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Comment by cbg0 | Hacker News Reader

> The US Government is not a major funder of frontier labs (who are almost exclusively VC and private money funded)...

There isn't a lot of VC funding available in Europe compared to the US, so without government intervention catching up will be very tricky.

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The problem is that EU has no money. France is virtually broke. Germany and eastern/central Europe is hemorrhaging its most valuable industries to cheaper Chinese competition. The whole bloc is carving out $100 billion military aid packages for Ukraine basically every year with no end in sight. And now EU is getting into a trade war with China despite having little leverage. Energy costs were bad even before the Ukraine war and Iran, and now they're at the boiling point.

It's why the USA and Chinese vultures are swarming. It's a bad situation.

France isn't "broke", its debt-to-GDP ratio is actually lower than the US right now and it's not in a situation where it can't pay its loans.

There is currently no real trade war EU-China; Chinese EVs are streaming into the EU while the US is blocking them completely for one example.

While Germany and more specifically Volkswagen is having some issues, EU industrial production actually had growth last year.

The $100 billion aid packages to Ukraine are also a bit overblown based on public figures https://www.kielinstitut.de/media/news/ukraine-support-track....

I feel like your comment pulls on some real threads, then blows things out of proportion.

Yes, I'm sure that EU doing its best to ignore building any technology frontier capabilities in its population will lead to a good solution for this lack of VC funding... ;-)

No shortage of visionaries in EU leadership these days :-)

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