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Comment by andy_ppp | Hacker News Reader

Why can the Chinese build models and Europe cannot? The algorithms behind this stuff are not that complicated, are they? Is it the cost of energy? The illegality and difficulty of obtaining all the data in the world? Lack of capital to start moonshot labs? Lack of optimism?

The Chinese just seem to have an ability to get it done without anywhere near the GPUs of the US and Europe can buy these GPUs.

I think relying on the US and China for AI is probably not ideal? For example I think Qwen have not released the Omni models as open weights in the past, it’d be good to know if they’re doing this here?

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> and Europe cannot?

Well there is Mistral. The EU is ahead on specialised models than general purpose LLMs.

There is.

- Flux3

- Kyutai (Open source AI lab)

- H Company

- LightOn

- AMD Silo (Finland)

- OpenEuroLLM and EuroLLM

There is probably more, but that's off the top of my head.

These are mostly not significant businesses with large value capture or creation. I hope it could change though.

What would be significant in your opinion?

Black Forest Labs for example has a $4B valuation with half a billion raised so far.

It's not that they can't, but why would they? It's a race to the bottom commodity wise, much smarter to build on top of the model layer like Legora and Lovable than make the models.

So the grand plan is to run US or Chinese models on hardware that you buy from US or China, and hope they'll keep selling us the hardware forever and giving away the models for free forever? Your moat is what? The prompts? The JavaScript for loop calling the model? Neat.

How many times will we do this? This line of thought is precisely why we can't build almost anything, and China can built almost everything. We could do X, but we're too smart - let's offload the actual work to China and we'll run our economy on IP and B2B deals.

> hardware that you buy from US or China

... Built using expertise, machinery, and/or factories from Taiwan, the Netherlands, and South Korea.

The supply chain is far more complex and globalized than you're trying to make out here.

In Europe AI is seen as evil that must be stopped. Unlike in the US, AI doomers have Commission well manned. Ursula addressed this in her State of Union speech yesterday. The EU rather chooses consumer protection, even if it means killing AI and maintaining status quo.

Because any AI company would be hit by hate and regulation derived from this, no VC invests in the EU. It's more state and large enterprise investments, good old East Germany style. And historically it has not been that efficient.

Or simply: lack of risk taking appetite.

Wtf?

No?

Its just that the richest companys with the most VC sit in USA and Europe isn't used to pay what USA / VC is paying and we are a little bit slow.

I agree with this, the rich actually are oddly MORE greedy in Europe and take double the equity for half the money (roughly) so founders get a lot less upside or they move their businesses to the US and get US capital at better rates.

The valuations are lower (greedier investors) because EU companies are less likely to succeed for reasons mentioned above

The Chinese were directed to it from their government.

We have no such government with a mandate to do that.

While there is no official mandate, many countries of the EU are working on models that are government funded.

The main one (IIRC) is Spains ALIA.

https://alia.gob.es/eng

There is also OpenEuroLLM and EuroLLM.

https://www.openeurollm.eu

Nah, they wouldn't have released deepseek open source if they were the case

How are you sure about that? Undercutting your competition (at cost even) to minimize their power is a common strategy.

Source?

It's well documented that the Chinese models were enabled by training on openapi and anthropics models...

Europe actually follows americas rules, hence they're not doing that.

It's braindead for sure considering how the US treats europe, but it is what it's

The EU would rather weaponize it instead, and build it in secret. That's why they're pushing the doom narrative so strongly.

Great engineering schools and good tech companies to train them post graduation.

Europe has none;

The best tech university in Europe when compared to Chinese/US equivalents won't even rank in the top 10.

Simpler view for me: this is one of the most capital intense technologies to exist. Europe does not have enough capital to compete. China is building its own chips. It’s own everything. Silicon up. How do you compete with that. Only Google and maybe Aamazon is doing it domestically.

> How do you compete with that.

I feel people are too focused on US/China and don't pay attention to what is going on in the world.

ASML in the Netherlands for example was the only company in the world that makes EUV lithography machines, which all the major chip companies depend on. China recently reverse engineered their work to create machines since late 2025, but not sold commercially.

Ireland has chip production facilities.

EU might not be in the top 2, but it is not out of the running at all.

China reinvests twice as much as EU. In a very focused way. It is very different due to their control.

Europe has more capital than China, it's just spent on pensions for boomers, refugees and pointless vanity projects

ETH Zürich is up there high, particularly for computer science.

The LLM they were involved in last year (Apertus) still was a letdown.

As someone who actually went there, my impression is that Europe in general is complacent when it comes to computers, and any bright eyed student will get their motivation choked out of them in academia here.

If you want to do things with AI in Europe, you can have a bigger effect by working for a consulting company than being at a university. That's … not a good sitatution.

The "Attention is all you need" paper authors where four (!) Europeans and one from US, amongst others. The "Top 10" lists are just complete rubbish, not worth the paper they are written on.

Europeans do not have the hustle mentality to break the law like Uber so you wont see them compete in anything data heavy. They also are quite risk adverse, probably from having a lower Gini coefficient.

TUM, LMU, all the british ones, Delft...

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