European AI. A playbook to own it
europe.mistral.ai
europe.mistral.ai
Let's not act like "entrepreneurship" is necessary at all to develop technology. Western governments simply have no ability to find their own destination as any attempt to get off the US big tech ramp comes with threats to destroy defense treaties, weapons contracts, and tariffs with their major ally.
Hardly anything to do with "entrepreneurship" and more about the insidious nature of US imperialism and how damaging neoliberalism is to the world.
Good on Europeans for rejecting this American blight.
It's easy if you're in some nihilistic and cynical echochamber like reddit. For everybody else, entrepreneurship is still quite celebrated and seen as a positive for society.
And yet I can’t name a single entrepreneur that I know personally outside of tech.
These are completely irrelevant to this thread, so I'm perplexed that you're perplexed. Read the thread, see that it's about differences between the US and the EU, and then realize what is meant by entrepeneur _in context_. Europe isn't very different from the US when it comes to plumbing company owners.
That's still very highly celebrated. Interestingly enough, people with Mediterranean backgrounds also feel this way (there's lots of crossover here btw).
Owning your own business is one of the best things one can do in that culture. There's a story in a Taleb book about a Lebanese (I think?) man who went on to become one of the execs at Mobil or some other oil company, and his mother was still disappointed that he didn't own his own company.
Maybe you just live in an echo chamber such as reddit where you believe entrepreneurship means making millions of dollars in the tech industry.
Reject it? They pay hundreds of billions for it. Every year. For decades now.
Europe runs on American tech, using American and Chinese hardware, powered by American energy, and protected by American defense.
Surely you're confused here, because Europe didn't reject these things, they offshored them and then teased Americans about working so hard. Europe's economic situation right now is borderline catastrophic, mostly because they built a society on someone else's support in the uncannily calm times after the wall fell.
Once you get off the ground though, you get most of the same benefits as Europeans, while taking home much more income. Especially in tech, the benefits and pay can be extravagant (Netflix famously had a year of maternity leave). Although you will likely work more time overall.
Keep in mind that generally social media is full of young American people. Once people get into their career, they don't spend much time on doomer social media. It's also socially taboo to not jump on the "conditions are so hard now" bandwagon.
If you can get into the top 40% in America, you will have what you need to live a pretty decent life.
The US sucks if you don't have very valuable skills, there aren't many guarantees.
But if you do have valuable skills, it's very hard to make a case for living in Europe. Once you reach the top 30-40% of Americans, you're living like the top 10% of Europeans.
That's why the US has been draining EU tech workers for a few decades now. The value prop from the US is much better if you're a strong player.
But I'm also not supposed to be saying any of this, because like a good little medium 6 figure household, I'm supposed to be wearing the mask of "difficult economic times" so as to appear virtuous and sensitive to others.
Besides, if you work for 10 years in US big tech, you can retire after that.
I don't think it's regulation, btw. Starting and running my company in the UK pre Brexit was way easier than doing it in the US. Keeping the IRS happy is no joke.
Society seems to rely on a tiny pool of overly-motivated people to do most of the work. There has historically been a healthy pipeline and many good reasons to convince them to leave Europe. And apparently sufficient safeguards to stop them building too much if they stay, based on the lack of success the EU has had in tech.
I wonder if recent US actions will start to influence this as there now appears to be more risk in sending your money to the US or founding your company there as a foreign entity than there used to be.
I’m from the UK but there’s no way there’s the same density, drive, and hunger to take risk, to the extent that you find in US. Also there’s a lot more synergy in the US vs a fragmented Europe.
I assume the article excludes the UK, I feel like UK has much more of a startup and VC scene than Europe does and I wonder if that is part of the issue : if you do want to create a startup, the London is a better place than mainland Europe. So even startups that for whatever reason won't take US funding still land outside Europe.
That was a long time ago. That UK is not the UK of today.
My belief is the underlying dynamics are less about, generalizing about cultures. Like you're right that that's what US VCs say, and collective belief is truth in markets even if it is not truth in reality. The bigger factor is EU, meaning French, Dutch, German, Swiss and Italian capital, are concentrated into the hands of large, opaque family trusts, structured primarily around tax evasion first and foremost, and other feudal issues, rather than minimizing the downsides of real risk or whatever, and that feudal stuff means, why do early stage investing? Without that there's little innovation. Hence Mistral, a growth stage company that everyone is happy making the growth stage, "dot AI" and "dot EU" winner. Presumably for EU sovereign wealth to be forced to buy.
