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Comment by jvwww | Hacker News Reader

So why doesn't Europe with it's talent, money and institutions create an actually useful open source model rather than relying on China?

The European attitude to technology is very strange to me. I'm very happy that I've been able to move to the US and leave it behind.

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Plenty folks in Europe work for American businesses, including tech, it’s just super duper hard to scale a business as quick as it is in the US for a variety of reasons - regulation, funding, labor laws, euro idea of work life balance, …

Fragmented EU domestic market (27 very different countries with no shared language) vs. unified US domestic market (50 pretty similar states with shared language) is the most important factor when it comes to scaling the typical services with marginal to nonexistent unit costs that are common in the tech world, especially consumer tech.

Yeah but also the consumer (if you’re selling to consumers) is very different in the US va Europe: on average, the US consumer wants to be sold stuff to. Not as much in EU.

> 27 very different countries with no shared language

Yet I can ask a Chinese frontier model in Russian how to say the phrase in Hungarian. How do they manage to achieve that?

Whatever LLMs are capable to with regard to translations is not relevant for the 30-year history of primarily Silicon-Valley-originated consumer tech service expansion: todays' LLMs didn't exist pre-2022, but the gigantic moat of US tech giants was developed pre-2022. Today, they mostly profit from that flywheel having been sped up already in the past.

Thank you. People love to blame regulation but no amount of regulatory simplification is going to make a Lithuanian speak Italian.

Combine it with the fact that in the media of every country the US comes far ahead of any other UE countries in terms of coverage (on any topic), you have a recipe that no amount of deregulation can ever fix.

What’s the „euro idea“ of work life balance?

That there’s life outside work ;)

You work to live, you don't live to work.

Why should they join in on a shoveling cash in to the fire competition? The winning move here is to just sit and watch the others waste all of their resource and to just take the free open source model that comes out at the end.

Again; they don't need to. Chinese open-weight LLMs are free and better than US models for security-focused work.

As an American, I wish our country had fewer "frontier" labs. They are not profitable and will destroy the economy when (not if) they fail to achieve gross ROI.

I kid you not, the research cloud for Danish universities is deploying a "sovereign AI". Which means running GLM 5.3 on their Nvidia GPUs. All that while EU designates China a strategic threat.

It's still much more sovereign AI than renting cloud from the country who wants to invade them though.

That is unironically more sovereign than using any US-developed AI. GLM 5.3 is cutting-edge for cybersecurity tasks, while the US frontier forces KYC/background checks for cyber capabilities.

Well in the same way as all the solar panels come from China, as well as all batteries.

EU is an open market - it exports a lot of products, but they are of high value. The AI spending is simply not high enough value so that it is picked up.

> So why doesn't Europe with it's talent, money and institutions create an actually useful open source model

This question is based on the assumption that existing models are actually useful.

They already are to many people. Maybe not to you, but that's okay — no tool has to be useful to everybody. It's therefore a valid assumption.

I would consider them tremendously useful.

why would anyone make a new model when we already have so many?

Well it's too late now. Europe should have started in 2023 when there were only a couple of models. Instead, we got Mistral, which is just useful for OCR.

A technology whose main selling point is that it will leave you without a job? What's wrong with Europeans, why don't they love this? Maybe because we don't have enough billionaires to convince us.

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