Love it as a consumer because Mistral is probably not doing any more open weights if they get tangled with Microsoft.
But man, as a business owner in EU, this would just make me not want to build an AI startup in EU
But man, as a business owner in EU, this would just make me not want to build an AI startup in EU
Like, purely on the basis that MS might not be allowed to take you over?
TBH I'd assume the FTC would at least be asking questions here, too. EC and FTC thinking on competition is generally not all _that_ different, but the EC tends to be quicker to act these days (this was not always the case; the FTC was very much out in front on Intel and Internet Explorer back in the day).
Mistral isn't exactly some decade-long state funded national champion. Its a 1 year old startup whose core staff all come from American tech companies. With 0 revenue and minimal market share, there's like no conceivable metric in traditional antitrust theory to block this. Yet the EU prevents it from taking foreign investment all the same.
Look at TSMC in comparison. It IS the national champion of Taiwan, yet its majority foreign owned, doesn't stop it from underpinning the Taiwan economy and spawning massive ecosystems in its local areas.. Taiwan's government understands its place in the international economy, so prefers to cooperate and trust its international partners.
They can't defend their own backyard, refuses to pay for their 2%, and free-rides off of US protection.
They tried to court China as their partner, only to now face a flood of Chinese car imports that outcompete their once prided industries.
They seem to only care about national security when it comes to fleecing US companies, rather than say defending against Russia, or strategizing against China.
Stop with that nonsense. Every single country that imports American goods has regulations on how it is imported. Your expectations are misaligned if you think the concept of a Free Market extends to other countries carte-blanche. Not even the United States can stop itself from regulating it's own businesses, and usually it's for the better.
These comments pop-up all the time but never have a reasonable alternative to suggest. This is what governance looks like; I'm sorry if you're offended on Apple or Microsoft's behalf.
So at what point in their buying spree do you cut them off? Do you wait until they've bought 90% of AI startups? 50%? Does it matter if there are 4 AI startups or 40?
Do you have a different experience?
It's not illegal to be a monopoly[0] (at least in the US) but abusing your monopoly is what gets you in trouble. Copyright and patents are examples of gov't granted monopolies.
[0] Fully conceding the fact that MS is a convicted monopolist and has to play by different rules than everyone else.
No they haven't.
If a Chinese company with massive government contracts had invested in OpenAI there is no way that the US would not start an investigation.
Based on recent news, Trump has done more for NATO rearmament than any US president in history. Gee, maybe sometimes drastic steps are needed when 20 years of three other presidents doing everything but stand on their heads while begging other NATO members to spend more on their own defense failed.
Trump was lambasted by the usual bien-pensant suspects when he told NATO this in 2018 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vpwkdmwui3k>. He was right when at the UN he warned against Western European dependence on Russian energy, for which the German foreign minister and others laughed at him <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfJv9QYrlwg>.
And remember, Trump isn't even in office now; he's already done more for Western collective defense than a) the putative current president and b) an actual land war in Europe!
>and gives state secrets to enemies
Repeat this often enough and maybe it'll come true one day!
Putin did that. To the degree Trump's statements have had an effect, it's in deharmonizing trans-Atlantic military coöperation.
(EDIT: Trump and Putin had similar effects. See [1].)
No. As I said, not even an actual land war in Europe has been as effective as Trump's mean words in getting Western Europe to actually get off their butts regarding defense.
The truth is that for many European countries military defence is was a bit of an abstract concept, with no real enemy nearby and no really interventionist foreign policies. Letting NATO rot was not a big problem in that context. What changed everything was when an enemy willing to use its military in a war in Europe materialised.
Putin and Trump appeared to have played similar roles in increasing European defence spending, with Putin beating out Trump (but not by much).
Let's look at Ex-US NATO defence expenditure as a fraction of GDP from 2017 to 2020 in comparison with 2014 to 2016 [1]. On average it rose +13 bps, 1.43% to 1.56%, (p = 0.09, unpaired t-test). Not statisfically significant. Same for '17 to '20 versus '21 to '23: +12 bps, 1.56% to 1.69% (p = 0.13).
Looking broader, '14 to '16 versus '17 to '23, we get +18.6 bps (p = 0.02) for Trump. Significant! But if we do the same for Putin, '14 to '20 versus '21 to '23, we get +18.1 bps (p = 0.02). Also significant! (And uncannily similar.)
Seeing the above, I get why there is an impasse. The data support an insignificant conclusion for giving the entire effect to Trump or Putin with low confidence. They more significantly support giving half the effect to each. Given we're "crediting" (in the high-confidence analysis) '21 to '23 to both, and Putin's effects have manifested over just 2 years, that makes the claim that Trump did more to boost ex-US NATO defence spending than Putin technically incorrect. But only technically.
(Would note that a t-test for such data isn't really correct, so would take the above as casual calculations.)
