Can Europe train a frontier AI model on the compute it owns?
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Westphalian norms are falling apart and countries will need to make hard tradeoffs about how to build enough economic heft to maintain their cultural values.
I do not understand how this can not be self evident.
That's an unfounded assertion. Of course, politicians will claim this to be the case. I don't see how patronising citizens protects their human rights, though.
In a more practical view though I'm not sure if it'll do anything to stop job replacement from automation as such. Most corporations seem all to eager to make deals with OAI or Anthropic here anyway, and if not that it'll be Chinese ones.
There is a question of "representation", like if a model cannot be trained on the data of one specific country with a specific language, then it does not learn it and the people of that country are now at a disadvantage when trying to leverage the result. Maybe that's a good thing, maybe not, depending on the perspective of how the model is being applied relative to the average person. If it's something that makes their job easier then it's a negative, if it's used by the government to automate scanning all chats then it would be beneficial for it to suck. For widespread languages that doesn't apply of course, so the UK and Spain might as well be exempt.
In general I think it's good for the EU to try and slow down adoption of bleeding edge tech so the US population with its lack of regulations can act as guinea pigs and absorb most of the early damage until we figure out what is the best approach when we get around to adopting it. Even if that means missing out on potential early upsides too. An old example is lots of late adopters going straight to gigabit fiber instead of being stuck on copper DSL.
Has it? I still have to see evidence of that. What GDPR definitely has achieved, though, is people engaging in pointless busywork out of fear some busybody is trying to have them fined for being in violation of GDPR.
> In a more practical view though I'm not sure if it'll do anything to stop job replacement from automation as such.
Again, I fail to see how automating jobs is supposed to be something negative. If a job can be automated that means humans ultimately can engage in more worthwhile endeavours. Most modern jobs would have been completely alien to someone from the 19th century. The same applies conversely. How many farriers do you know personally?
> In general I think it's good for the EU to try and slow down adoption of bleeding edge tech so the US population with its lack of regulations can act as guinea pigs and absorb most of the early damage until we figure out what is the best approach when we get around to adopting it.
Quite frankly, by that point there might be not be enough left of the EU to make such a (very) late adoption possible or even relevant at all. We're talking about a timescale of just a few years for a revolution that'll dwarf the Industrial Revolution (which took an entire century, give or take). Up until now, the benefits by far outweigh the downsides and if we're talking about catastrophic damage (essentially, the SkyNet scenario), EU regulation certainly won't stop a US AI from killing Europeans.
> An old example is lots of late adopters going straight to gigabit fiber instead of being stuck on copper DSL.
That's actually a very good example of how overly cautious behaviour in European countries leads to those countries being left behind. Up until very recently, for example, Germany's last mile Internet infrastructure was largely DSL-based (perhaps, still is; at least they're trying to make more use of fibre optics now).
> If a job can be automated that means humans ultimately can engage in more worthwhile endeavours
Yeah if that were actually the case. Seems like the plan is to just automate everything we can in broad strokes, then wait if anything happens to turns up to occupy that portion of the workforce. Nobody seems to have any idea what to do with vast amounts of unemployed people who aren't qualified to do anything anymore.
I think the very possible end result is that there won't be any immediate new jobs in a meaningful volume in the time span when they're needed. As you say, the timeline can be very short, and in the US it certainly will be. The idealistic future is that UBI gets implemented, automation gets taxed and redistributed, so the economy continues to work. But that's a fantasy with the current ring wing wave across the world where any kind of social service is seen as communist money burning for some reason, pocketing that extra wealth through corruption will be the priority. We've seen this again and again in countries where most of the income is dug from the ground in some form, which is economically the same as a few companies making it all through automation. The end result is usually not great for the population. With the AI Act being very anti-authoritarian, banning credits cores, facial recognition, etc. it's a step in the right direction to compensate.
The likely result is probably gonna be some kind of army service and an increase of international tensions to justify a draft when we realize there's only so many extra Wolt drivers a population needs, and then those will go to Starship too. With a war economy you can do pretty much anything to maintain stability, the numbers are made up and the protests don't matter.
If a delay in adoption can help bridge this intermediate gap without complete chaos, millions will suffer a lot less.
This is a common misconception by people who never had to deal with GDPR in a business capacity (including the politicians who have caused this mess). Corporations either simply don't care or they have their legal department deal with this. It's the small companies and self-employed solo entrepreneurs that suffer.
As for the economic ramifications, there will certainly be a massive short-term upheaval. However, going all Luddite - or even just slowing down the process locally - won't help. Regulation doesn't generate wealth, after all (although EU politicians would like you to believe that), and for something like UBI we need massive wealth generation.
Claiming that GDPR and the EU AI Act "protect human rights" is very, very far-fetched. How does the training of, say, Claude or GPT-X models, hurt human rights?
Honest answer, no, not if it was publicly published and available for free, not indefinitely.
From an ethical (not legal) perspective, 18 years seems long enough for something like that to enter the public domain.
It's not also actually "getting paid for your work" when you're talking about copyright. It's "collecting rent for your property".
Once upon a time, artists and writers got conned into thinking that was a good deal for them, forgoing payment for work in return for a dangling promise of rent extraction. The vast majority of them were wrong.
