This is a wake up call for EU, but it’s already too late IMO. ChatGPT was launched in 2022 and since then only company in EU which has released a model that is even closer to a frontiers is Mistral.
With strong data protection, copyright and privacy laws, it would be a nightmare for any company to train models because activists lawyers would sue left and right.
Even by some miracle they come up with the model, again the hardware would be from US companies. It would take years to build a European equivalent of AWS and not to mention the talent required to do that. Given how low the wages in European countries are compared to American counterparts, and also lack of incentives from the governments I truly cannot think of a way how EU can catch up to US or China. Although I would love to be proven wrong
>Worst part is Europe was near the top of nuclear and microchips ~30 years ago
Boomers decided that was enough growth, it's time to cement what they got and cash out without thinking about economic growth opportunities of future generations.
>France had bleeding-edge AI
They still do, but it's all tied in stuffy bureaucratic French-speaking academia, not in monetizable products that scale internationally. Whatever they come up with, the US companies will then buy up, turn into products and sell for money.
Yes, the time to take action has been 10 years ago. In order to catch up with US and China, EU would have to accelerate assuming US and China would stagnate(which is not the case). At current rate EU would always be catching up. I would love to hear if you can think of any plan on how EU can overtake US and China on AI advancement
These stories about regulation preventing EU frontier models are frankly complete bullshit. The real reason is much simpler, but also harder to fix.
To build frontier models you need VC money. There’s no VC money because VC believe that there is no market for a ‘EU Champion’.
There’s no market for a EU champion because internal EU market is not big enough for VC returns. Why invest in EU champion when the US champion is guaranteed to have better returns ?
And there’s no public alternative to VC either because that’s national level and national investment in EU doesnt cross national boundaries
Mistral actions reflect this, they need returns and they target the market where they can be competitive, which is the scraps the US labs cannot address. This is not enough to fund frontier lab research
Also the legal context on regulations is quite different from the US. In the US you can have unlimited damage, that is not the case in the EU, where regulation penalty can never as a matter of principle put the existence of the company in danger, and thus the application of the regulations is always a matter of negociation with the government. You don't have to respect everything all at once, size of the company and ability to actually implement the regulations are taken into account, which means that sartups are usually excempt.
In most EU countries if your company went bankrupt, you are not allowed to open another one. Think about that for a little bit.
The Southern Countries are parasitically living from EU funds and EU programs, including money transfer for the budgets. The rich countries are desperately seeing China eating their lunch in Cars and all the rest.
Add to this the aging population, and now having the head under the sand on AI, and it does not look pretty...
You dont have a clue, and are showing EU regulations made by funcionaires that most countries simply ignore.
Here is an example of the current situation in Luxembourg for example, where the EU Court is based! They want you to clean up your debts first, well you would not go bankrupt if you could no? And if you look at the remaining conditions for the so called second chance they are impossible to achieve.
In the Netherlands restarting after bankruptcy is possible, but not automatic. The bankruptcy trustee determines whether the business can restart, and restart may be impossible if it harms creditors...
Spain excludes or limits discharge for some public debts and certain debtors...
Ireland and Austria completely ignored the law you quoted and currently have infringement procedures...see you in a few years...
Poland did not apply at all the law you mentioned, and had been criticized by the EU but nothing was made about it until now...
There are differences between being on the field, or knowing how to do a google search...
> It would take years to build a European equivalent of AWS and not to mention the talent required to do that.
It will never happen because it's a political decision!
European politicians and bureaucrats, at any level, are idiots(in the best case scenario) or corrupted(in the worst one). Cloud computing is a thing since at least 10 years, and we still don't have a single fucking hyperscaler despite having everything already in place: Ovh, Hertzner + several other big cloud providers in all major countries, but instead of acting as a unique actor ...
That would imply that the EU has the ability to build its own, competitive AI ecosystem. At the moment, it's mostly just Mistral, and they have been way behind SOTA for a while now.
You can't just legislate this into existence, you also need the money and talent to do it, not to mention the hardware.
Hopefully, EU-based Yann LeCunn's AMI Labs will develop foundational world models at some point. As I see it, the main problem in EU is not lack of talent: it's lack of investments. Mistral itself recently secured 4B, which is 50 times less than what it could have made in the US.
Investing in the EU is like burning cash. Excessive regulation, high costs and taxes (especially of human labor), and investors get punished for creating and growing companies.
Even if you overcome all of this and become successful, you'll get chased by politicians for having too much money (which is not allowed in the EU).
And even if you don't, today, it will be tomorrow.
Easier to just take a long haul flight to your favorite US coast and do it there.
However true that is, it now has only to compete with the US, where any model could be shut down by the Government on a whim with no clear rules at any time.
The rest who are not chased are usually deeply intertwined with politicians, and are running corruption schemes along them.
I'm not one to hate rich people (I'm a capitalist myself), but if any billionaires are to be looked at with skepticism, it's EU billionaires with significant political ties.
You _can_ legislate it _out_ of existence though. The competence is there, no doubt. Just not the complete disregard for copyright law that is step 1 of training an LLM. Rules for thee but not for me, classic colonialism. The EU is so intertwined with the US that even Trump isn't enough to force a clean break.
>Just not the complete disregard for copyright law that is step 1 of training an LLM.