Name them rather than being vague, clearly people here want to hear where they are.
As a UK founder that has raised in the UK, I have seen our US competitors raise substantially more with substantially less traction, so in future I’m significantly more tempted to look across the pond for raising. It has little to do with my culture vs theirs, and all to do with where the opportunity sits.
Many of the other founders I know with the “drive and hunger” as you put it, have already made the same jump.
So it does have to do with culture. The US has better culture for starting a business. You can't just divorce the opportunity that came from the culture just to make a point.
So it's purely tech. And there, that extra "drive" that leads to the US and modern VC culture seems to largely be based on a hunger for power and immense wealth, when it comes down to it. I know everyone pretends it doesn't, changing the world for the positive, blah blah. But when push comes to shove, that's the outcomes we're seeing.
There's no shortage of capital in Europe. But nobody wants to take the risk. Meanwhile in the US, people are putting 10-100x the capital at risk. So you can say what you want about it looking scary to you to invest in the US, but the people with capital to invest clearly don't see it that way.
More often when you hear VCs give interviews, they are saying the opposite: that never-ending EU regulations introduce more business risk than anything the US president could possibly do.
Ultimately it’s all about investing money to create real assets that generate cash flows. One can side step regulations to some extent whilst developing a product (nobody cares/notices until you are actually growing fast) and then deal with regulations later. Uber already showed this and the leading AI firms are following the same act - having ripped off a lot of content but nobody threw a fit until a legit asset came out of it.
It's counterintuitive but if you allow "failing fast", you lower risk of new engagements, and this allows for more speculative bets on ideas and people.
Make it difficult to evict tenants? Expect more stringent requirements from landlords
Enact rent control? Initial rents are going up, new builds are are disincentivized.
Strong worker protection? Expect fewer highly paid roles (wage compression)
I'm not saying these regulations are unilaterally bad - I'm saying don't be surprised that there are 2nd-order effects that are arguably just as bad, if not worse.
The US, by having bad worker protections and privacy abusing tech companies, etc. have been able to pave the way for extreme amounts of innovation that just wouldn't happen anywhere else. The rest of the world then effectively has innovation subsidized since they import the finished product.
Take Cost Plus Drugs, for instance. Or companies enabling faster cash transfers over the internet, like Paypal. Or healthcare insurance plans from Oscar Health or prescriptions from Truepill. Or videos made by Khan Academy, which are currently in use in many schools across the US.
> The only way an international business is going to consider investing in French workers, for example, is with relatively low salaries to offset the inability to fire them.
> Strong worker protection? Expect fewer highly paid roles (wage compression)
For European startups it’s different motivation. Lower salaries than in USA are an advantage, but job security isn’t a show stopper. First team is hired in fixed contracts, which may be converted to permanent with growth. In scaling phase you add external support, with e.c. 20% of workforce coming from outstaffing, so that you can react on the market and scale down when needed. If you are big enough to be called international business, you will not hire in one of the most expensive locations in the world (USA) unless you have a good reason. There exist other easy-to-fire tech hubs, and it’s not a big problem in Europe anyway (it’s just some more effort to execute, but even with payouts it’s probably cheaper than in US).
> Make it difficult to evict tenants? Expect more stringent requirements from landlords
In Europe there’s less homeless people. It doesn’t work like that.
>Enact rent control? Initial rents are going up, new builds are disincentivized.
It’s not rent controls that make markets inefficient. They are reaction to NIMBY regulations and disincentivized home ownership like in Germany. Root cause is uncontrolled extraction of scarce resource (land) and the solution is actually to scale down for-profit rental market while aggressively subsidizing ownership and construction.
The EU has taken it to another level.
For venture ultimately it’s a soulless moneyman’s game. Really they have to pick winners, and anybody can look at the landscape and see there’s just not gonna be a Pierre Zuckerberg or a Klaus Kalanick. And if there ever is, he’ll need to raise lots of money anyway, which would come from venture.
Which is very much a positive. Those two aren’t a boon to humanity, they very much made everything worse at a global scale. We need fewer people emulating them, not more.
Does anyone ever say what these regulations are? Or are they like "red tape" / "regulations on bendy bananas" / "WMDs" / "the war on christmas"?
Because without it, they will quickly be grouped into the “I want to do things which SHOULD be forbidden” crowd, which is a pretty vocal one.