Innovative methods to destroy human life are "stifled" by measures intended to preserve human life. What to you mean by "progress" -- the betterment of the human condition, or the enrichment of the few and powerful?
Europe has more human rights protections than the US and stronger enforcement of them, even against the state, by many metrics. Freedom of expression ends where other human rights begin, is protecting hate speech and Holocaust denial really something worthwhile?
Belarus is a European country. How is freedom of the press doing there?
It is. Look at the freedom of press index for example. And as the US doesn’t accept foreign courts, there is not really a legal apparatus against the state outside of the US, which many European countries do have.
Belarus is not part of the EU, nor did it sign many of the international human rights
The comment I responded to was about Europe. Belarus is part of Europe. As are Serbia, Moldova, etc.
You are trying to move goalposts instead of trying to counter my arguments
As you said, in spirit. In fact the EU’s AI Act is not really human rights legislation. (It exempts military and national-security uses.) Where it comes close, e.g. in seeking to ban facial recognition or social scoring, it does so clumsily.
So in practice, the EU has passed a series of laws that essentially make AI a monopoly of military and intelligence-community interests while forcing its consumers to use foreign products. Not exactly a win.
The EU cannot legislate on national security matters.
Sure. Legally, makes sense. Practically, if you want to do all those things the legislation purports to be doing for human rights, you just have to get the right general or spy or police chief on your side. That makes the whole scheme a bit of a boondoggle. Lots of friction. Remarkably little tangible benefit.
If you had just owned up to how you were mistaken about EU legislative limits - confidently stated - I probably would have taken everything else in your initial comment at face value.
Your doubling down into unfalsifiable territory has me thinking your arguments are feelings-based with post-facto justifications.
I’m not making any legal arguments. The fact that the EU can’t legislate on those issues doesn’t change that its AI Act has those loopholes.
> unfalsifiable territory
No, I’m not. If the AI Act constrained any actual risks, that would falsify my assertion. I’m saying it in practice doesn’t. Those capabilities are still being built, just not in Europe. And they’ll still be sold to Europe, just to its governments to use however they want, not to its people.
The EU doesn’t have the power to write AI legislation for human rights purposes. It does have the power to throw gum into its AI industry’s works. It did what it could. Which is very little of the former (by constraining B2C and B2B, sort of). It did a lot of the latter.
Congress can’t do a lot of things. Passing something stupid and then complaining that the reason it isn’t competently written is because of Constitutional limits doesn’t absolve the stupid bill.
I’m not an expert on EU law or AI. But I do make capital-allocation decisions around this stuff, and I know enough to know that as currently configured the only main AI business to do in the EU is in selling it things that kill or surveil.
There is no way I want America's future.
europe is huxley nightmarish utopia worst parts without any of the bright ones.
Europe has no models to even block.
The US has a guy who occasionally can screw things up for a few weeks, but who will be gone in a while.
You have it upside down: the innovation and the stuff is the valuable thing, the laws are there to help us organize ourselves a bit after the fact. They're always a secondary concern to the extent that the vast majority of civilization is working with one another, doing material things wherein the law usually is there as a backstop.
There are some ugly things here and there but by and large - 'cookie settings' has not materially improved people's lives - and not nearly as much as the innovations on the web themselves.
Doing is primacy, regulating is always secondary, with only a few exceptions.
The EU is in really really bad shape on industrial issues on a continental scale - 'too many regulations' is actually not a root cause (it's a big drag, but not root), but it's also not for the most part some kind of advantage.
You see the same thing play out with defence and other things.
Having to beg the US for help with Ukraine, for Patriot munitions, Starlink, advanced intel, for 5th Gen gear, mid range ballistic missiles - it's an existentially disempowering posture.
Human rights won't matter in the areas where the Russians have conquerd or destroyed. Again, here EU/Euro governance issues loom large.
'Do the thing' then as you go along, think about some guardrails or whatever, but the 'do the thing' is the hard part that deserves most of the focus.
On the other hand EU started as an economic union and has rotten into a behemoth that tries to control every aspect of Europeans. It was not created by the people for the people, rather a bunch of bureaucrats to exert their power and establish authority. At the start EU has done a lot of good things as an economic union, but at its current form, it does more harm for the growth of Europe rather than helping
250 years is commendable, but it wasn't without problems.
'stable' as we understand it is relatively modern.
Let's try to figure out where the 3rd amendment might actually have significance in the future. Maybe in space habitats? Or could forced installation of government AI in systems be considered a 3rd amendment violation?
European countries have gone from massive societal changes to massive societal changes (for example from monarchies to republics).
The USA is a new country, and its constitutional rigidity causes a lot of social and political problems that most likely will lead to big changes in the future.
Yes, some countries in Europe remained monarchies for 1500 years or longer. They didn't really have a constituion back then because they were not republics.
A constitution, or supreme law, is the aggregate of fundamental principles or established precedents that constitute the legal basis of a polity, organization or other type of entity, and commonly determines how that entity is to be governed. [0]
> The USA is a new country, and its constitutional rigidity
and general loudness on the matter of "what is a constitution and why ours is the first and the greatest" has caused much confusion given they have such a short and barely evolved one.