I guess you forgot that EU's unicorn champion, Spotify, started by distributing pirated music they stole off the torrents before getting the rights to that music.
Except they could have killed spotify legally if they wanted to. Their luck was that Stockholm was the capital of the music recording industry so they had easy lines to negotiate with record label execs face to face to not get buried by the Swedish, EU and US laws they broke and would have sent them to jail.
Same thing will happen with the LLMs. Publishing companies will cut a deal with the LLM companies to get a cut off the books and IP they used for the training data.
So this is a very poor cope/excuse of why the EU doesn't have cutting edge models, because it's illegal to steal IP in Europe vs US.
I'm seeing this downvoted, but it's - unfortunately - painfully true!
European politicians are only ever judged by what they say, not what they do, so there's no incentive beyond the empty words. As a result, this is all they do: they express a populist opinion and jump to the next hot topic, with no actual work put into solving any of the issues.
I'm not really sure the US can be counted on to defend the EU via NATO anymore. They certainly gave up on Ukraine, which is grinding Russia down to the benefit of the EU and NATO.
Hopefully it will prompt more EU investment into ai and hopefully EU will have something good in the future.
EU will maybe never be like the US and maybe the US will be stronger and richer than the EU... But us EU people have nice weather and lots of good things like small cars and bike lanes and soccer teams and socker teams and suckerteams and lots and lots of windmills and sea windmills small tiny farms that are super cosy!!!
LOL....I just went trough the experience of trying to buy a bus ticket, at the Machines of DB in Munich Airport. I challenged two German citizens, who were kind enough to help, and they could not manage.
I think a YT Video about it would take on millions on views. Oh and the bus,no cards...debit or credit...only cash...oh wait...only coins.
German precision...the fairytale adults tell mechanics.
Can you even buy bus tickets via dbahn? Buses are local, they are different systems. FWIW you’re better off using the mobile apps than trying to use the machines
You are supposed to, and I managed only with the help of sending each screen to an LLM, while in English, but the English of the machines is broken.
For example when it gets the moment to pay in German, there would be a link to pay, but it wont enable the pin machine because it says in English "pay via association". You have to be an half genius to understand they are referring in English, via a broken translation, to The Munich Transport and Tariff Association (MVV) that provides the overarching framework for local public transport in Munich, but of course you wont have their card.
Oh and despite taking the money ok, when the machine prints the ticket, the machine fails to print the bar code in 60% of the cases...
The online info says you can go to the DB counter, and request them to print you a card with the proper bar code, that the bus inspectors need to scan. After 20 minutes on the queue, the most arrogant employee there refused to do it, laughed and said it was not worth it, as the machines fail to print the bar code 50% of the time. It gets you a "Barcodedruck fehlgeschlagen" message in the ticket, so the controls at the bus are forced to ignore it ...or they can decide to give you a fine...German precision my a#%"#&
Regulation and prerogative, revenge-driven abuse of state power are not the same thing.
Anthropic has been asking for a sensible regulatory regime, as you would know if you read their suggestions. What you’re looking at is USG directly integrating with the free market based on personal dislike.
It’s purely a revenge tactic due to Anthropic’s disagreement with Hegseth’s desire to use AI for war crimes.
I think due to a variety of reasons EU and US are on a road to divorce. EU will be wise to make that happen on their terms, but they do not seem to be ready.
- Monopolies and related regulation. Of course US has its own companies being treated as monopolies so they will try to save them
- Social systems including healthcare
- Russia being next door vs far away (for US)
- The whole AI buildout
- A little bit of Libre Office smattering at the government level
Whether you consider US to be guarding its national interests, or whether you consider europeans to be taking a free ride on US's defense systems, it seems like 2 partners who got together for whatever reasons, you can even justify them in history, but history has moved on. I think we are going in 2 different directions for even the next president, however big a U turn he/she makes, I do not think the situation is salvageable.
No responsibilities in the EU at all? I feel trump is more of an accelerant/trigger.. but where two parties fight etc. We did not get to this situation (or Trump for that matter) from a vacuum.
>EU will be wise to make that happen on their terms, but they do not seem to be ready.
It's too late for this. The time to execute this was 20 years ago when EU had leverage (the EU stock market was bigger than the US one in 2004, now it's half). Now that leverage is gone and EU is bogged down with massive domestic issues it can't recover from (some of which you mentioned), and starting a massive tech IP/trade war now with the US over Claude as retaliation for Trump will only hurt the EU working class more, as the US has more levers to pull being a big consumer of EU exports.
Unfortunately due to decades of neglect, mismanagement and bad policies, EU has backed itself into a corner making itself an easy mark for both the US and China to take advantage of as they lack any leverage to dictate international policies on their terms so they have to fold in the end.
Also, many EU politicians have no idea how the internet works let alone what Claude is. So much talks coming from them out of the blue on this topic will be the mouthpieces of the lobbyists funding them in exchange for government money to build "EU sovereign products" which may or may not deliver which is irrelevant as the goal will be to laudner public money into private pockets for shipping a sovereignty sticker.
@snovv_crash
>You spend too much time online
How can you insult people like that?
