Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

These are just signs of this market maturing. For a lot of business customers, EU based hosting is not optional. That includes models. Routing requests via API endpoints in the US is not really acceptable. And anything involving privacy sensitive data of course needs to be handled properly. Sam Altman pinky swearing to be nice doesn't quite cut it in terms of hard guarantees.

EU based legal entities and strong compliance with local laws with some hard SLAs and contractual guarantees is not going to be optional for liability reasons. Provenance of models, their training data, and exact ways they have been instructed to act are also not just nice to haves.

I expect non EU jurisdictions are eventually going to be similarly picky about their AI suppliers and I expect all the big tech providers to adapt to local markets just like they did with cloud infrastructure.

I don't have much experience with Mistral yet. But I may need to get my hands dirty to be able to sell this to some of our customers. We have a few more picky customers in Germany.

You can get the frontier models hosted in Stockholm & Ireland: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/bedrock/latest/userguide/model-c...

There's probably a very good business to be made of bringing close to frontier knowledge and finetuning recipes and infrastructure to enterprises that cannot hire that talent. But that's largely not a business that is going to be of a lot of interest to technologists as consumers.

> We have a few more picky customers in Germany.

Describe making business in Europe with one evergreen sentence

Because companies here actively want to avoid breaking the law, as opposed to the U.S where breaking the law is just a matter of paying some $ to the grifter in chief? I always find it funny when Europeans being proactive about that sort of stuff is somehow a bad thing from Americans point of view. Like wanting decent human rights and not having to bend over to megacorps is something we should not have.

Though, if the Americans in question just want to do their grifting in EU, it makes sense why they are upset at that, I guess, because it limits their grifting opportunities.

>Because companies here actively want to avoid breaking the law

Haha, yeah sure. What other fairy tales you gonna tells us next?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens#2005_and_continuing:_w...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirecard_scandal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parmalat_bankruptcy_timeline

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus#Bribery_allegations

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CumEx-Files

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lafarge_scandal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizergate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ING_Group#Money_laundering_cas...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_Holdings#Corruptio...

Yes, European companies break the law too. However, the comment this was about literally mocked the companies that are actively trying to follow the law.

So yes, such companies exist and plenty of people see their existence as a good thing rather then something to mock.

That comment mocked German customers; it didn't mention companies at all.

I read it like the customers where German based companies.

Obviously B2B given the context

Law has no virtue in and of itself.

It also ultimately a expression of might makes right (sad as this is) and as the current culture supports a decline of western might, it also undoes the law - first international, than domestic. We simply decided to burden our might with these restriction fictions, others feel not at all compelled to follow.

I expect to see further selling out of these laws, as the economic prosperity declines. I can perfectly see german law limiting german companies from developing and selling AI products, while at the same time allowing us companies for a "pay our retires and pension-plans" kickback.

In Europe, those are scandals. In the US, it's another Tuesday.

If we keep moving the goalposts you can make any argument

What goalposts? Your sitting president, himself a conman is pardoning fraudsters left and right while he and his family enrich themselves with public money and extortion.

Shhhh, don't tell them, it'll be funnier at the end.

What's "the end"?

> Your sitting president, himself a conman

Joke's on you, I'm European not American, so "your president" in this case would be the unelected Ursula and she would technically be a con-woman, not a con-man.

Not sure what your argument was supposed to prove with this cheap jab though.

Ursula Van der Leyen was elected. Trump too.

If you argue she wasn't elected by the European population, well, Trump technically isn't too.

Let me rephrase this: companies want to avoid breaking the law unknowingly, because their US providers are going to break the law without notice, willingly or unwillingly.

Plenty of corporations are willing to break the rules, but never for free.

> because their US providers are going to break the law without notice, willingly or unwillingly

This is a weird hill to die on because it's not true. I can't find anything to support your world view and if anything evidence points to the contrary. Europe has a deliberately more complex legal framework, usually in the hopes of keeping out foreign competition (although it's dubious whether or not that actually works).

> I can't find anything to support your world view

Just look at US laws pertaining to data that goes through US companies.

Thank you for your brilliant demonstration of survivorship bias.

How many people were punished for Enron? For the subprime crisis? Etc.

In the US, you just give a little money for the president's ballroom and you are pardoned. Or you settle out of court because your justice system is crap.

The CEO of Enron was convicted and died two months before sentencing and the COO got 12 years.

Interestingly the chief accountant of Enron ended up getting a job in Europe after he got out of prison.

>Interestingly the chief accountant of Enron ended up getting a job in Europe after he got out of prison.

But, but ..Europeans here said they don't tolerate crooks.

The parent poster is implying things that aren't:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Fastow

> companies here actively want to avoid breaking the law

This is hilarious. This reminds me of Soviet propaganda. "No, there was no Chernobyl disaster. Please disregard the corpses. Yes, the centrally-planned economy is doing fantastically, better than expected. Reports of famines and shortages are imperialist propaganda."

(Mind you, the Soviets are not alone here, but the blatant chutzpah of Soviet propaganda is perhaps more conspicuous to the Western eye than the Western varieties of PR and psychological manipulation.)

> For a lot of business customers, EU based hosting is not optional

They still use US clouds that can have information pulled by the US government.

We should forbid that if customer PII is involved

Companies can set whatever rules they like.

