Hacker News Reader

Comment by tangled | Hacker News Reader

Europe absolutely needs a home-grown AI lab, especially with Pax Americana looking increasingly shaky.

LLMs embody value systems, and American and European values are not the same (yes, there are overlaps, but also key differences).

More nefariously, I can also imagine LLMs that silently degrade their reasoning when used in a national security context of a non-US country.

So, Mistral may not be competitive with OpenAI and Anthropic, but in many contexts that doesn’t matter. And, perhaps this gap could be closed with more funding (the three billion funding figure is a rounding error next to US labs). I’m sort of surprised that the EU isn’t stepping in to support them.

View on HN

> I’m sort of surprised that the EU isn’t stepping in to support them.

It is! The second largest investor in this round is Scaleup Europe Fund:

https://eic.ec.europa.eu/eic-fund/scaleup-europe-fund_en

Do you think that's a good thing?

European money invested in a European company ought to be a good thing, don’t you think?

It's possible to be a waste of European money that could be better used elsewhere, though. I think the same about LeCun's company sucking up the little funding here.

Do you think it's not?

Imagine the fund were distributing to several teams, but let's say Z.ai and Deepseek were european and among them. What percentage would be allocated to Mistral in that case? OK, the other two aren't, but in the same vein, should the EU fund be saving its powder until such a project shows up?

I don't know. Government funds have a unique way of being often wrong, so this may be the kiss of death. But it is a sign that the EU is helping Mistral.

> LLMs embody value systems, and American and European values are not the same (yes, there are overlaps, but also key differences).

There are also some areas where values across Europe are quite divergent. Think LGBT rights and social acceptance, religion & secularism, immigration & multiculturalism.

And countries don’t fall into neat “liberal west vs conservative east”. Spain is exceptionally liberal on LGBT issues while remaining more religious than some northern countries; Denmark is socially liberal but has adopted relatively restrictive immigration policies.

You are conflating two concepts into one words, immigration and illegal immigration are not the same thing

> Spain is exceptionally liberal on LGBT issues while remaining more religious than some northern countries

When you move here, "more religious" turns out to pretty much be window dressing. Yes, they still celebrate a bunch of the old catholic holidays, parading saints around on feast days, but apart from a handful of older folks, nobody actually believes.

Particularly when compared to the US, where a large minority is still going around loudly thumping bibles, Spain is a very secular country.

Well, being secular is kind of a catholic thing. Besides the vatican (for obvious reasons), catholics do have that tradition.

To Caesar what is Caesar’s, to God…

> Europe absolutely needs a home-grown AI lab, especially with Pax Americana looking increasingly shaky.

The only problem (at least in the LLM space) is that you can do more in Europe by just getting the best Chinese Open weights model (do a finetune if you really want) and do more for cheaper than using Mistral.

Europe has no budget of their own like the USA and China do, because there is no debt nor taxation at the European level. That’s the reason for the complication you are noticing.

They're pushing hard to do Euro bonds precisely for things like this.

> They're pushing hard to do Euro bonds precisely for things like this.

I really, really wish that this was true, but basically no-one is pushing for euro bonds (even though they'd be a great idea).

What do you mean by "Europe has no budget of their own like the USA and China do"? The EU was specifically mentioned and the EU does have a budget, debt, and income:

https://european-union.europa.eu/institutions-law-budget/bud...

>I’m sort of surprised that the EU isn’t stepping in to support them.

On a similar note: Why does it have to be the EU to step up?

Why doesn't EU rather speed up making VC investments more attractive, so that EU and banks don't do the majority of investing?

*I don't have answers to these questions. It just frustrates me how many investments here come from politicians and banks, rather than from investors, people, and companies.

It’s a different culture with different rules, if it was that easy it would have been done already. See my other comment about lack of budget at a federal level.

> It’s a different culture with different rules

Nah, it's more that there's no Capital Markets Union, so there's just ~30 smaller pots of money scattered across each country.

> with Pax Americana looking increasingly shaky.

that is being replaced with Pax Silica

https://www.state.gov/pax-silica

This "Non-Signatory Participants : Taiwan *" is so weird precisely because Taiwan is the one who started the Silicon shield few years ago by making TSMC central to the whole ecosystem.

Its a roundabout way of not recognizing Taiwan as an independent country. The USA officially has a "One China policy".

"Pax Sinica", Chinese Peace

Reply on news.ycombinator.com