I base my assessment on the visible decline me and everyone around me see with our own eyes over the past 10 or so years. I can see for myself how my purchasing power has dropped like rock, how brutal inflation is, how much more expensive housing is relative to wages, how much more difficult it is to get a state doctor and childcare, the waves of layoffs me and friend experienced, etc. the news didn't have to tell people that, people can see and experience that for themselves. All these are not caused by one single issue that you can easily revert, they're a cumulation of multiple issues that accumulated over decades and are impossible to reverse in the current situation the EU is in.
It's so insulting when people are trying to gaslight you that your lived expiries are just "being online". So disingenuous and bad faith.
>The EU isn't bogged down with issues
It definitely is. That's why it can't take decisive actions against foreign bullies like Trump or even Putin(he invaded Ukraine in 2014 BTW). Like the EU talks a lot about its freedom and humanitarian values and policies but sheepishly fails to impose them on its trading partners, because it would suffer retaliations its economy can not absorb. It's too dependent on energy and tech trade with the US and too dependent on manufacturing from China, so it can't piss either of them off and is forced to play ball to their tune regardless of diverging values, while also playing to the tune of Azerbaijani authoritarianism for their gas imports and to the whims of Indian nationalists for access to their market. EU is currently in no position to bargain so it folds to everyone's demands.
To be fair the value of the stock market is not a good indicator of progress. The US stock market is incredibly inflated.
Besides, it's a bit strange to argue that it's impossible to make a change, and as proof of that take the fact that there's been a big change over the last 20 years.
>To be fair the value of the stock market is not a good indicator of progress.
Where did I talk about it being "progres"? I said the value of the stock market represents economic leverage which the EU lost and is now at the mercy of foreign bullies with stronger economies(US and CHina). If you want your trading partners to respect you and your values and not back-stab you the moment you turn around, you need leverage over them(economic and/or military), otherwise everyone will walk all over you and take advantage of you and your citizens will lose prosperity proportional to your nation's loss of share in the global economy.
>The US stock market is incredibly inflated.
Doesn't matter in this particular point. If the US stock market pops, the EU's economy will suffer just as much or even more, just like post 2008.
The point was that EU is far too economically dependent to US and other major nations they hate but has no muscle and no leverage to do anything against them except post stern words on X while quietly folding like a deckchair to their demands.
Call it progress, call it "economic leverage", a very inflated stock market is no good measure for either.
It's true the US economy has grown faster than the European in the last two decades, for sure, I agree with you. It's just that the apparent magnitude of the difference depends on what metric you choose, and I just mean that the value of the stock market seems like a poor metric.
Most of the issues you mentioned are more likely to be specific to you own country. The EU is pretty limited in what it can do due to Europe being so afraid to federate
Why would they be afraid? Yugoslavia, USSR and any other time in history where you force similar but not really cultures under one central leadership, it ended up great in the end, they didn't fight or break up at all. So what's to be afraid of?
Yeah, why bother with that pesky democracy, freedom of speech and what each country wants when we can have a German like Ursula v.d Leyen be the supreme chancellor over the European Federal Reich and all of EU's problems will be gone, we'll have our own SV, our own SpaceX, it will be amazing, right? It will be uncle Adolf's dream come true.
> the EU stock market was bigger than the US one in 2004, now it's half
I feel this is mostly to do with the EU having more companies that stay private for longer and partly to do with the USA's currency manipulation which maintains the dollar value artificially high.
You spend too much time online. The EU isn't bogged down with issues, it has uplifted an enormous part of itself out of abject post-communist poverty and yes growth isn't as fast, but it also isn't foisting as much debt on its citizens or working everyone to death. The problems you hear about on the news make the news because they are newsworthy, not because they are normal occurrences.
Its not to late, thats the defeatism that gives us fascism in the form of US politicians influencing us. Please dont think that we are soooo behind that there is no choice but to give in to their BS. There is, and right now is the perfect to to fight back.
The White House has Sachs and Krishnan and the CCP is full of engineers. In contrast, the EU Commission:
- Commissioner for Digital and Frontier: Henna Virkkunen (JOURNALIST, experience PR) [1]
- Executive Vice-President for Prosperity and Industrial Strategy: Stéphane Séjourné (LAWYER, politics, but hey, his mom was a telephone switch operator!) [2]
Arguably, it was Anthropic's decision to abide by their Government's orders. They could have not done so, but that would likely have consequences they weren't willing to face.
I choose to follow the law, but it’s an obligation not a decision. Framing it like this just misses the big picture entirely. A few words from a tech CEO is all it takes for this government to take extreme measures like this.
Viewing it as an obligation means you are weak. There are consequences to disobeying the law - a successful person will view them through the lens of cost-benefit analysis, not of dogma.
At the end of the day it's not really a decision at all, the government has a lot of men with guns, Anthropic has (presumably) low numbers to zero of men with guns.
You don't really have a choice if the government decides to play hardball
There are other things that can happen. For example, Anthropic could secretly transfer a copy of the model to a Chinese company in exchange for a large sum of yuan at a Chinese bank. Both parts of the transaction would be invisible to US authorities. I don't think this is a likely occurrence but if you think it's impossible then you need to think outside the box more.
10x? More like 1000x. EU doesn't have a chance except providing training for those talent only to be then aquired by US tech behemoths paying them what they are actually worth
The tech billionaires won't let such a ban stand. They may not GAF about random Latinos being deported from a field in Texas, but they won't simply give up people like Andrej Karpathy.