I am not arguing for any law to be changed to allow someone to do things most people wouldn't want them to do. I don't think the VCs are arguing for that either. And that's not the case in the EU anyhow: laws are pretty similar on the major stuff among western countries.
I don't know why you're assuming that's my position, and I don't know why it's on me to avoid being "grouped" in with anyone. Assuming things that aren't true when you get defensive is your own personal issue, not mine.
I live in the UK where we seem quite good at inventing things but not that good at global profit making with a result that companies like DeepMind and ARM get bought by foreign investors.
It's just as impossible to fire people in Japan and Korea yet I'm quite sure they're doing quite a lot better at the startup per capita ratio when compared to population under 40.
Italy is also infamous in the EU for its bureaucracy, together with Germany. Look at how half of Italy's football stadiums are falling apart to a degree not seen in neighboring Spain or France.
Farming is unrelated to tech. I believe your dad.
We have regulations in place to make it more difficult and more risky for businesses to engage in immoral behavior, but these regulations usually appear after observing bad behavior.
Being European, I love the idea of European AI labs. But I wish there was more competition.
That being said, as a German for example, I can't think of an AI company successfully training a competitive foundation model here. The copyright mafia would take your investor's money before you could even finish the first training run (hyperbole.)
I did not spend 10 years writing (A)GPL code for all of it to be stripped of its license, remixed and sold for profit.
Of course in a truly just world, the LLM companies who took my code without permission would beg with offers of owning a share of them because if I didn't consent their models would have to be destroyed.
Since my work is apparently so valuable that they just have to have it, it should count towards my retirement age too.
They admit it themselves. We also know how aggressively they scrape everything they can get their hands on because projects like Anubis[0] exist
> And if so what percentage of your work constitutes the model?
That should absolutely be quantified, yes. My part is tiny but together with other people whose work was taken without consent, we make the vast majority. Last time I napkinned the math, I estimated making the models took 10^12 hours of work (nearly all being scraped public and possibly even private projects), out of which only 10^6 was paid (work by the employees of the LLM companies). So roughly 10^12 remains unpaid.
"Sounds like a no."
This level of discussion does not belong on HN.
But it begs the question why you chose (A)GPL instead of a permissive license in the first place. If you are OK with people training and using LLMs on top of your work not giving users the right to inspect and modify, you must have logically been OK with it before. The existence of LLMs or even AI is irrelevant to your position.
Look at consent in sex and how long it took to make everyone accept it's something you need to have sex with someone. Some places are still not there yet.
I firmly believe using other people's work should require the same level of consent.
Okay this is a new level of narcissism and gatekeeping, thanks for the laugh.
Not hating on Mistral here, their latest Mistral Small 4 is quite capable and a very reasonable choice for its cost and size.
On the bright side: people seem to be moving away from such nationalistic ideas. Here's to Orban being the first of many defeats for them in the near future.
A couple of weeks ago they were calling for a European AI tax to pay creatives.
Love that idea.
I'm also using Voxtral TTS to try to replace OpenAI. It "works", but I've had problems with volume levels being radically different between different audio chunks. It doesn't seem to "understand the full text" the way OpenAI's voice models do, which can be more expressive. Voxtral sometimes sounds robotic in the reading. And some Voxtral TTS output contains music in the background occasionally, which suggests their training corpus isn't that clean. Try generating a personalized news podcast, and the intro may occasionally sound like the music for BBC News underneath....
As for not focusing on AI, there's this interview in the Big Technology Podcast 2 months ago, where the Mistral CEO says their main focus is on helping companies fine-train models for internal use, over being a general model builder.
yeah, no shit ? All you're saying is that you're happily locking yourself in to models you have zero control over and that Anthropic can fuck you over at any time.
However, yes, Mistral is not in the business of providing you with a perfect, general purpose model. They fine tune from their base models for specific tasks.
"For organizations with stringent data privacy requirements, Mistral OCR offers a self-hosting option. This ensures that sensitive or classified information remains secure within your own infrastructure, providing compliance with regulatory and security standards. If you would like to explore self-deployment with us, please let us know."
https://docs.mistral.ai/models/ocr-3-25-12 https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-ocr-3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
Ridiculous, and it didn't take money from the right people or give it to the right people. I would expect the same from an AI tax.
It was never legal for massive corporations to record other people's work on CDs and sell them; that's the opposite of copyright. The comparison is absurd.
