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Comment by throwaway13337 | Hacker News Reader

The tariff talk was ostensibly because the EU exported more goods to the US than the US exported to EU.

The US exports far more digital services to the EU, though.

Understanding those things, it would seem a particularly unwise framing for the US government to focus on EU digital services exports.

LLMs are rapidly commoditizing software, and in particular making it far easier to handle the regulatory compliance and regional fragmentation that have traditionally held back software companies in the EU. Combine that with growing concerns about software trust, and the EU looks like an increasingly attractive bet for future software investment.

Ironic, then, that Europe seems slowest to adopt the very tool that could finally solve its fragmentation problem.

Two governments, two very different strategies to cripple themselves. The race is on.

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> LLMs are rapidly commoditizing software

Can you elaborate on this one? Hopefully with some citations.

Your last sentence is funny as hell because it’s so true

You have to understand who Trump's base is. They think factories> liberals in Seattle.

Globalisation has made America the richest country on the planet. The real problem is that the money doesn't reach the "deplorable" population.

But that is an INTERNAL issue that could have easily be solved with voting for Bernie Sanders.

People vote against their own interests is a tale as old as democracy itself.

Are you saying trickle-down economics doesn't work? If those kids could read… what I do wonder is how tens of millions of Americans still think that it's other countries that are to blame for their poverty or struggles. Baffling. If you ARE in the richest country, wouldn't you at least blame something internal?

A major thing that holds us back and will continue to do so in B2B (coming from someone whose last startup failed): differences in language/customs/needs linked to the multitude of cultures in the region.

We hired someone that could sell in Italian, French, and Spanish. Her profile is fairly rare, given she had a good understanding of the customer. I can't believe our CEO let her go simply because of a 4-days at the office obsession…

LLMs can't really fix this. Even though she could speak Spanish, the culture and customer needs for Spain will be a little different than those for Italy. Traditions will be different. She's a wonderful human being, but imagine a customer in France not liking her “Belgian accent” and tanking a sale… She was really losing motivation because of that. The 2 other people on sales struggled more or less with the same issue.

All hail LLMs, if you want, but Europe's issues are not that easily fixed. We end up obsessing about the wrong stuff, as if compliance and regulation was the Big Problem, instead of a boogeyman that neoliberals love to hate.

Yeah the standard advice for European startups is to sell in the US first and worry about the local markets later, language and culture barriers are still huge.

It wouldn't work for us, plenty of entrenched competitors. In the EU? Zero direct competition. We focused on France and expanded later, France is a good enough market for some stuff. Can't imagine trying to compete in the US!

Uh, you're planning to outsource regulatory compliance to an LLM? In the EU? Which has already banned the usage of "algorithms" that aren't "transparent" via the DMA? That isn't going to work.

As for cloning the US software industry with LLMs ... with which non-US LLMs, exactly? Mistral? The best LLMs for coding (which still can't handle many important tasks) are: Gemini, Claude, GPT. All non-EU models.

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