Jared Kushner will get a sweet package of private Anthropic shares and everything will be forgotten.
It remains to be seen what the actual consequences of the "Anthropic decision" are. Will it be struck down by the courts? Does it matter anyway? (And, from my POV, the answer to that is "No" -- Opus 4.whatever did several fine jobs for me this weekend, and I've yet to be convinced of Fable/Mythos/Whatever superiority).
Does "Europe" need a leading-edge model? Yeah, most likely, but chasing the "SpaceX-buys-all-the-Nvida-chips-then-rents-them-out" model is pointless, and the "China distills it all" market seems to be rather saturated as well. So, another vote for "meh", I guess?
Software development productivity can go up 10x for some industries and tasks with SOTA model. If the EU cannot access such model it means the EU cannot produce software at competitive prices. Software is eating the world and if the EU is not in the software business, it has no stakes in the future.
There is no evidence these models substantially increase productivity.
That's a strong statement, isn't it? But so far it seems true. They lower barrier to entry but they don't enable experts to get more things done better. Studies like the METR report show they make experts less productive but with the feeling of being more productive.
If the Chinese models surpass US ones, I highly doubt Chinese government would allow non-Chinese to use those models. It seems like the most capable model is becoming a national asset
China also uses export controls - heck, look at the export controls passed against EU aerospace and defense companies [0] as well as China's rare earths embargo on the EU last year [1].
Additonally, the Chinese AI industry is shifting away from open models and to American-style commercialization as well [2].
EU will start strongly "monitoring the situation" and "urging for peace" on monday, but only after after lunch and coffee break, then continue talks in september when everyone is back from their 3 month summer vacation, then have a meeting to decide when to schedule a meeting to decide on how to regulate the use of AI, then in 2030 authorize a massive 50k Euros package in funding to EU companies to build a domestic competitor to Claude, available after they fill 50k pages of paperwork, then post self-congratulatory boomer memes on X on how their AI achieved sovereignty, privacy and freedom of speech and can be access by all EU citizens only via their government doxxing digital-ID, just don't call them fat and stupid for this or the police will arrest you for hate speech. /s
Yes, I know Mistral exists but they're into the b-2-b sovereign enterprise/government niche, not winning the consumer space. And if history taught us anything from the Blackberry vs iPhone wars is that products winning over the consumer preference end up dominating the market over those dominating enterprise. Simple as.
Not many consumers and small-medium businesses will prefer to buy an inferior but domestic products for the sake of sovereignty, if the foreign imports can deliver better faster/results for cheaper. Same how Chinese car brands are now easting European ones on the European market. The free market is brutal and merciless when it gets to be actually free.
This is a wake up call for EU, but it’s already too late IMO. ChatGPT was launched in 2022 and since then only company in EU which has released a model that is even closer to a frontiers is Mistral.
With strong data protection, copyright and privacy laws, it would be a nightmare for any company to train models because activists lawyers would sue left and right.
Even by some miracle they come up with the model, again the hardware would be from US companies. It would take years to build a European equivalent of AWS and not to mention the talent required to do that. Given how low the wages in European countries are compared to American counterparts, and also lack of incentives from the governments I truly cannot think of a way how EU can catch up to US or China. Although I would love to be proven wrong
You forgot no energy and deep resentment for anybody earning more than 85k/y (except politicians).
Worst part is Europe was near the top of nuclear and microchips ~30 years ago, and France had bleeding-edge AI.
>Worst part is Europe was near the top of nuclear and microchips ~30 years ago
Boomers decided that was enough growth, it's time to cement what they got and cash out without thinking about economic growth opportunities of future generations.
>France had bleeding-edge AI
They still do, but it's all tied in stuffy bureaucratic French-speaking academia, not in monetizable products that scale internationally. Whatever they come up with, the US companies will then buy up, turn into products and sell for money.
Why _too_ late? Late, yes, but you’re implying that some line was crossed.
Yes, the time to take action has been 10 years ago. In order to catch up with US and China, EU would have to accelerate assuming US and China would stagnate(which is not the case). At current rate EU would always be catching up. I would love to hear if you can think of any plan on how EU can overtake US and China on AI advancement
Aren't you assuming that current approaches to AI won't plateau?
There's only so far you can push things before you need breakthroughs that give new approaches and when that happens it is often a new playing field.
These stories about regulation preventing EU frontier models are frankly complete bullshit. The real reason is much simpler, but also harder to fix.
To build frontier models you need VC money. There’s no VC money because VC believe that there is no market for a ‘EU Champion’.
There’s no market for a EU champion because internal EU market is not big enough for VC returns. Why invest in EU champion when the US champion is guaranteed to have better returns ?
And there’s no public alternative to VC either because that’s national level and national investment in EU doesnt cross national boundaries
Mistral actions reflect this, they need returns and they target the market where they can be competitive, which is the scraps the US labs cannot address. This is not enough to fund frontier lab research
Also the legal context on regulations is quite different from the US. In the US you can have unlimited damage, that is not the case in the EU, where regulation penalty can never as a matter of principle put the existence of the company in danger, and thus the application of the regulations is always a matter of negociation with the government. You don't have to respect everything all at once, size of the company and ability to actually implement the regulations are taken into account, which means that sartups are usually excempt.