250 years is older than almost every country in Europe (by that I mean current borders and form of government, not the ancient historical ones).
Most were monarchies or various forms of dictatorship till only a few decades ago and finally settled on their current borders only after WW2 or the fall of the USSR or the Yugoslav wars.
For example Spain had its first democratic elections in 1977 and then the UK was dealing with "The Troubles" sectarian conflict in northern Ireland. Europe always was a powder keg around forms of governance, culture, religion and sects. All that is not something that goes away overnight just because EU membership happened.
In contrast, 250 years of continuous governance and conflict free stability is super impressive by that standard.
Not much happened between 1861 and 1865?
Sure it is, it's very impressive.
What other nations have lasted that long?
Chinese Dynasties usually collapse within that range.
Aside from the UK, maybe Sweden (?) which have been fairly contiguous, most nations are more short-lived. France is on it's 5th Republic in the same time-frame.
America is way more than the gong show in charge right now.
Most of the 'tests' of it's integrity are due to really just that one guy.
But you're right to point out inherent problems with the Union.
Because EU is not a 'right wing flag waving' entity, we don't really think about it in terms of 'nationalism', but the EU has among the loudest, most clearly visceral and virulent nationalist supporters.
You can say anything you want about national governments but critique of the EU is met with a lot of rancour.
I've worked for EU bodies, it's full of well meaning people and it has tremendous value as an economic unions, but as a political entity it has existential flaws, too many to name, and it is absolutely an elitist project and it absolutely has a 'regulate first' attitude, which is quite upside down.
'Doing The Stuff' matters 10x more than 'Talking About The Stuff'.
It's vibrant and productive, just not at the 'next level' and it lacks some industrial dynamism.
We have all just realized that the American Constitution is the jurisprudential analogue of the Albanian virus (https://github.com/AriBjornOlafsson/Albanian-Virus). I wouldn’t take it for granted that what has happened up to now, before this new twist, will continue to happen in a world where being Trump’s friend is enough to change the NASDAQ listing rules.
Perhaps it merely says that certain good positive things stifle other good, positive things?
Having 24 languages is a good, positive thing for the EU's cultural distinctiveness, respect for citizens' heritage, and the fairness of the nexus of power not excluding speakers of any country's language.
And yet it's a major barrier to cross-border trade, military cooperation, popular support of closer political ties, and the prospects of any EU companies growing large enough to counterbalance the amazons and facebooks of the world.
A ban on cracking eggs serves the interests of eggs, while stifling the omelette industry.
The EU can and should reform many parts of its sclerotic laws and bureaucracies. Whether it can do so before it becomes a subservient puppet state which serves as a battleground for competing powers remains to be seen.
I'm not so sure the ideal should be to substitute for those.
Feels like a reaaaaal roll of the dice
Protect human rights as defined by EU legislature, obviously. And privacy in public places, for example, doesn't seem to be an undebatable human right.
Heck, I hate street views disfigured by huge privacy blobs.
> Heck, I hate street views disfigured by huge privacy blobs.
Services like Street View should have distance-based friction to preserve privacy. The further you are, the less (or at lower quality) should be available, to keep it proportional with the effort required to inspect the place in the real world.
How would the website validate how far I am from your neighborhood? What if I am your neighbor but I am traveling this week? Can I still check Street View of my neighborhood? This is how we get websites to require ID-based verification for everything.
Street View is one of the most amazing technologies ever invented. It brings humanity closer together. No longer do you need to get a visa and get on a plane to see what the world is like in a particular place. You can just look on street view. Throughout history people have given up their lives for that kind of world knowledge.
Your inclination to ruin one of humanity's greatest achievements with distance-based blurring to protect the privacy of what is already visible at street level is just sad.
No. OpSec is not Nimbyism.
> It brings humanity closer together.
Sure, then they show up at your door angry about something they saw online. No thanks.
They why on earth do you care?
Oh gods our politicians will have to read their own emails, and write them too! We may never recover. Clearly there is no path forward apart from mass surveillance.
Being able to write cutesy SaaS apps faster is neat, but not like, essential, the way water is.
The US is waging wars far from their borders (of which they all lost since about 50 years) while the topic in the EU is self defence within their borders, that's a different ball game.
A third of the US economy is propped up by waging wars. That's not even being imperialistic that's just a very costly and damaging social service program that costs a lot of lives.
State regs often fail to grapple with the future, and at best slow it down and at worst smother it.
European future looks bright compared to the political landscape the US has now
But we will see, they have very interesting Enterpise Use Cases, like with Mistral Forge.
And YannLeCun decided to build in Europe as well
AMI has offices across the world. Fact is, companies often have at least an office where the CEO lives. Same when Musk kicked up a stink about 'leaving California'. It wasn't really anything of substance.
This whole US vs Europe discussions are fruitless anyways
Hope you're hungry. The Mistral are going to what most great European companies are good at - regulatory arbitrage. They're going to insert themselves everywhere within EU (French govt, etc) and extract value that way whilst delivering subpar services to what open weight Chinese models can deliver. Honestly they'll probably be profitable before most other AI providers are simply because there's very little pressure to improve models.
And, btw, the bang per buck that I got from OVH was better than EC2.