> This playbook provides a clear, actionable framework to position Europe as that powerhouse, accelerating AI development and adoption, attracting and retaining top talent, simplifying regulation without sacrificing values, and mobilizing public and private investment to build homegrown AI infrastructure. Only with it, Europe can ensure AI is not only developed in Europe, but for Europe and on Europe’s terms.
playbook for what?
> This document is not a theoretical exercise. It is a practical playbook
Seems quite theoretical? A lot of random statistics, and all the sections start with abstract empty claims in 'not x, y' slop format "Artificial intelligence is not an abstract promise. It is a tool that fulfills its potential when embedded in the real economy."
I'd love an executive summary of this for anyone who has AI tokens to spend (I've got some other stuff to get done with what remains of my quota this week). I'm not saying this report is bad, I'm just saying it didn't do enough to convince me to read it, and it has some patterns that would make me guess it's bad.
Multiple sections have expandable subsections for more details on proposals.
They essentially want a bunch of stuff and most importantly funding from the EU and using the FOMO angle to get them to act. This of course is not on merit. They see that no other lab in Europe really exists and are trying to seize an open opportunity.
Nobody acts like you need to invent steel to have a steel mill.
> The mechanism consists of a revenue-based levy applied to all commercial providers placing AI models on the market or putting them into service in Europe, reflecting their use of content publicly available online. This levy would apply equally to providers based abroad, creating a level playing field. The proceeds would flow into a central European fund dedicated to investing in new content creation, and supporting Europe's cultural sectors.
Presumably Mistral is putting forth the most pro-AI position possible for the region.
So it sounds like anyone doing what you described is at risk of a tax that will make their offerings uncompetitive.
So why even bother?
Steel is a great example because we don't pollute our rivers with steel mills any more either. As Milton Friedman said, if someone wants to give you steel and you give them green sheets of paper, be thankful, nothing's easier to make than paper.
What are you losing, the bragging rights among nerds on the internet? Right now Americans are paying the energy bills, Sam Altman is paying for the compute, they make no money off it, and they're even publishing the models! So if push comes to shove, we can deploy them. But until then how is that not a great deal
Exactly. Take what they spent a lot of R&D bucks developing and host it ourselves at the fraction of the cost.
The point is digital sovereignty. The same reason you keep data on your own hard drive instead of Google's cloud.
What a nice tagline lol. You really can read it both ways.
> The question is no longer whether Europe can compete, ...
But it, too, do not ask myself this question any more. Since EU seems to have already lost completely.
Even Proton's new local AI service uses Ollama, which was developed in USA and is pretty outclassed. Does HN say europe can do more than hope to catch up in five to ten years, if the race is still on then?
> Tell HN: docker pull fails in spain due to football cloudflare block
next to it on the front page
Given how un-startup-driven adoption of new technologies usually happens in Europe, I don't see this playbook becoming a cornerstone of how AI adoption will pan out in Europe.
Europe can be a top player in AI —- but there is a cost.
Taking a break and looking at the direction AI is advancing won't hurt.
The people working at Mistral, Expedition 33, or other top successful software coming out of the EU, most likely also aren't working only 35 hours/week either. In fact some probably squeeze some work on weekends too out of dedication and pressure to meet deadlines.
In a lot of Austrian SW companies for example, have "all-in" contracts where you waive your rights to the scrutiny of the standard 38,5h/week in exchange for a "higher" salary with longer work hours and less time tracking. Similar cases in France I believe.
The 35h/week European meme people here parrot, you mostly see only in civil servants, old established monopolistic companies with moats and strong unions, not in scrappy start-up trying to make it and fix a bug before release, or semiconductor companies fighting a tape-out.
So no, work hours aren't what's limiting EU startups.
I’ve worked most of my career in US tech satellite offices and I have not experienced EU team members to be less productive than US team members, nor spend less time on work (if anything, more really since they also need to be available for US time zone overlap).
It’s true there are chill jobs here, as there are in the US.
But ambitious people tend to work as much as ambitious US people (and it’s really more like 40 hours work weeks - 39,5 where I live since lunch is not work time). But again, many are not really counting, it’s just a full time job.
Vacations (typically 3 weeks summer holiday and additional weeks to distribute over the year) does create longer time on skeleton crew. Skilled tech labour is also cheaper so you can just hire more to make up for it.
But messagebird is another example.
It's hard to read this as anything other than "It's hard to treat your employees like shit when countries have strong labor laws and that just won't do for american megacorps".
Amodei (love of god) Altman (alternative to man?) Arthur Mensch fighting from the ethical side