In most EU countries if your company went bankrupt, you are not allowed to open another one. Think about that for a little bit.
The Southern Countries are parasitically living from EU funds and EU programs, including money transfer for the budgets. The rich countries are desperately seeing China eating their lunch in Cars and all the rest.
Add to this the aging population, and now having the head under the sand on AI, and it does not look pretty...
> In most EU countries if your company went bankrupt, you are not allowed to open another one. Think about that for a little bit.
That's just completely false but ok. There's even a EU regulation to ensure the exact opposite: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=legissum...
You dont have a clue, and are showing EU regulations made by funcionaires that most countries simply ignore.
Here is an example of the current situation in Luxembourg for example, where the EU Court is based! They want you to clean up your debts first, well you would not go bankrupt if you could no? And if you look at the remaining conditions for the so called second chance they are impossible to achieve.
https://sstlaw.lu/obtaining-a-business-license-after-facing-...
In the Netherlands restarting after bankruptcy is possible, but not automatic. The bankruptcy trustee determines whether the business can restart, and restart may be impossible if it harms creditors...
Spain excludes or limits discharge for some public debts and certain debtors...
Ireland and Austria completely ignored the law you quoted and currently have infringement procedures...see you in a few years...
Poland did not apply at all the law you mentioned, and had been criticized by the EU but nothing was made about it until now...
There are differences between being on the field, or knowing how to do a google search...
Regarding AWS, we have Gcore, OVH, Hetzner
You are comparing cars to bicycles.
Are you referring to the services offered or just to the number of servers available?
> It would take years to build a European equivalent of AWS and not to mention the talent required to do that.
It will never happen because it's a political decision!
European politicians and bureaucrats, at any level, are idiots(in the best case scenario) or corrupted(in the worst one). Cloud computing is a thing since at least 10 years, and we still don't have a single fucking hyperscaler despite having everything already in place: Ovh, Hertzner + several other big cloud providers in all major countries, but instead of acting as a unique actor ...
Poor decisions from politicians continue to bite us harder and harder.
It remains to be proven whether a continent without LLMs would actually be worse off.
If American services can be yeeted on a whim, American services can no longer be relied upon.
The Fable debacle seems destined to be the canonical reason why the EU built their own software / AI ecosystem.
That would imply that the EU has the ability to build its own, competitive AI ecosystem. At the moment, it's mostly just Mistral, and they have been way behind SOTA for a while now.
You can't just legislate this into existence, you also need the money and talent to do it, not to mention the hardware.
Hopefully, EU-based Yann LeCunn's AMI Labs will develop foundational world models at some point. As I see it, the main problem in EU is not lack of talent: it's lack of investments. Mistral itself recently secured 4B, which is 50 times less than what it could have made in the US.
Investing in the EU is like burning cash. Excessive regulation, high costs and taxes (especially of human labor), and investors get punished for creating and growing companies.
Even if you overcome all of this and become successful, you'll get chased by politicians for having too much money (which is not allowed in the EU).
And even if you don't, today, it will be tomorrow.
Easier to just take a long haul flight to your favorite US coast and do it there.
However true that is, it now has only to compete with the US, where any model could be shut down by the Government on a whim with no clear rules at any time.
It's happened once, could happen any time.
Not good for business!
We have billionaires too in the EU, they obviously aren’t chased by politicians… wtf are you talking about
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/10/super-rich-aba...
The rest who are not chased are usually deeply intertwined with politicians, and are running corruption schemes along them.
I'm not one to hate rich people (I'm a capitalist myself), but if any billionaires are to be looked at with skepticism, it's EU billionaires with significant political ties.
You _can_ legislate it _out_ of existence though. The competence is there, no doubt. Just not the complete disregard for copyright law that is step 1 of training an LLM. Rules for thee but not for me, classic colonialism. The EU is so intertwined with the US that even Trump isn't enough to force a clean break.
Flip the rules put a blanket ban on US digital services and see what comes out of Europe within couple of years.
The only problem is - when US services are available, there's no incentive to bring anything to the market.
>Just not the complete disregard for copyright law that is step 1 of training an LLM.
I guess you forgot that EU's unicorn champion, Spotify, started by distributing pirated music they stole off the torrents before getting the rights to that music.
Which invalidates everything you just said.
I think that proves the point more than anything. Spotify was allowed to live on because the music industry bought in.
Except they could have killed spotify legally if they wanted to. Their luck was that Stockholm was the capital of the music recording industry so they had easy lines to negotiate with record label execs face to face to not get buried by the Swedish, EU and US laws they broke and would have sent them to jail.
Same thing will happen with the LLMs. Publishing companies will cut a deal with the LLM companies to get a cut off the books and IP they used for the training data.
So this is a very poor cope/excuse of why the EU doesn't have cutting edge models, because it's illegal to steal IP in Europe vs US.
Its especially funny in light the US is always complaining about EU regulations.
I would still prefer bureacratic laws to the chaos of the White House.
Indeed. Is America really very far from the Soviet planned economy where the Dear Leader would manage what crops got planted, and who would starve?
And it’s not like the US doesn’t have complex regulations
Greenland has been enough already. EU sovereignty in everything, from data to arms is becoming a widespread official policy.