Why don't you ask yourself: how come those brilliant European minds couldn't find a job that pays well enough at home? Why could they in the US? There are many more Chinese and Indian, and other internationals working for US companies, outnumbering Europeans. It's not like Europe was intentionally targeted by US companies.
Real GDP has grown 84% in the US since 2000 [0]. EU grown 40-45% in the same span. The two regions were basically had the same economic output in 2000. Europe has been left behind economically.
Living in Europe is nice (I love Europe by the way), but the question is why EU can't compete with the US and increasingly China. Sooner or later that'd affect your living standard as well. Look at how much China has caught up with the West in terms of quality of life.
Which basically coincides with the introduction of the Euro currency. The dumbest currency ever created: a common currency for countries with different fiscal laws/different tax rates and different economic outputs. Since then one the Eurozone state already (partially) defaulted on its public debt: Greece.
My beloved EU is fucked. And not just because of that ultra-poorly and very probably short-lived currency that the Euro is: the EU is a socialist construction, by socialists, for socialists.
In 25 years of introducing the Euro they manage to kill the first industry of the most important economy of the EU: the car industry in Germany.
> Sooner or later that'd affect your living standard as well.
Oh but the EU is making sure the standard of living falls really quick.
For as if the EU wasn't falling into poverty quickly enough, politicians are at hard at work at importing millions upons millions of very poor people from africa and the middle-east. For the most part totally unemployable people (a politicians in Germany talked about 93% migrants without a job, that cannot speak the language and unemployable and used the term "a lost generation").
In my native city, Brussels ("head" of the EU), a recent report from a Belgian university estimates that 5% of the population of the city are undocumented migrants: undocumented means they aren't working. It's impossible to work without a shitload of paperwork in the EU. One out of every 20 people is an unemployable, unaccounted, undocumented, migrant. Let that sink in.
The EU is fucked way more than people imagine.
And anyone who thinks that the millions and tens of millions of migrants coming without any education are going to be the ones that shall save the EU economically is totally delusional.
I raised my kid in english, only every going to british school and now british college, and wife is working towards acquiring a new citizenship. Thankfully we've also got family in Japan (a country notoriously hard to get in), so we've got that option too.
We moved to a new country four times already, but now we're planning to leave the sinking ship that the EU is.
There's no future in the EU: the only way forward is that major european cities are going to keep turning ever more into slums.
Sure some things are a hurdle, but in the end, being the first just means doing all the work.
The UK, for example, is outside the EU and arguably Europes strongest AI hub birthing DeepMind, Stability and others. Home to top universities etc.
I think compute is certainly our weakest point but it should be possible to train a frontier-ish model on Isambard-AI if you supplement it with other London based commercial compute for post-training.
AI Act regulates high risk AI systems and banns AI systems like social scoring. Most of the AI applications are not regulated.
Did you read the GDPR and follow court rulings regarding AI training. OLG Köln saw no violation in Meta‘s training of user data in Insta and FB.
It is obvious that you don’t know what you are taking about.
I’am tired of unfounded EU bashing. The guardrails in place are not hindering
1. In order to build competitive models, you need to offer competitive salaries and equity. Europe has very old and inadequate corporate law virtually everywhere but in UK. European labs cannot attract talent that can build such competitive models with the proper lack of incentives.
2. In order to build competitive models, you need gargantuan amounts of compute. And thus capital. How can you compete when big tech can just cough a handful of equity and raise $ 85 B like Alphabet is doing right now?
3. In order to have these datacenters financially feasible you need cheap energy. We don't have it. Some places like France have clean one, but it's still not cheap enough, you're still paying a 45-50% premium over some random South Carolina.
What Europe should do is to finally tackle its fundamental issues with corporate laws, startups and incentivize more money to flow into venture capital.
Essentially we need a bunch of Mistrals, but with more competition and better incentives.
There's plenty of brilliant European engineers and scientists that would gladly take some pay cut to work in Europe instead of US and could bring their expertise here, but you still need the right incentives.
1. No longer possible the same way it was for openai and anthropic and
2. Much more regulated in the EU
Also the EU would need state backing since we don't have the same private capital, meaning the regulations are even tighter.
The European regulations are the thing that will kneecap anything meaningful coming out of Europe. Mind blowing to me that this is worth the tradeoff since Europe will be beholden to other frontier labs be it China or the US, so regulations accomplishing very little if anything on impacting actual AI development and losing vast amounts of leverage in the process.
It's true though that multiple problems mean multiple propaganda seeds.
It cost Anthropic $1.5 billion for training on libgen's 480k pirated ebooks.
Investors will cough up that money if you're already clearly a frontier lab with a model people are paying a lot of money for.
Tough to get that much cash without anything to show.
In China they seem to be nonchalantly doing a lot with AI for specific rather than 'ask me anything' tasks. To them, they are quite used to everyday applications that work well within limited domains, no vast data centre needed, just on-device. Hence the hype is no big deal.
Europe needs to think again about what can be done to make Europe attractive for software development, and I have seen no helpful encouragement from UK or European governments over the last few decades. No word of a lie, all we got in the UK was the BBC Micro, way back in the early 1980s, and since then tech has been culturally uncool.
