I'm not against them being a global organization, that's wonderful. I was just surprised. I expected a parisian office and european accents.
Mistral has a successful business model and is actually making money. Not sure opening and anthropic are doing that yet.
The financial structure of the EU is nowhere close to enabling these capital devouring endeavors based on lofty future bets. Operating at a loss for years and years is simply unacceptable in European markets and the EU is not authoritarian enough to randomly divert capital based on political orders like China because the EU doesn't try to be a superpower controlling a hemisphere.
You don’t get US-level (or even Israel/China/Singapore) seeds, but often you get a matching public investment. Germany has better matching funds, but we did alright in Belgium, and previously Portugal.
Let’s stop pretending the EU can ‘fix’ this. It’s cultural, we’re simply not risk takers (on average) because a “normal” job comes with great benefits. Most of us don’t struggle to survive and have to “pull ourselves by the bootstraps”. The social security safety net protects you.
That’s all fine. We’re fine. No, we won’t lead on AI productisation, but we have AMAZING fundamental research going on at unis. I hired 2 such people in PhD+job setups, that part is also working fine.
Chill.
Have realized most people are idiots and are willing to give away their and resources for a piece of paper if it has George Washington's face on it. So they've kept putting it on every piece of paper they could find.
Serious people keep pointing out that this is unsustainable, and will lead to the collapse of American society in weeks/months/years, but they've been saying that for decades and so far that hasn't happened yet.
(I did work for one which had an office in Vancouver, instead; same tz.)
¹ The one locally famous for being sued by Amazon for non compete back when non compete were a thing: https://www.geekwire.com/2020/amazon-sues-former-aws-marketi...