[1] https://www.nato.int/nato_static_fl2014/assets/pdf/2023/7/pd... Table 3
Trust in the US on military matters is rather high (despite some recent blunders), but in every other arena it is basically nonexistent. I don't see why the US should receive any less scrutiny than China in this instance.
I’d add that as long as NATO was uncontroversial in American politics, allies could count on being able to work with each successive president, regardless of party, which definitely did help. There was the occasional bickering (like the French being vocal in their opposition to the war in Iraq), but nothing that would compromise the alliance in the long run. Things like “friendly” intelligence gathering, or indeed trade disputes, never stopped, but did not preclude cooperation at the highest levels.
In that context, it’s fine to argue every now and then because everyone knows that neither side is likely to escalate things out of control. As you said, it did not affect trust in the fundamentals.
Huge difference between not taking someone for granted and being antagonistic towards them.
Sure, but if a European did we wouldn't.
So if you start in America, you can access both continents. If you start in China, you can access Europe and Asia. If you start in Europe, you're limited to one.
Granted, this is just a proble. But if it amounts to something, it's an asymmetrically chilling move.
Congress seeks to curb it but doesn't in practice. That may change. In any case, I was discounting access to American capital market for Chinese AI start-ups: they can tap both China and Europe.
> Clarifying a couple of things since we’re reading creative interpretations of our latest announcements:
- We’re still committed to leading open-weight models! We ask for a little patience, 1.5k H100s only got us that far.
- We have a reselling agreement with Microsoft, that we’re very excited about. Alongside similar partnerships, it will accelerate our growth.
- Microsoft invested in a small convertible note alongside many other companies, as a distribution partner. We are an independent European company with global ambitions, that part is not changing either.
> We’re seeing some interest for Le Chat and Mistral Large, on both la Plateforme and Azure, and we’ll be iterating fast!
[1] https://twitter.com/arthurmensch/status/1762818733016322168
It's similar to the debate France had about raising the progressive tax rates - some ultrarich people would rather give up their French residency, than pay higher taxes.
There's clearly stuff the EU could do to be more competitive, but I think the core issue is that American investors can expect less risk and bigger payoffs, because the environment is friendlier to them, but the environment being friendlier to them leads to regular people getting screwed by giant companies that operate with no oversight. Fast forward the 2020s and you literally have planes falling out of the sky.
I don't think there are any great options.
I'm also aware this is a fringe view on HN, kinda by definition. It's a forum for founders, mostly in the US, and the median opinion on what you should be able to do with your company on here is extreme by most peoples' standards. But the echo chamber needs some dissent on this point.
If EU wants to own its AI future, that’s not a great way of getting started.
If EU wants to own its AI future, it has enough money to buy one. They decided not to.
I guess Norway is not a member of EU.
Statoil was created by the state not bought by it. If anything Statoil is an example of the very opposite idea and that is that Norway has sold shares in a company set up by the state rather than bought shares in an already existing company.
It absolutely does. The problem is it must then partition the work across the entire continent. America has this problem, too, e.g. the F-35, but the consensus model of EU politics makes it particularly insidious.
Also, EU doesn't but things for their consumers, do you even know what the EU is?
You can't attract investors if they can't sell in case the investment is successful. This is severely limiting and a terrible situation to be in - especially if you already have investors, who might demand their money back from you - way before your profits could cover it.
And the worst thing that might happen - you design a startup to be acquired by Microsoft/Apple/Google and then EU comes and says no. WTF?
Also, this isn't the EU saying "no" at the moment, but looking into it, as it does with many things.
Some structural differences are in part actually from the US having been less permissive than Europe in banking.
Even growth should be questioned holistically when you can literally make a few million dollars once and be done with it
instead of every quarter while pretending that making the same or lesser amounts are disasters
BTW the company was failing. If we didn't sell we'd have 0 very soon. It's really not as easy as "well let's just grow I guess".
If thats not your circumstance then it doesn't apply to you
I’m not the person that thinks there is anything wrong with selling shares, or failure, by the way
I would just rule out very many ideas to pursue at all, and encourage others to do the same.
But founders and employees at some point want to leave and do other things. They want to take their stake in the company and sell it to buy a house or retire or pay for their kids' college or whatever.
That requires an exit, either as an acquisition or an IPO.
(In theory, dividends or profit distributions are an alternative, but they're much harder to do anything with because they're mostly in the future and not guaranteed. You can't pay for your kids' college with future profit-sharing that may or may not materialize. And, dividends or profit distributions are the opposite of growth, because you're no longer re-investing in the company.)
... and infinite growth is neither of those?
And yes, growing until that exit point is a lot of work - so it makes total sense people want an exit at some point.
Of course everybody expects the company to take advantage of opportunities - but it has to make economical sense. Nobody wants their company to try to grow so hard the whole company crashes.
We're talking about a nascent field. Sustaining means holding the status quo while others lap you in capability and cost.
The goal should be whatever the creator wants.
The solution is to mandate open weights. Not kneecap your flagship by putting it at a permanent capital disadvantage.