This cultural aspect has not gone away, if a guy is a software engineer then he isn't going to get lucky with the lasses, they will run a mile.
What gets me is that the UK or places in Europe such as those places where finance matters, could have had active policing and law enforcement of data breaches and hacking, with sensible standards for storing customer data, making Europe the best place to host your data, purely for the legal protections. But we ended up with cookie notices and anti-slavery statements.
Off the top of my head, ARM is from Cambridge.
FWIW, for the equity part there's a proposal expected to pass for next year: https://www.eu-inc.org/ (but it doesn't address taxes, cross-border employment, or anything significant so it's mostly moot). The main goal is to attract native VCs.
AFAIK it's designed by lawyers and old money, with little to no input from tech entrepreneurs.
As a native German, I wouldn't say this is the case: the opinions of people rather differ quite a bit on this topic (there also exist quite a lot of people who are nearer to the US-American mentality here).
What I would rather claim is some kind of kiss of death, is if your startup failed because you made stupid mistakes. People don't like such unresponsible people (many people say that startup founders also have responsibility for their employees).
We need compute, yes, but we certainly aren't short of talent if we put our minds to it, and many of them are already here.
Founded in the UK, then bought by Google, it still has its HQ in London.
If they develop the "next big thing" and the next US administration decides its for US citizens only, nothing has changed.
Re "US citizens only", the question I'd have right now for all the AI companies is: can any new better-or-as-good-as Fable AI model actually be released?
If not, stop development of better models. That's the single most expensive thing any of them are doing.
Export controls on software is somewhere between "hard" and "impossible", so "US citizens only" means something between "nobody" and "perhaps some government agents", but the latter don't pay enough to justify the cost.
It is a fact that a much smaller amount of money is available in the EU for startup investments.
But in which sense it the corporate law inadequate? As far as I am aware the laws allow quite a lot of freedom in setting up the corporate governance for many forms of companies.
You get someone you cannot tempt him with "do a great job and get X amount of equity".
In Italy it is not enforceable, even if you sign a contract.
With this, startups can only compete with bigger companies on salary, hard, and don't get equally motivated hires to get a piece of a company. You get people there for the paycheck.
It's also unfriendly to venture capitalists, for different reasons.
So corporate law is a major problem in most of EU, as it's unfriendly both to investors and employees.
Also, firing people is hard in EU. You hire the wrong person, you're stuck with it.
This has always been an argument for "peace time" underperformance of european tech sector but I don't buy this argument for critical national security needs. Historically countries never needed to top the compensation charts to get talent. What they do need is a clear mission and ambition. This is what is missing in Europe
It seems unlikely at the moment. The writeup you have is quite interesting, but notably distributed compute for frontier is at least a bump in the road.
As other's have pointed out, if resources across Europe came together there could be a good amount of resources today to do so, but it is fragmented.
Project Glasswing, and most recently the blocking of Fable 5 potentially only for non-US citizens have sparked more attention in the political spheres regarding sovereignty/competitiveness of European AI.
There as also this great write-up which explains the trajectory Europe currently has when it comes to AI compute here: https://europe2031.ai/
So theoretically: yes, but there doesn't seem to be a big enough will to attempt to catch up with the trajectory of American hyper-scalers.
Asking for sensible AI policy is like asking for a base on mars.
this has nothing to the other good idea which is to start building AI
I am open to the idea that we should handle immigration differently, but I want a plan and specifics, not slogans. What we want to achieve, and by what mechanisms you plan to get there. Open any newspaper: are you more likely to find careful and considerate opinions or racist screeds?
And that is the problem. Time and energy and money and political capital are routinely spent on inconsequential electoral poliTICS rather than substantial poliCY.
i know many immigrant who don't pose any problem withou need for "handling" or "supervision"
Hateful, sure, though just like all those on the right who say the first word of "hate crime" is redundant, I'd argue home-grown hate's just as dangerous as imported.
But "unskilled" immigration? When the topic is AI? If this stuff works as advertised, *nobody's skills matter any more*. If it doesn't at least render many of our skills obsolete, why build it? If you make an AI which can't automate anything, how is this not a waste of money?
Even without that, I've not seen anyone who knows about Baumol's cost disease opine either way about migration, high or low skilled.
I sometimes wonder if the citizens of the United States (of America) even comprehend that the EU is not itself a sovereign nation (unlike the states in say, the USA, or Australia) and is just a union of sovereign polities.
Nobody in the EU is an EU Citizen unless they are a citizen of one of the member states.
The US military has a few companies that it can work with to produce what it needs, so they are not necessarily tied to "we need to build a plane in 20 different locations to satisfy everyone".
And yeah, Europe has an expensive rocket no one wants to use commercially because it many times more expensive than the competition.
someone explain this to me please
The EU is organized more similar to the US under the Articles of Confederation.
The first American government (Articles of Confederation) gave State governments almost unlimited power e.g. they could print their own money. It did not grant freedom to the people in any meaningful way. States were free to abuse this power both against their own citizens and, more importantly, the other member States. This created many practical problems.
