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Comment by nonethewiser | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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> 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.

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

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