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Comment by srameshc | Hacker News Reader

I was thinking the same, why are so many superior models coming from only countries like US and China. And why are European countries not in the list other than France with Mistral. Why are so few companies in India, Japan, South Korea even close to a promising new model like what Chinese companies did ?

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"Why" is a fair question but are you surprised? Europe is consistently behind in tech.

Europe has about 1.3 times the population of the USA and about 75% of the GDP yet EU tech output is a very small percentage of US tech output. We are not talking about 70, 50, 30, or even 20%. It's a drop in the bucket.

>The seven largest U.S. tech companies, Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla, are 20 times bigger than Europe’s seven largest, and generate 10 times more revenue.

https://eqtgroup.com/thinq/technology/why-is-europes-tech-in...

"Why" is a good question, but I definitely wouldnt expect significant competition in LLMs from Europe based on the giant tech disparity. Having 1 non-cutting edge model that isn't really competitive is pretty much what I would expect.

Also, commercial software is consistently behind from open source.

I only use open source LLMs for writing (Qwen 32b from Groq) and open source editor of course, Emacs.

If some people can write better using commercial LLMs (and commercial editors), by all means, but they put themselves at a disadvantage.

Next step for me, is to use something open source for translation, I use Claude for the moment, and open source for programming, I use GPT curently. In less than a year I will find a satisfying solution to both of these problems. I haven't looked deep enough.

What a weird comment.

llama-3.1-70b-versatile is pretty good at translating though

> The seven largest U.S. tech companies (...) are 20 times bigger than Europe’s seven largest, and generate 10 times more revenue.

I'm going to guess that this part is intentional. Europe tends to be more aggressive in enforcing antitrust laws. Economically, Europe's goal isn't to have the biggest companies but to have more smaller companies.

So you're not going to get companies like Google, but you will get companies like Proton, Spotify, Tuta, Hetzner, Mistral, Threema, Filen, Babbel, Nextcloud, CryptPad, DeepL, Vivaldi, and so on.

>I'm going to guess that this part is intentional. Europe tends to be more aggressive in enforcing antitrust laws. Economically, Europe's goal isn't to have the biggest companies but to have more smaller companies.

So is your hypothesis that the total market cap of EU tech companies is something like 50,60,70, etc. % of total US tech marketcap? Something significantly different than the ~10% implied by that figure (largest us companies 10x largest EU companies). And it's just more broadly distributed?

Hard to find data on this but this is showing EU tech market cap at 3.2T. https://www.stateofeuropeantech.com/chapters/outcomes

Whereas this is saying the US "megacaps" ($200B+) are at 21T. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/05/tech-megacaps-worth-market-c...

Which puts the entire EU tech market at 15% of the US megacaps. Not even the entire market.

European companies are smaller on average and less likely to go public in general, so market cap comparisons don’t show the whole picture. Growing big is less often seen as a goal than in the US. “Megacaps” aren’t necessarily considered a healthy thing to have.

Yes, and this all but guarantees that Europe will stay behind USA and China in their technology capabilities.

What are these capabilities?

I don't see any sense in which the EU has fewer capabilities. It has, say, a smaller number of businesses with smaller market dominance.

It isnt clear to me what capability the EU would gain by having a monopolist social network, a monopolist search engine, a monopolist advertising trader

Europe has all of those things, they just come from the US.

If it means sticking to their values, then so be it.

Antitrust laws are not the reasons for more smaller companies. Getting an antitrust case off in Europe is very hard, not US hard but still hard. The reasons are more complex then that.

As a European citizen I think it boils down to access to the capital. EU/EEA is not a country and the market is sort of fragmented. The big players are UK, France, Germany, everyone else does not have the same access to money as say in the US. Folks want to do it but there is a glass ceiling. Hence you have these collabs among large institutions to tap into funds such as from Horizon which are academic in nature and do not translate well into products.

The fun part is that people whining about not being able to raise common capital and operate across whole EU due to regulation tend to also be the most rabid opposers of any kind of common regulation that would bring whole EU into alignment and make it a less fragmented market.

Because training frontier model is expensive and only US and China have capital structure to raise tens of billions of dollars to do it.

being able to train new frontier models is the new equivalent to nuclear capabilities.

i predict at some point countries will get CIA'ed when they publish plans to build a large data center.

Similar to the time when they got CIA'ed when announcing plans for new nuclear plants.

They are already CIA'ed on a regular basis for much less than that.

You can easily fit below 10 billion for the whole datacenter, then you only pay for electricity + maintenance + staff. 100k GPUs cost a few billion USD, that's more than enough to train frontier models, run experiments, and serve models in the EU to start. Look at what xAI did and how much it cost them and it's more expensive to do in US than in EU.

EU made a >900 page law about AI and patted themselves on the back for being "the first to regulate AI" (which was not even true, China had an AI law before and it's two pages long).

This cannot be stressed enough. In my experience working in multiple tech startups in Germany, the power compliance, legal and all other 2nd line has over engineering is quite immense. Most of the time they act as a hindrance for innovation rather than a supporting factor.

This AI law is a clear example of that. Pencil pushers creating more obstacles for the sake of creating more obstacles rather than actually taking a pragmatic approach.

It's strange, my real life experience is very different than yours. Unless you're training AI to do something shady, it's really no bother at all. In fact, most of what the AI Act requires, you have to do anyway for a good model card.

I agree. And I also know how much of that experience comes from having a legal dept. that are collaborative and supportive of what the tech org wants to do. Which I suspect is quite rare.

Because the value of these models is (actually) yet to be proven. Why saturate the market with something that we already have at least one of and others are selling as a service? No model provider (including the "big ones" like OpenAI) has been able to produce a viable business case. They're all literally running on government deals and investor money.

It’s been proven that it is valuable to be able to convert English into executable code that does what is wanted.

Does it even make sense? Just use the American or Chinese ones, adjust As needed. Where’s the point in spending millions to build The same thing or worse

Now that the big bets have been made, who wants to try to compete with them?

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