realise that London, Berlin and other European tech hubs have their fair share of talented engineers who have moved to that country for work too?
America might have Silicon Valley but it’s hardly the only tech hub in the world.
How is this not an own goal? These companies had a head start and they still lost. Not by a little, but by such a staggering margin that AWS does two OOMs more revenue.
> I literally just said I work for an AI tech company in Europe.
The argument is not ”there are no AI companies in Europe.” The argument is ”there are no competitive AI companies in Europe.” The only one I can think of is DeepMind, and they are A) English (no longer EU) and B) were acquired by Google ten years ago.
What are these European tech companies that are competitive with Nvidia, OpenAI, Google, etc? I’d like to learn more.
> You do realise that London, Berlin and other European tech hubs have their fair share of talented engineers who have moved to that country for work too?
A lot of them work for subsidiaries of American companies.
They’re hugely successful corporations. Saying they’ve “lost” is a tad ridiculous.
Plus monopolies are bad for innovation so you could argue that Europe has a healthier ecosystem because it is tougher on monopolies than America.
> The argument is not ”there are no AI companies in Europe.” The argument is ”there are no competitive AI companies in Europe.”
You phrase that like it was a quote but in fact it wasn’t. The point being argued was that AI start ups couldn’t exist and I demonstrated they could.
Europe is also a hotspot of AI research:
https://odsc.medium.com/top-ten-european-ai-research-labs-fo...
> The only one I can think of is DeepMind, and they are A) English (no longer EU) and B) were acquired by Google ten years ago.
England was in the EU 10 years ago, EU legislations were carried over to English law after “Brexit” and the fact that they were good enough to be bought by Google also demonstrates that European companies can be seen as a threat.
> A lot of them work for subsidiaries of American companies.
And a lot of them don’t. I had my worked for a single American subsidiary in my 20 years of experience in Europe. Same is true for a lot of my friends too.
I really do get fed up with how some Americans believe it’s impossible that any other country could be successful.
Let’s quantify it so it’s not ridiculous. Since getting their head start, they have ”lost” about 90% of total market share to American companies who are doing a better job. And this is before the new transfer framework that cane out this month. What is the value prop of OVH without regulatory capture?
> Europe is also a hotspot of AI research
This is absolutely true. Amsterdam for example produces outstanding ML research. But where do their freshly minted phds go? American companies!
> I really do get fed up with how some Americans believe it’s impossible that any other country could be successful.
For what it’s worth, I live in northern Europe. As you point out, European universities are great. They are an AI research hotbed and they produce highly capable undergrads. But this clearly isn’t translating into world class tech companies, and we should ask ourselves why.
This is a different argument to the one originally pitched though. And you cannot just assume the reason OVH hadn’t exploded like AWS did was due to EU regulation.
> But where do their freshly minted phds go? American companies
Again, I work for a European AI tech firm.
> But this clearly isn’t translating into world class tech companies, and we should ask ourselves why.
I think it is. I just think European tech firms are generally happier to grow organically. I think it’s more a case of different cultures. America is all about growth above all else. Whereas Europe is often more about user experience. European firms are often less aggressive at advertising outside of Europe too (maybe that’s a language barrier?)
I do honestly think the European tech market is healthy. It’s just different to the US market. The problem is the American school of capitalism is all about market dominance whereas European companies seem a little less obsessed with that. But that doesn’t mean Europe isn’t doing some exceedingly good work.
As a European, I value the fact that we have such a vibrant ecosystem.
What country are you talking about? Definitely not Germany.
> America might have Silicon Valley but it’s hardly the only tech hub in the world.
Berlin startup scene is a joke compared to the Silicon Valley though. Cambridge, London, Zürich, maybe Munich I would agree to a certain degree - but not Berlin. The rule of thumb is that it's better outside of EU though.
That knowledge exists now in Europe, but there was easily a lost decade in terms of capability. This is the price. Similar will happen in AI and you will be stuck relying on American products. I hope for your sake that I am wrong.
You keep saying this but I’m not seeing any evidence it’s true. There have always been plenty of companies in Europe that have had data centre scale compute too (plus managing a data centre requires that level of understanding as well so I don’t agree with you dismissing OVH.
Plus you keep saying it’s taken a decade for the EU to catch up and on those timescales it would put things before GDPR et al. Thus EU legislation would have no impact even if your point was true.
> Similar will happen in AI and you will be stuck relying on American products.
At risk of sounding repetitive: I work for a European AI firm.
We actually have a lot of American clients — so the exact inverse of the point you’re making.
https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate...
> Although Europe has many high-performing companies, in aggregate European companies underperform relative to those in other major regions: they are growing more slowly, creating lower returns, and investing less in R&D than their US counterparts.
which is exactly what I’ve been saying. There are plenty of high performing companies in Europe, we just aren’t as aggressive in chasing growth for growths sake.
If you want to ask why that is, then I’d argue it’s more a cultural thing than it is to do with legislation.
Should that culture change? Personally I’d rather it didn’t. Personally I think America needs to change to become more customer focused because a lot of American businesses are really shitty to deal with.
I get this point will be an unpopular opinion on a VC forum like HN. But it just goes to demonstrate that the situation isn’t so black and white as you’ve been making out.
It'll probably be "good enough" for most industry usecases ;) And you can run it offline and on-prem, which is a big deal to the many companies who DO NOT want their internal data leaking to OpenAI.
And the Carrefour AI stuff is hosted on OVH cloud (in France), I believe: https://www.carrefour.com/en/news/artificial-intelligence-op...
OVH has roughly 15% of the revenue that Google Cloud makes in Europe. So I'd put them at a similar size to Oracle Cloud, but clearly larger than DigitalOcean.
Then I suspect you haven't spoken to anyone technical. Every single person in my company on the dev team (myself included) is extremely pro GDPR, not the least because it provides us safety from leeches that would try to impose some horrid user-violating tracking in the app we make.
The greedy suit wants us to track every millimeter of the user's mouse on the page? Nope, thanks, better luck next time!
> As a guy with a startup...
If your startup can't exist without hoovering infinite user data in perpetuity, then your startup shouldn't exist.
And yes, tracking what users focus on is very relevant to building a good product. But that kind of entrepreneurial mindset is largely absent in Europe - my guess is most Europeans with such a mindset eventually go to America, whether they were born in 1850 or 1985.
So not tracking every single molecule of detail about your users is incompatible with building a good product?
If being entrepreneurial means that I have to violate my user's privacy then I'd rather not be an entrepreneur, thanks. And again, if your business can't survive without being invasive and malicious to your users, then your business shouldn't exist. You won't see me or anyone else reasonable weeping about the dissolution of such entities, either.
If GDPR was really that problematic then it would be all over the news instead of a few nationalists outside of EU arguing about hypotheticals on random message boards.
GDPR doesnt prohibit you from monitoring your product. It just gets very serious when you abuse users without them agreeing.
Like Threads not launching in EU because of that.
Let alone Mozilla (non-EU) and browser extensions (like ublock) did more for personal privacy than any of the aforementioned laws. And in contrast to creating a "level playing field with Big Tech" they made tech business in the EU a morass of legal insecurities for small businesses while big corps are still happily intruding individual's privacy in ways that our current legal system cannot even cover.
I'd like to know those people, especially if their job is connected in any way to the practices the GDPR is fighting against, because, although it may have been created better, I can't find a single reason why ordinary honest people should believe the GDPR shouldn't exist.