The second and current American government (Constitution) learned lessons from this experience. It removed a limited set of key powers from the States and gave it to the Federal government such as the creation of currency. It also forced all States to interact with each other on the same terms, with strict oversight from the Federal government. Additionally, it explicitly granted rights to the people rather than their State governments, since the States had demonstrated they could not be trusted to do the right thing. These changes forced the States to play nicely with each other and treat their people better.
These changes were a large improvement. Almost every law an American experiences is State law, because States have much more freedom to create laws. The Federal government can only make laws from a short list. Both State and Federal governments are strictly prohibited from creating many kinds of laws.
In the US, freedom is for the people, not for the member States. The Federal government has even less freedom than the member States to make law.
I don't see how anyone can make this claim in 2026 and not expect to be laughed out of the room? In practice, freedom is for sale; it's not available to the people nor the citizens.
The EU is in some ways closer to a confederation, but with various "hacks" - in the form of various treaties - to try to work around the problems that led the US to abandon it in favour of a federal model.
It's largely down to very different levels of willingness to integrate more, and various levels of opposition to the kind of constitutional changes that would be required for a federal model.
And what good does it do? The EU cannot speak in a single voice - there is no foreign minister, no defense minister, no whatever minister.
Like the EU foreign function: you have a person claiming to be the EU voice, and then you have the foreign ministers of every EU member that can just say whatever they want if what the EU voice says is contrary to their political game in their own country. Same for the other functions.
Being less federalist is not better, it is worse. The EU does not speak in a single voice in any domain.
Nor can Switzerland. And still it is one of the best country world wide both in term of living and economically.
Distributed federal power like Switzerland trades quick decision making for resilience.
If it might look up 'messy' on the surface, it is in fact a quality. A very valuable one in fact: because it is exactly what prevent fucked up like Trump to happen in the EU.
But the EU foreign minister can be contradicted by basically any country president/prime minister or their foreign ministers if it says something that is not aligned with every other EU member.
Then you are misinformed.
Because it happens continuously.
Canton executive argumenting again "conseil fédéral".
Local Syndic (Mayor) arguing against Canton decision.
Local parlement trying to address or delay legislation or arguing against Berne ones.
Just open a random news paper.
This is democracy, like it or not.
In your example, the mayor can criticize the canton decision, but he cannot do anything about it. That's the difference.
Second question: you think the USA has a strong federal government?
I mean that is actually an open question even in non-Trump years, not least when one side of the political aisle was famously dedicated to shrinking it down so small it could be "drowned in a bathtub", to quote one of its more famous assholes.
Compete with each other, yes.
But all US states take pride in Silicon Valley being American.
No EU project for its own "Silicon Valley" can succeed, because the French would insist on it being in France, Germans would insist on Germany, Dutch in the Netherlands, etc.
France and Germany and the Netherlands may compete with each other to attract VC and tech firms, but they're ultimately no more capable of preventing each other from getting a runaway success loop than New York and Utah were at preventing California from getting actual Silicon Valley.
The EU as an institution just doesn't wield any magic wand of creating things like that to be fought over, just like Washington DC also doesn't.
Yes, but why hasn't said success loop occurred anywhere else yet? Silicon Valley has been a "thing" for five decades now.
> The EU as an institution just doesn't wield any magic wand of creating things like that to be fought over, just like Washington DC also doesn't.
What I meant is that every time HN or elsewhere talks about Europe being behind the US in terms of tech there is mention of the need for a "European Silicon Valley". But that is going to require a level of support that is probably beyond the scale of one national government.
The EU can trace its origins back to France and Germany agreeing to combine its coal and steel.[1] Berlin and Paris would be happy to designate, say, the Strasbourg-Stuttgart axis as the "EU technology hub", with corresponding EU funding, but other member states aren't going to be happy.
[1] And further to the long wrangling over Alsace-Lorraine, but that's neither here nor there
So have twenty-three Superfund sites —- land from 1970s businesses that the federal government had to take over because nobody else could or would fix the uncosted externality.
The most in any single county.
An increasingly useful, very vivid metaphor.
Same reasons (plural) it also hasn't happened a second time anywhere else in the USA.
The list is long, and economics is full of anti-inductive loops.
> But that is going to require a level of support that is probably beyond the scale of one national government.
The EU as an institution is tiny in comparison to its member states, total budget only €192.8 billion: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/2026-euro...
> The EU can trace its origins back to France and Germany agreeing to combine its coal and steel.
While true, that's like saying the US can trace its origins back to some cold salty tea: it misses quite a lot of both the good and the bad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_High-Performance_Comp...
Even at the smaller level the ethos and ambition is clear - take EURO-3C: the Horizon Europe project aimed at delivering a pan-European sovereign infrastructure that integrates Telco, Edge, Cloud, and AI capabilities under a federated model which has 70+ Euro-participants.
https://www.medialaws.eu/the-euro-3c-initiative-a-new-dawn-f...
I think that is the way forward: work with whoever has common interests and is willing to work together.
I think the point is that the EU does not necessarily make cooperation between governments any easier.
They are not bad, and they have made huge progress, but you're still one year behind if not more.
May matter less and less as time progresses, or it may matter more if research further speeds up.
Honestly I wish capitalism and globalization kept working as they did for decades, but since more than a decade we're reverting to inefficient protectionist steps, one after the other.