This is changing somehow. At least on a surface. For example Amazon have created European subsidiary completely managed by Europeans under European company thus under it's local jurisdiction.

Unless it is air gapped which it is not there is no way to protect Amazon's developed and owned software stack from reporting back to headquarters.

Sure there is: contracts, laws and prison time can ensure that doesn't happen.

The European leaders would have have no say in it. If the software from Seattle is designed to covertly exfiltrate information, they won't even know it. Even if they review the individual code changes, it can be an obfuscated attack similar to XZ where the code itself is clean, but not so much for the network fabric firmware binary test data.

That's why I used the "somehow". But abiding your logic nothing is ever secured, which is ultimately true, but it could be illegal so detergent here is not the impossibility it self but potentional harsh punishment for breaking the law.

You are incorrect:

1. the 2018 CLOUD Act mandates US companies — and their subsidiaries — to provide information to the US government on demand, regardless of where the data is stored

2. FISA secret courts prevent companies from even saying they where summoned, or telling anyone who or what the case was about (including canaries).

So you won't ever know if your data was handed over to the US government.

Best to assume it is.

They should be legally and physically separated and these actions should be then potentially illegal for Europeans so I do not think I'm at least infactual.

But assuming the owner is US company abiding US laws it's safe to assume that data would be transferred to US one way or the another.

The US intelligence machinery spied on Angela Merkel's phone. Do you suppose secretly demanding cooperation for Lawful intercept capabilities in Amazon GmbH is somehow beyond or beneath them?

Also consider that all communication between the European subsidiaries to the HQ is fair game under FISA.

The whole point of setting up the EU subsidiary as a separate company that is incorporated in the EU and is managed and staffed by EU citizens is to avoid this.

The purpose of the CLOUD Act was to get at data that was stored outside the US but that was "in the custody, control, or possession of communications-service providers that are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States".

It arose from a situation where an email provider in the US used cloud storage services in several countries to store emails. They were asked for the email of a particular customer and said they did not have to provide it because they had happened to store that customer's mail at a non-US cloud provider.

What the CLOUD Act requires is that:

> A provider of electronic communication service or remote computing service shall comply with the obligations of this chapter to preserve, backup, or disclose the contents of a wire or electronic communication and any record or other information pertaining to a customer or subscriber within such provider's possession, custody, or control, regardless of whether such communication, record, or other information is located within or outside of the United States.

A company incorporated in the EU, even if it is owned by an entity in the US, is not subject to US jurisdiction and so that does not apply. The US owner is subject to US jurisdiction but the data of EU customers of the EU company is not in the US owner's possession, custody, or control.

> The US owner is subject to US jurisdiction but the data of EU customers of the EU company is not in the US owner's possession, custody, or control.

No? Certainly sounds like it is in the US owner's control to me.

But even disregarding that fact. Given that the US government also started hiding what it was doing with FISA courts and forbidding that anyone, including the companies themselves, checks what actually happens ... do you think anyone will believe this? We HAD evidence of US companies refusing to hand over data before CLOUD and FISA, we do not see that anymore. (And that's before we start taking into account more some recent administration's respect for ...)

Of course this is also pretty hypocritical since EU countries have been caught more than once capturing communications of non-citizens. The problem that usually gets mentioned: the Boeing - Airbus fight wasn't a one sided US being untrustworthy to help Boeing.

Do you think the US board of Amazon will go to jail to protect their EU subsidiary?

"A company incorporated in the EU, even if it is owned by an entity in the US, is not subject to US jurisdiction and so that does not apply."

Incorrect, this is EXACTLY the scenario that the Cloud Act was introduced to to handle.

What happened is in 2013 Microsoft Ireland refused an FBI warrant for information held on EU servers, under the control of MS Ireland.

Microsoft USA refused the warrant on the grounds on the jurisdiction grounds you mentioned above.

So the Cloud Act was passed: US law for access to digital information applies to any subsidiary anywhere on earth.

Sorry.

FTA:

> So Mistral is developing its own data centers, starting with one outside Paris. Mensch projects it will have 200 megawatts of capacity by the end of 2027. Power from France’s state-owned nuclear plants will help, but the buildout could still cost an estimated $5 billion. Mensch tapped oil-rich Abu Dhabi and reportedly sought debt financing to help pay for it.

Though to your point it won't be running until 2027.

Yes, I think the EU is going to be dependent on US tech (other than EUV lithography machines, very cool) for very long time. Even those data centres, while run by Europeans, are still being made with almost entirely US tech. But at least the EU companies can borrow some oil money and buy in the stuff developed by someone else's R&D spend, which is a nice shortcut to have available.

>I think the EU is going to be dependent on US tech (other than EUV lithography machines, very cool

Well, ASML's EUV light sources are based on licensed US IP from Sandia Labs, and manufactured in the US by CYMER, which ASML bought, but they still operate and manufacture out of California, so the EU is not sovereign/independent here (neither is any country).

This doesn't mean much anyway, since despite ASML being European, their machines all go to export and EU doesn't put any of those machine to good use domestically, with the most cutting edge semiconductor fabs on EU soil being the Germany based TSMC fabs on the much older 16 and 12nm nodes, far bigger than the 3nm that Taiwan and US operate domestically.

Compared to US datacenter buildout, it’s probably much more likely to actually go online..

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