Please, for once, react in a meaningful way. No "we are concerned and will consider strongly monitoring".
I'm seeing this downvoted, but it's - unfortunately - painfully true! European politicians are only ever judged by what they say, not what they do, so there's no incentive beyond the empty words. As a result, this is all they do: they express a populist opinion and jump to the next hot topic, with no actual work put into solving any of the issues.
European politicians are subject to US's (and thus Trump's) orders.
The "strong and deep statements" they release are cheap theater.
The US is defending Europe through NATO. Until that changes, the EU will continue to be the US's slave.
I'm not really sure the US can be counted on to defend the EU via NATO anymore. They certainly gave up on Ukraine, which is grinding Russia down to the benefit of the EU and NATO.
Hopefully it will prompt more EU investment into ai and hopefully EU will have something good in the future.
EU will maybe never be like the US and maybe the US will be stronger and richer than the EU... But us EU people have nice weather and lots of good things like small cars and bike lanes and soccer teams and socker teams and suckerteams and lots and lots of windmills and sea windmills small tiny farms that are super cosy!!!
Don’t forget Deutsche Bahn, and the best railway system in whole world
Im not sure if it’s a joke or not. In Germany Deutsche Bahn has a terrible reputation since half a decade at least
LOL....I just went trough the experience of trying to buy a bus ticket, at the Machines of DB in Munich Airport. I challenged two German citizens, who were kind enough to help, and they could not manage.
I think a YT Video about it would take on millions on views. Oh and the bus,no cards...debit or credit...only cash...oh wait...only coins.
German precision...the fairytale adults tell mechanics.
Can you even buy bus tickets via dbahn? Buses are local, they are different systems. FWIW you’re better off using the mobile apps than trying to use the machines
You are supposed to, and I managed only with the help of sending each screen to an LLM, while in English, but the English of the machines is broken.
For example when it gets the moment to pay in German, there would be a link to pay, but it wont enable the pin machine because it says in English "pay via association". You have to be an half genius to understand they are referring in English, via a broken translation, to The Munich Transport and Tariff Association (MVV) that provides the overarching framework for local public transport in Munich, but of course you wont have their card.
Oh and despite taking the money ok, when the machine prints the ticket, the machine fails to print the bar code in 60% of the cases...
The online info says you can go to the DB counter, and request them to print you a card with the proper bar code, that the bus inspectors need to scan. After 20 minutes on the queue, the most arrogant employee there refused to do it, laughed and said it was not worth it, as the machines fail to print the bar code 50% of the time. It gets you a "Barcodedruck fehlgeschlagen" message in the ticket, so the controls at the bus are forced to ignore it ...or they can decide to give you a fine...German precision my a#%"#&
Why is anyone surprised? Anthropic has been screaming from the roof tops that their models are dangerous. Reap what you sow.
Regulation and prerogative, revenge-driven abuse of state power are not the same thing.
Anthropic has been asking for a sensible regulatory regime, as you would know if you read their suggestions. What you’re looking at is USG directly integrating with the free market based on personal dislike.
It’s purely a revenge tactic due to Anthropic’s disagreement with Hegseth’s desire to use AI for war crimes.
I think due to a variety of reasons EU and US are on a road to divorce. EU will be wise to make that happen on their terms, but they do not seem to be ready.
- Monopolies and related regulation. Of course US has its own companies being treated as monopolies so they will try to save them
- Social systems including healthcare
- Russia being next door vs far away (for US)
- The whole AI buildout
- A little bit of Libre Office smattering at the government level
Whether you consider US to be guarding its national interests, or whether you consider europeans to be taking a free ride on US's defense systems, it seems like 2 partners who got together for whatever reasons, you can even justify them in history, but history has moved on. I think we are going in 2 different directions for even the next president, however big a U turn he/she makes, I do not think the situation is salvageable.
If there is a divorce the very obvious reason is Trump
But let's be clear about this - 50% of the voting population of the United States have been giving him their support for a decade now.
His conviction for sexual assault, attracted the votes of 43 million female voters. Just the facts...
No responsibilities in the EU at all? I feel trump is more of an accelerant/trigger.. but where two parties fight etc. We did not get to this situation (or Trump for that matter) from a vacuum.
Okay.
>EU will be wise to make that happen on their terms, but they do not seem to be ready.
It's too late for this. The time to execute this was 20 years ago when EU had leverage (the EU stock market was bigger than the US one in 2004, now it's half). Now that leverage is gone and EU is bogged down with massive domestic issues it can't recover from (some of which you mentioned), and starting a massive tech IP/trade war now with the US over Claude as retaliation for Trump will only hurt the EU working class more, as the US has more levers to pull being a big consumer of EU exports.
Unfortunately due to decades of neglect, mismanagement and bad policies, EU has backed itself into a corner making itself an easy mark for both the US and China to take advantage of as they lack any leverage to dictate international policies on their terms so they have to fold in the end.
Also, many EU politicians have no idea how the internet works let alone what Claude is. So much talks coming from them out of the blue on this topic will be the mouthpieces of the lobbyists funding them in exchange for government money to build "EU sovereign products" which may or may not deliver which is irrelevant as the goal will be to laudner public money into private pockets for shipping a sovereignty sticker.
@snovv_crash
>You spend too much time online
How can you insult people like that?