I could rant about this, I am just so disappointed at how Mistral completely gave up and pivoted into bespoke fine-tuning consulting. The terrifying thing is that they don't seem to even understand how far behind they are, as if they never tried Opus, let alone Fable / Mythos. Or they do understand and that's why they focus on consulting now.
I personally think there's a hint in that Mistral Medium 3.5 costs 5x the price of Mistral Large 3, and that Mistral Large is not listed anymore as a "Featured Model" and hasn't been updated since Dec 2025:
https://docs.mistral.ai/models/overview
But what I really base it on is an interview the Mistral CEO gave on the Big Technology Podcast back in January this year:
Alex Kantrowitz: "Do you consider yourself, is the most important thing you do building the models? Or is the most important thing you do the service? Are you primarily a model builder, or primarily a service provider?"
Arthur Mensch: "We are there to help our customers get to value."
Alex Kantrowitz: "So, service!"
Arthur Mensch: "We are here to... but to get to value, they need to have great models. And to get to value, they need to have the right tools to train the models. And so the best way to train, to create those tools, is effectively to train the best models. So the two things are extremely linked together. We create models that are very easy to customize. We create models with tools that we then export to our customers, so that they can use them, and we help our customers train their own models. You can't go and sell to an enterprise that you are going to help them create great custom systems, if you can't show to the world that you are effectively the leader in open source technology. So the two parts are equally important, the first is enabling the other, and there's effectively a flywheel there because we make our choices when it comes to the model design in a way that is enabling the various customers we have. As one example, we've put a lot of emphasis on having models that are great at physics, because we work with manufacturing companies that run into physical problems. So that's the flywheel we have set up. Having the science team and the business team sit together."
It's at 22:37 in the video. Elsewhere in the podcast he mentions that they don't believe in a large unified generic model, they think the future of AI is small dedicated-task models (OCR, TTS, bespoke trained)... but unfortunately I don't have a timestamp link for that part.
I mean, I do too. Or at least, this will be a large market. But the natural leader for that space is the firm building the frontier models. They have the most control and access for distillation.
Speaking of me being wrong: the Mistral CEO tweeted today that they're coming out with a "fat but sparse" model in July, so big that it will only be available to governments & a few partners at first (ala Glasswing/Mythos I guess). I fear that's just marketing, but if Mistral really have gone all out to make a new truly large model & at least try to catchup to China, good luck to them!
Cohere would like a word here
What I see as usable product in the future are smaller specialized models which are able to run and be trained with fraction of resources what goes to current frontier models.
However, we're (i think officially) in an arms race.
I wouldn't want to bet against anyone in these unprecedented times (with plenty of historical parallels).
I am guessing that enough of these questions can be answered with "no" that nobody really wants to invest.
For the same reason there isn't really a serious third start up competitor to OpenAI and Anthropic.
You don't like US models because their values don't align with yours, but then you turn to Chinese models? See how hypocrite that is?
Similarly I was not suggesting Chinese models are an alternative to sovereign AI. An alternative which might be able to fulfil some of the objectives of a real sovereign AI while being far cheaper.
> If a battery can do 1000 cycles and remain above 80% capacity it is exempt
But if the needed total revenue for an investment is so absurdly large, that we need to capture 5-10% of the labour market, being slow might mean not burning in the crash.
The US drove the CCCP to bankruptcy by investing in nuclear bombs. Maybe history repeats itself.
Yes an economy that's being inflated by AI can affect acquiring of certain resources like DRAM or certain silicon quotas, if you're not joining the bandwagon. However there is enough in-house tech in Europe to prop up the critical industries that do not get affected by AI.
The US also needs someone to sell their stuff for keeping the inflated prices. A majority internal market is as unhealthy for the US as the EU.
What are we even doing here.
I'm still waiting for the European computer but all microcontrollers (no processors yet) made in EU have an ARM (British-American) Cortex and the RAM is made elsewhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-mover_advantage#Second-m...
Welcome to the age of digital realpolitik.
We also have buerocracy and regulations problems, but not with the AI at all. Only with the military civil dual-use restriction of thermal cameras. The ones we are allowed to sell have ridicolous resolutions. It still works, but it's barely useful.
And our colleagues across town are also world leader in their AI field. They produce all the world best face recognition SW. They had to use tricks to overcome regulations, but it works. They have their own HW as us.
And again other colleagues across town do rent their GPU computes to train their models. That's for office OCR, and speech to text.
The town is Dresden btw
They already tried training LLMs.
We live in a world where free open weight-models become competitive with frontier model within a year or two.
It is much more lucrative and proficient in term of business to solve real problems affecting the industries / govs with A.I right now than it is to do the arm race with OpenAI or Anthropic.
That is what Mistral is doing and that served them well so far.
The problem is not regulation and never has been. Regulation is a best a minor stone in the shoes of A.I company in Europe.
The problem is somewhere else: People fails to understand that there is no equivalent in the EU to the unlimited money tap of American VCs and private funding. That's just not a thing here, the investor landscape is much more dry.
Company here just cannot stay unprofitable for 25y while surfing on stocks valuation, it does not work like that in the EU.
And as such they cannot compete with behemoth like OpenAI that burn 80B$ a year of cash while staying afloat.
