The question was never do enough computers exist in Europe, but rather can Europe organize the capital and cross-company / cross-border relationships required to build a big model at scale. There the answer still looks iffy at best. This is where the US has, and continues to, thrive and where Europe can’t get out of its own way.
I don't believe Europe can build models that can compete with American ones.
1. In order to build competitive models, you need to offer competitive salaries and equity. Europe has very old and inadequate corporate law virtually everywhere but in UK. European labs cannot attract talent that can build such competitive models with the proper lack of incentives.
2. In order to build competitive models, you need gargantuan amounts of compute. And thus capital. How can you compete when big tech can just cough a handful of equity and raise $ 85 B like Alphabet is doing right now?
3. In order to have these datacenters financially feasible you need cheap energy. We don't have it. Some places like France have clean one, but it's still not cheap enough, you're still paying a 45-50% premium over some random South Carolina.
What Europe should do is to finally tackle its fundamental issues with corporate laws, startups and incentivize more money to flow into venture capital.
Essentially we need a bunch of Mistrals, but with more competition and better incentives.
There's plenty of brilliant European engineers and scientists that would gladly take some pay cut to work in Europe instead of US and could bring their expertise here, but you still need the right incentives.
You can do what frontier labs do today which is to properly license things that are copyrighted and use open source web crawls for things that don’t have copyright issues. You can then also commission new datasets (volume needed goes down when quality is high).
The European regulations are the thing that will kneecap anything meaningful coming out of Europe. Mind blowing to me that this is worth the tradeoff since Europe will be beholden to other frontier labs be it China or the US, so regulations accomplishing very little if anything on impacting actual AI development and losing vast amounts of leverage in the process.
> You can do what frontier labs do today which is to properly license things that are copyrighted and use open source web crawls for things that don’t have copyright issues. You can then also commission new datasets (volume needed goes down when quality is high).
It cost Anthropic $1.5 billion for training on libgen's 480k pirated ebooks.
Investors will cough up that money if you're already clearly a frontier lab with a model people are paying a lot of money for.
Tough to get that much cash without anything to show.
Regulations aside, Europe is extremely divided. There's constant resistance from individual states, disputes and far right extremism gaining traction. At this point, it seems like EU can barely agree to make any decision.
Well-meaning restrictions that threaten Europe's ability to compete sound like something that would eventually encourage far right extremism by impeaching the validity of the restrictions' philosophical underpinnings.
In my experience it doesn't take anything that ample to encourage far right extremism. It's enough to point at an existing problem and a convincing scapegoat. It works today not eventually and it works regardless of any reason or reality.
It's true though that multiple problems mean multiple propaganda seeds.
> 1. In order to build competitive models, you need to offer competitive salaries and equity.
FWIW, for the equity part there's a proposal expected to pass for next year: https://www.eu-inc.org/ (but it doesn't address taxes, cross-border employment, or anything significant so it's mostly moot). The main goal is to attract native VCs.
AFAIK it's designed by lawyers and old money, with little to no input from tech entrepreneurs.
The culture's still all wrong. If you have a startup that failed in SV, that's par for the course. Better luck next time! If you fail in the EU, that's the kiss of death. Your startup failed???
> If you fail in the EU, that's the kiss of death. Your startup failed???
As a native German, I wouldn't say this is the case: the opinions of people rather differ quite a bit on this topic (there also exist quite a lot of people who are nearer to the US-American mentality here).
What I would rather claim is some kind of kiss of death, is if your startup failed because you made stupid mistakes. People don't like such unresponsible people (many people say that startup founders also have responsibility for their employees).
This sentiment is so wrong, yet so bloody persistent. I know plenty of european entrepreneurs, myself included, that went through one or more screw ups. All the ones that stuck with entrepreneurship eventually landed a hit.
> you need to offer competitive salaries and equity
This has always been an argument for "peace time" underperformance of european tech sector but I don't buy this argument for critical national security needs. Historically countries never needed to top the compensation charts to get talent. What they do need is a clear mission and ambition. This is what is missing in Europe
Just as a reminder, Google DeepMind is right here in the UK, and there are hundreds, thousands of top AI researchers that are foundational to everything that the US is doing, as much, if more so than the Chinese contributions.
We need compute, yes, but we certainly aren't short of talent if we put our minds to it, and many of them are already here.
It is a good example that what Europe lacks is capital. And there is an rich get richer phenomenon where wealth flows to the USA, and successful European companies gets sold (and many talented Europeans ends up working for American companies). In many ways the dynamic is one of a colony.
The more I learn about modern economics, the less I feel I know. Right now, the sense I have is that the flow of money from Europe to the USA is more like using the US as a flag of convenience than a material loss of wealth, especially given how many "American" companies have European offices filled with European staff and how much money is made selling space for ads from European companies to European users.
Does it matter in which countries the offices with the staff who develop some of these models are? I think so, for a number of reasons too long to go into.
Re "US citizens only", the question I'd have right now for all the AI companies is: can any new better-or-as-good-as Fable AI model actually be released?
If not, stop development of better models. That's the single most expensive thing any of them are doing.
Export controls on software is somewhere between "hard" and "impossible", so "US citizens only" means something between "nobody" and "perhaps some government agents", but the latter don't pay enough to justify the cost.
> In order to build competitive models, you need to offer competitive salaries and equity. Europe has very old and inadequate corporate law virtually everywhere but in UK.
It is a fact that a much smaller amount of money is available in the EU for startup investments.
But in which sense it the corporate law inadequate? As far as I am aware the laws allow quite a lot of freedom in setting up the corporate governance for many forms of companies.
There's no stock option mechanisms available in most of EU.
You get someone you cannot tempt him with "do a great job and get X amount of equity".
In Italy it is not enforceable, even if you sign a contract.
With this, startups can only compete with bigger companies on salary, hard, and don't get equally motivated hires to get a piece of a company. You get people there for the paycheck.
It's also unfriendly to venture capitalists, for different reasons.
So corporate law is a major problem in most of EU, as it's unfriendly both to investors and employees.
Also, firing people is hard in EU. You hire the wrong person, you're stuck with it.
As per your points, Europe really can't compete, particularly when power is considered. However, frontier models that require city-sized data centres might not be all they are cracked up to be.
In China they seem to be nonchalantly doing a lot with AI for specific rather than 'ask me anything' tasks. To them, they are quite used to everyday applications that work well within limited domains, no vast data centre needed, just on-device. Hence the hype is no big deal.
Europe needs to think again about what can be done to make Europe attractive for software development, and I have seen no helpful encouragement from UK or European governments over the last few decades. No word of a lie, all we got in the UK was the BBC Micro, way back in the early 1980s, and since then tech has been culturally uncool.
This cultural aspect has not gone away, if a guy is a software engineer then he isn't going to get lucky with the lasses, they will run a mile.
What gets me is that the UK or places in Europe such as those places where finance matters, could have had active policing and law enforcement of data breaches and hacking, with sensible standards for storing customer data, making Europe the best place to host your data, purely for the legal protections. But we ended up with cookie notices and anti-slavery statements.