I base my assessment on the visible decline me and everyone around me see with our own eyes over the past 10 or so years. I can see for myself how my purchasing power has dropped like rock, how brutal inflation is, how much more expensive housing is relative to wages, how much more difficult it is to get a state doctor and childcare, the waves of layoffs me and friend experienced, etc. the news didn't have to tell people that, people can see and experience that for themselves. All these are not caused by one single issue that you can easily revert, they're a cumulation of multiple issues that accumulated over decades and are impossible to reverse in the current situation the EU is in.
It's so insulting when people are trying to gaslight you that your lived expiries are just "being online". So disingenuous and bad faith.
>The EU isn't bogged down with issues
It definitely is. That's why it can't take decisive actions against foreign bullies like Trump or even Putin(he invaded Ukraine in 2014 BTW). Like the EU talks a lot about its freedom and humanitarian values and policies but sheepishly fails to impose them on its trading partners, because it would suffer retaliations its economy can not absorb. It's too dependent on energy and tech trade with the US and too dependent on manufacturing from China, so it can't piss either of them off and is forced to play ball to their tune regardless of diverging values, while also playing to the tune of Azerbaijani authoritarianism for their gas imports and to the whims of Indian nationalists for access to their market. EU is currently in no position to bargain so it folds to everyone's demands.
To be fair the value of the stock market is not a good indicator of progress. The US stock market is incredibly inflated.
Besides, it's a bit strange to argue that it's impossible to make a change, and as proof of that take the fact that there's been a big change over the last 20 years.
>To be fair the value of the stock market is not a good indicator of progress.
Where did I talk about it being "progres"? I said the value of the stock market represents economic leverage which the EU lost and is now at the mercy of foreign bullies with stronger economies(US and CHina). If you want your trading partners to respect you and your values and not back-stab you the moment you turn around, you need leverage over them(economic and/or military), otherwise everyone will walk all over you and take advantage of you and your citizens will lose prosperity proportional to your nation's loss of share in the global economy.
>The US stock market is incredibly inflated.
Doesn't matter in this particular point. If the US stock market pops, the EU's economy will suffer just as much or even more, just like post 2008.
The point was that EU is far too economically dependent to US and other major nations they hate but has no muscle and no leverage to do anything against them except post stern words on X while quietly folding like a deckchair to their demands.
Call it progress, call it "economic leverage", a very inflated stock market is no good measure for either.
It's true the US economy has grown faster than the European in the last two decades, for sure, I agree with you. It's just that the apparent magnitude of the difference depends on what metric you choose, and I just mean that the value of the stock market seems like a poor metric.
>a very inflated stock market is no good measure for either.
It absolutely is. If my assets are worth twice as much as yours, I have more options to mess with you, and you have less resources to fight me back.
It's how rich people can bully poor people in court. It's how rich countries can bully poorer countries.
Most of the issues you mentioned are more likely to be specific to you own country. The EU is pretty limited in what it can do due to Europe being so afraid to federate
> The EU is pretty limited in what it can do due
Thank god for that. Enjoy it while it lasts.
>do due to Europe being so afraid to federate
Why would they be afraid? Yugoslavia, USSR and any other time in history where you force similar but not really cultures under one central leadership, it ended up great in the end, they didn't fight or break up at all. So what's to be afraid of?
Yeah, why bother with that pesky democracy, freedom of speech and what each country wants when we can have a German like Ursula v.d Leyen be the supreme chancellor over the European Federal Reich and all of EU's problems will be gone, we'll have our own SV, our own SpaceX, it will be amazing, right? It will be uncle Adolf's dream come true.
> the EU stock market was bigger than the US one in 2004, now it's half
I feel this is mostly to do with the EU having more companies that stay private for longer and partly to do with the USA's currency manipulation which maintains the dollar value artificially high.
You spend too much time online. The EU isn't bogged down with issues, it has uplifted an enormous part of itself out of abject post-communist poverty and yes growth isn't as fast, but it also isn't foisting as much debt on its citizens or working everyone to death. The problems you hear about on the news make the news because they are newsworthy, not because they are normal occurrences.
> 20 years ago when EU had leverage (the EU stock market was bigger than the US one in 2004
Where did you get that from??
Its not to late, thats the defeatism that gives us fascism in the form of US politicians influencing us. Please dont think that we are soooo behind that there is no choice but to give in to their BS. There is, and right now is the perfect to to fight back.
The White House has Sachs and Krishnan and the CCP is full of engineers. In contrast, the EU Commission:
- Commissioner for Digital and Frontier: Henna Virkkunen (JOURNALIST, experience PR) [1]
- Executive Vice-President for Prosperity and Industrial Strategy: Stéphane Séjourné (LAWYER, politics, but hey, his mom was a telephone switch operator!) [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henna_Virkkunen
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St%C3%A9phane_S%C3%A9journ%C3%...
inb4 Sacks is MD/lawyer... but he is a Stanford econ graduate, was PayPal COO, is tech VC, etc.
Odd title, I’m not sure it was Anthropic’s decision.
Practically this means Europe has a short window in which to catch up, while the US hobbles its own progress.
Arguably, it was Anthropic's decision to abide by their Government's orders. They could have not done so, but that would likely have consequences they weren't willing to face.