I do believe the approach of Mistral is the right one: Solve actual problems right now even if not Edge and construct on top of that.
Specially if politically speaking, the White House administration continue to give excellent arguments in favor of sovereignty for the incoming decade. It might be the best strategy they have.
"Training a frontier AI model" is a euphemism. The AI industry is, at present, a disproportionately resource-intensive and exploitative activity which carries only an religious promise of making up for itself at some future date (note that the beliefs being touted to board members are different than the gospel spread to users).
More accessible "non-frontier" models are being designed, built, and trained, while bigger models' gains are beginning to asymptote. Economically, Europe does not often hastily participate in new ways of wealth extraction, and with regard to sovereignty, I'd argue that "frontier" models are becoming a liability to the governments who build them and to the populations they're meant to lead.
Since it's impractical to airgap your military and readinessness capabilities, this means you need incountry capabilities because even if America weren't a fascist, you could easily be disconnected from the support from a cyberattack.
I think you're just following too much AI hype to see any clear use case.
The story I'm not readily conceiting to is that trillion-dollar frontier model training capex is the only thing that results in the defense capabilities countries need in relation to information security. From my understanding, the cyber wins being celebrated of late have come just as much (if not more) from how models are wielded than how they were trained.
Maybe the more honest framing of my question is: at what level of capability does sovereign training become the only viable path, and is that level the same as the trillion-dollar pretraining capacity TFA is actually asking about, or is it rather something more tactical/accessible? That is the part I'm genuinely more interested in, since the closer you are to benefiting from the commercial aspects of model training, the more likely it is that the answers will simply follow the money, so to speak.
1. Cyber - already discussed - has an issue that the bigger models can actually do a full end-to-end exploration of an exploit - go from theory to an actual deployable payload.
2. CAD/CAM/Mechanics - CalculiX (ccx) - an open-source FEA and similar mechanical solver - think Siemens or ANSYS, but open-source. A team I was helping was trying to do a design mount of a physical object that would need to reduce vibrations in a frequency band - think microphone mount basically. Usual loop would be design, analyze with Siemens, go to beginning. AI loop is have AI design, then analyze using ANSYS, then analyze result, change design, iterate. That loop did not produce anything useful for elastic materials because ANSYS would take 12 hrs to do acoustic analysis using a GPU. 1 week of autonomous work by a frontier model resulted in a modification and custom solver added to ccx that could simulate the acoustics (vibrations) _in that particular problem_ in about 20 seconds - mainly because it could try new mathematical ideas, then compare them against ANSYS reference for quality of solution, and iterate. And 1 week _after that_ the frontier model - iterating on one design per minute - came up with multiple 3-d printable ground-breaking mounts - including sending one off to xeometry for printing and getting it shipped back. Existing designs had a 20 db drop in the frequency ranges needed - this one had 60. For reference 40 DB is basically infinity :) While this was for microphones - you can imagine that vibration reduction is a big thing in engine, suspension, and weapon mounting, and well, in general things that move. 3 person team btw - unthinkable even 1 year ago.
3. Pharma. Different company - but given a known Density Function Theory or Kappa Cluster molecule simulator, one can run nice agentic loops over frontier models to do chemical or pharmaceutical research - there’s a reason Anthropic is launching Claude Chemistry. Note that then limiting factor is the multi-week runtime of Kappa Cluster and similarly molecular dynamics simulators. If one _could_ speed that up for a particular problem space or molecule type, one could very very quickly have a high-end reasoning model iterate to a good molecular design - and frontier models are getting very good at precisely automating the ML research needed to do that autonomously - after all, there’s a reference there. 5 ppl - 2 years ago would be a research institute.
4. Physical AI - robotics - same principle.
5. This is basically the bet Bezos is doing with his new company.
Please do not underestimate the effect these models will have on our ability to improve our ability to effect the world - this is just starting to hit now. I think we can all extrapolate the GDP and defense impact of this - or at least that there will be a very significant one.
Perhaps. While I'm more impressed by AI than I think you are, I do also say on occasion that recent developments in AI feels much like the 90s rapid development of computer graphics, in the sense we're overly impressed by what we see only to discard it quickly when the next improvement arrives: https://archive.org/details/nextgen-issue-26
If the US government declares no model ≥ Fable can be released, that could make it completely pointless for anyone in the USA to work towards superior models, which may cause rapid catching up, or may cause the investment bubble to pop and all the money to go away.
Or it may cause all the investment to go to not-USA. China's one possibility, EU is another. No idea which would be least-distasteful to the people currently eager to invest in AI.
You cannot have innovation at the speed and scale that you have in the US because the legislation is cumbersome and there is no unified market with the same rules.
Source: I am European.
That's not to say that there are no bureaucratic inefficiencies in Europe. There are a lot. France, Germany, Nordics and other members of the EU / EEA should strive to strengthen the industries and cut out the bullshit. It is a must to wake up from Boomer-pensioner-induced sleep and NIMBYsm, not for joining a stupid arms race but being able to provide a peaceful prosperity for our children. It is possible to enjoy quite a lot human rights and I think they are not a blocker.
You do know it is better to cry in a Mercedes than on a bike, no?