DAX40 $1.9T
CAC40 $2.8T
There are single companies in US that exceed both of these values.
US has new upstarts like Tesla and Nvidia, which at their prime, add like 1 IKEA per fortnight to their market cap.
In terms of revenue Bosch is comparable to Nvidia and Tesla. IKEA is about half that and Schwarz is about Nvidia and Tesla combined, but of course those two are bad comparisons because they are in the rather unexciting retail market.
But generally I agree that exciting upstarts that reach fortune 500 size tend to be US companies.
Ah yes, feel free to name all the other European startups that are in the right place at the right time with their own technology. Maybe one of these days you'll acknowledge that there may be a reason why such companies keep appearing in the US and East Asia, and not across the Atlantic.
Yes, I know that Nvidia is 30 years old. That does not change my point. Where were the European GPU startups back in the 1990s, let alone today?
(This is where you inevitably cite ASML. Psst: Look into where and who developed ASML's lithography technology, and what companies were not allowed to build off it.)
For starters, there's ARM and STMicroelectronics. Then all the classical household-name businesses like SAAB, Phillips, Nokia, Siemens et. al. However, there's also more recent "SF-style" startups like Spotify, TransferWise and Klarna. Take your pick?
> Where were the European GPU startups back in the 1990s, let alone today?
Imagination Technologies was a pretty big name for a while: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PowerVR_products
My point is that maybe the US isn't better for causing wildly successful ideas to be rewarded by the market.
The US probably is better for starting tech companies. More rolls of the dice, more chances for success.
But it's not like Nvidia's founders were shopping around for a country to start Nvidia in either. If the Wikipedia history is to be believed, they were already accomplished engineers working at established computing companies in the US, so why would they found Nvidia anywhere else? The web of causality is deeply tangled here. Was the US in the 90s onward actually better for tech startups, or was it a momentum effect carried forward from the US already being a tech and computing leader in the 80s? Maybe a little of both.
I read an interesting point recently: Austria's 100 wealthiest families have two thirds of the country's wealth, and zero have earned their money from technology; they've all inherited it.
How different would the same list be for Germany? One, perhaps two families earned their fortunes from tech (and by "tech" I mean "SAP")?
I am not an expert but does this kind of probes not help businesses against things like hostile take overs and against VC buying up all your competitors to crush you with scale?
What is the most biggest EU software company? SAP?
In a "winner takes all" situation, how else can the EU compete ? (The US did protectionism too while their industries were fledgling, to avoid getting crushed by the British...)
It’s not just investment capital which usually grows out of exits but also the whole ecosystem of services and consultants and experts and law firms specializing in the sector. All of it.
The EU doesn’t have enough routes to exit due to both regulation and a way more conservative business climate. As a result you don’t get a big tech ecosystem and most exits result in the whole thing being pulled into the US orbit.
In the US you build your app and everything is in English. You can launch that across all of the states as-is.
In Europe (not even the EU specifically) you’re gonna need i18n, particularly with B2B. If you want to launch in Germany, for example, you’ll be expected to provide an interface in German. You can’t presume everyone speaks English, because they don’t. Expect multilingual support too.
Then you have payment. Different countries have different cultural norms, so what people are used to using in the Netherlands is unlikely to be supported generically elsewhere. It’s not gonna be enough to just support Stripe and card payments or PayPal for B2C.
Regulation doesn’t mandate any of this. It’s effectively conducting business internationally.
LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton (422B Euro)
ASML (347B)
L'Oréal (241B)
Hermès (240B)
SAP (203B)
Totalenergies (142B)
Siemens (140B)
So it's really SAP.
The response was a list all companies, i.e. completely unrelated to original comment.
Edit: i see a typo in original comment 's/to/no/g'
but to get back to the general point, that list looks kind of bleak to me. bags, makeup and oil. at least there's ASML in there (i hope they won't have a reason to move their listing to NYC).
Not even that, it's just the Eurozone. So it's missing most of Scandinavia and the UK, which are probably the most 'techy' economies in Europe.
Europe does not tend to produce as large tech startups as the US, in part because a lot of promising companies leave for Silicon Valley first chance they get because funding opportunities are better there. But then neither does most of the US, partly for the same reason.
We see the same all the way down - when I worked in a UK based technology VC, we saw both people decamping from the regions to London, and from London to SV for these kinds of reasons, as well as an influx of tech companies from all over elsewhere in Europe who saw London as one of a short list of European cities to move to in order to make things easier - some of whom undoubtedly would move on to SV.
I myself moved to the UK 24 years ago because I co-founded a startup in Norway, and the VC's that invested in us adviced us to move the company to London because there was insufficient capital for tech/software companies in Norway at the time.
Europe has plenty of tech. Tech is not all, or even mostly, the tech giants. It could have more, and it could put more effort into keeping more here. But regulations will not be enough for that - it'll take more capital infusion.