I choose to follow the law, but it’s an obligation not a decision. Framing it like this just misses the big picture entirely. A few words from a tech CEO is all it takes for this government to take extreme measures like this.
Viewing it as an obligation means you are weak. There are consequences to disobeying the law - a successful person will view them through the lens of cost-benefit analysis, not of dogma.
Good luck with that. I hope you’re successful in your law breaking endeavours with your highly informed cost benefit analyses.
I've broken many laws. Have you not? Never crossed at a red light with no cars in sight?
At the end of the day it's not really a decision at all, the government has a lot of men with guns, Anthropic has (presumably) low numbers to zero of men with guns.
You don't really have a choice if the government decides to play hardball
There are other things that can happen. For example, Anthropic could secretly transfer a copy of the model to a Chinese company in exchange for a large sum of yuan at a Chinese bank. Both parts of the transaction would be invisible to US authorities. I don't think this is a likely occurrence but if you think it's impossible then you need to think outside the box more.
Fair point, but doing that from inside the US under the direct view of multiple three letter agencies would be extremely risky to put it mildy
If it's lucrative but risky, it will happen.
How are we going to catch up if our most talented AI people have moved to Silicon Valley and get 10x the compensation they would get back home.
The most egregious example: the core OpenAI team is like forty per cent Polish...?
10x? More like 1000x. EU doesn't have a chance except providing training for those talent only to be then aquired by US tech behemoths paying them what they are actually worth
The US banning those people from working on frontier models is perhaps the exact thing that would give you an opportunity, you would think.
The tech billionaires won't let such a ban stand. They may not GAF about random Latinos being deported from a field in Texas, but they won't simply give up people like Andrej Karpathy.
Jared Kushner will get a sweet package of private Anthropic shares and everything will be forgotten.
> random Latinos being deported from a field in Texas
You should cool it with the racially charged remarks.
It remains to be seen what the actual consequences of the "Anthropic decision" are. Will it be struck down by the courts? Does it matter anyway? (And, from my POV, the answer to that is "No" -- Opus 4.whatever did several fine jobs for me this weekend, and I've yet to be convinced of Fable/Mythos/Whatever superiority).
Does "Europe" need a leading-edge model? Yeah, most likely, but chasing the "SpaceX-buys-all-the-Nvida-chips-then-rents-them-out" model is pointless, and the "China distills it all" market seems to be rather saturated as well. So, another vote for "meh", I guess?
Software development productivity can go up 10x for some industries and tasks with SOTA model. If the EU cannot access such model it means the EU cannot produce software at competitive prices. Software is eating the world and if the EU is not in the software business, it has no stakes in the future.
There is no evidence these models substantially increase productivity.
That's a strong statement, isn't it? But so far it seems true. They lower barrier to entry but they don't enable experts to get more things done better. Studies like the METR report show they make experts less productive but with the feeling of being more productive.
> If the EU cannot access such model it means the EU cannot produce software at competitive prices.
Yeah, but isn't the "common knowledge" that the EU can't produce software anyway, annoying outliers like SAP nothwithstanding?
And: "Fable" being 10x (or even 2x, or even 1.1x) better than Opus 4.x is not agreed-upon fact, right?
Our best hope for non US citizens is for the Chinese companies to continue to improve their models.
If the Chinese models surpass US ones, I highly doubt Chinese government would allow non-Chinese to use those models. It seems like the most capable model is becoming a national asset
China also uses export controls - heck, look at the export controls passed against EU aerospace and defense companies [0] as well as China's rare earths embargo on the EU last year [1].
Additonally, the Chinese AI industry is shifting away from open models and to American-style commercialization as well [2].
[0] - https://www.scmp.com/economy/global-economy/article/3351292/...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/eu-firms-brace-more-shut...
[2] - https://m.guancha.cn/economy/2026_06_12_820253.shtml
EU will start strongly "monitoring the situation" and "urging for peace" on monday, but only after after lunch and coffee break, then continue talks in september when everyone is back from their 3 month summer vacation, then have a meeting to decide when to schedule a meeting to decide on how to regulate the use of AI, then in 2030 authorize a massive 50k Euros package in funding to EU companies to build a domestic competitor to Claude, available after they fill 50k pages of paperwork, then post self-congratulatory boomer memes on X on how their AI achieved sovereignty, privacy and freedom of speech and can be access by all EU citizens only via their government doxxing digital-ID, just don't call them fat and stupid for this or the police will arrest you for hate speech. /s
Yes, I know Mistral exists but they're into the b-2-b sovereign enterprise/government niche, not winning the consumer space. And if history taught us anything from the Blackberry vs iPhone wars is that products winning over the consumer preference end up dominating the market over those dominating enterprise. Simple as.
Not many consumers and small-medium businesses will prefer to buy an inferior but domestic products for the sake of sovereignty, if the foreign imports can deliver better faster/results for cheaper. Same how Chinese car brands are now easting European ones on the European market. The free market is brutal and merciless when it gets to be actually free.
It's sadly really like this. And they are "always busy".
You know it’s true when the comment is being downvoted by spiteful Europeans
I don't envy the interns whose job is to explain things to the EU leadership.
Which internships are better? Explaining things to the US leadership? Or to the Chinese leadership?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48529685
That's a pretty tight hair to walk on.