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Comment by wiz21c | Hacker News Reader

> Tech entrepreneurs struggle to navigate 27 different markets with different regulations, authorities, standards and requirements

And cultures... And this ain't gonna change any time soon...

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Yes. It‘s striking what kind of benefits a large domestic market automatically brings to startups. If the EU really wants to get closer to the US and China, they really need to make the single market become true. Not going to happen in the foreseeable future, though.

Or they can introduce laws that (while also protecting citizens rights) break down the economies of scale advantages currently enjoyed by US big tech.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40681920

And most importantly, languages. I find myself constantly wishing for an unified online marketplace, or unified comparison website for consumer products or reviews.

Different SKUs for each country. It's just a nightmare to try and buy something in Europe

Not a big problem.

I had to learn English to use computers. It was hard. Fallout games helped a lot. I played with a dictionary by my side. Soon we will all learn chinese to do the same (and read relevant scientific articles).

If you live in Germany or Netherlands or any other big European market, you have access to big market where you can find everything. If you live in smaller market country in the EU you'll find much less options and buying from other countries becomes a hassle and expensive.

It's not an open free flowing market like people might think it is. It makes it less competitive

I thought the EU had solved a lot of this by unifying the markets.

Actually with generative AIs we soon won't need English as a middle ground anymore. Which is quite revolutionary. Right now English kind of serves as a common ground for doing international business. There are a few other languages that are important of course. But thanks to the British, English spread the furthest. Historically, that has created an advantage for native speakers and those educated well enough to master it. The Romans used to have the same thing with Latin. Latin has been a dead language for quite some time but it's still taught in a lot of places.

This puts native speakers at and advantage. We're talking billions of people on this planet. The tech that OpenAI recently demoed, allows real time translation of pretty much any language to any other language. Babelfish just stopped being science fiction. On a side note, somebody needs to productize a fish shaped bluetooth earbud.

Anyway, that enables a whole range of people that are currently hard to interact with because they don't speak English well, or at all, to interact with quite literally anyone on the planet that speaks something that LLMs can make sense of. Even people only speaking relatively obscure dialects or languages. That's going to have an effect on international trade and other exchanges. Not speaking English is going to stop being a hurdle.

And likewise, LLMs can make it easier to navigate bureaucracy and deal with other local customs and procedures. I live in the EU.

I have a problem, so I used AI. Now I have two problems.

The only constant in all your problems is you. Don't blame the LLM.

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