I lead a European owned and operated Data/AI company, Hopsworks. We are the only competitor to Databricks/Snowflake/etc based-in and from Europe. We can still compete, as we have a deep research/industry background (ex-MySQL and KTH folks).
Crossing the chasm is harder from here. Even if you build a great product (we are best at real-time AI) - we had a paper at SIGMOD 2024 where we showed higher thoughput/lower latency by a factor of 4-40X Databricks, AWS Sagemaker, and GCP vertex - we lack the echo chamber. (Try the mental exercise where Databricks' peers acknowledge massive over-performance through a peer-reviewed paper and imagine how much noise it would generate). Still, we can replace our competitor at their largest European customer, Zalando, for real-time AI. But it's a much harder slog than it should be due to the 10X lower round sizes (due to 10X smaller VC fund sizes). European pension funds place way more money in US VC funds than in EU VC funds - that is self-defeating.
I hate that I agree, and yet, I agree. The EU has a giant single market, has a pipeline of elite tech talent from everywhere from Finland in the North on down, has long since settled on English as the lingua franca of business but has plenty of tools to solve i18n, and yet...culturally is just hostile to entrepreneurship in a way that goes beyond reasonable suspicion of fakery. what's that all about?
I don't think it's regulation, btw. Starting and running my company in the UK pre Brexit was way easier than doing it in the US. Keeping the IRS happy is no joke.
Brain drain I expect. All the people who believed in freedom and entrepreneurship have had maybe a century of incentives to leave Europe and head for the US.
Society seems to rely on a tiny pool of overly-motivated people to do most of the work. There has historically been a healthy pipeline and many good reasons to convince them to leave Europe. And apparently sufficient safeguards to stop them building too much if they stay, based on the lack of success the EU has had in tech.
Looking at the US culture, it's not hard to see entrepreneurship as a societal disease.
Let's not act like "entrepreneurship" is necessary at all to develop technology. Western governments simply have no ability to find their own destination as any attempt to get off the US big tech ramp comes with threats to destroy defense treaties, weapons contracts, and tariffs with their major ally.
Hardly anything to do with "entrepreneurship" and more about the insidious nature of US imperialism and how damaging neoliberalism is to the world.
Good on Europeans for rejecting this American blight.
> Looking at the US culture, it's not hard to see entrepreneurship as a societal disease.
It's easy if you're in some nihilistic and cynical echochamber like reddit. For everybody else, entrepreneurship is still quite celebrated and seen as a positive for society.
I think the fact that you can claim this without any apparent sarcasm means you operate in a very specific part of society most people aren't a part of.
In Australia one of the most common paths to wealth outside of owning property is literally taking up a trade as an apprentice, then after a couple of years beginning your own plumbing/electrician/brick laying/etc business.
That's still very highly celebrated. Interestingly enough, people with Mediterranean backgrounds also feel this way (there's lots of crossover here btw).
Owning your own business is one of the best things one can do in that culture. There's a story in a Taleb book about a Lebanese (I think?) man who went on to become one of the execs at Mobil or some other oil company, and his mother was still disappointed that he didn't own his own company.
Europe is obviously full of sole proprietor tradesmen, shop and restaurant owners etc. It's completely orthogonal to the apparent shortage of VC-funded startup unicorn hustle culture.
I am thoroughly perplexed by this statement. Every single person who starts their own restaurant, painting company, events planning company, etc. is an entrepreneur. The appeal of saving up enough to break free of your job and start working for yourself is so pervasive as to be almost entirely unspoken. It’s something that, being raised as an American, you simply believe is good in the same way you believe that stealing is bad.
And yet I can’t name a single entrepreneur that I know personally outside of tech.
> Every single person who starts their own restaurant, painting company, events planning company, etc. is an entrepreneur.
These are completely irrelevant to this thread, so I'm perplexed that you're perplexed. Read the thread, see that it's about differences between the US and the EU, and then realize what is meant by entrepeneur _in context_. Europe isn't very different from the US when it comes to plumbing company owners.
>Good on Europeans for rejecting this American blight.
Reject it? They pay hundreds of billions for it. Every year. For decades now.
Europe runs on American tech, using American and Chinese hardware, powered by American energy, and protected by American defense.
Surely you're confused here, because Europe didn't reject these things, they offshored them and then teased Americans about working so hard. Europe's economic situation right now is borderline catastrophic, mostly because they built a society on someone else's support in the uncannily calm times after the wall fell.
True we pay for it so we don't have tu subject our own people to the horrible working culture of the US. No maternity leave is diabolical. No money when you're sick for a month? How do you accept this
For dead-end/entry level work, the laws are not great.
Once you get off the ground though, you get most of the same benefits as Europeans, while taking home much more income. Especially in tech, the benefits and pay can be extravagant (Netflix famously had a year of maternity leave). Although you will likely work more time overall.
Keep in mind that generally social media is full of young American people. Once people get into their career, they don't spend much time on doomer social media. It's also socially taboo to not jump on the "conditions are so hard now" bandwagon.
If you can get into the top 40% in America, you will have what you need to live a pretty decent life.
Europe is great if you don't have very valuable skills, you are pretty much guaranteed at least a decent quality of life.
The US sucks if you don't have very valuable skills, there aren't many guarantees.
But if you do have valuable skills, it's very hard to make a case for living in Europe. Once you reach the top 30-40% of Americans, you're living like the top 10% of Europeans.
That's why the US has been draining EU tech workers for a few decades now. The value prop from the US is much better if you're a strong player.
But I'm also not supposed to be saying any of this, because like a good little medium 6 figure household, I'm supposed to be wearing the mask of "difficult economic times" so as to appear virtuous and sensitive to others.
Given the US has a money making culture that is very business friendly, it completely makes sense. The "American Blight" could roughly be translated as "Investor Returns".
The glaring number to me is only 5% of VC funds vs 52% in the US. That's 10x more opportunity despite roughly comparable economies. As long as that is true, it seems like it will always be impossible to get an organic startup industry working in the EU. Any startup that is any good will almost certainly end up getting a round of investment from the US and most likely move their base of operations there.
I wonder if recent US actions will start to influence this as there now appears to be more risk in sending your money to the US or founding your company there as a foreign entity than there used to be.
Not just startups or funding. Google alone has more AI compute than China and the EU combined.
There's no shortage of capital in Europe. But nobody wants to take the risk. Meanwhile in the US, people are putting 10-100x the capital at risk. So you can say what you want about it looking scary to you to invest in the US, but the people with capital to invest clearly don't see it that way.
More often when you hear VCs give interviews, they are saying the opposite: that never-ending EU regulations introduce more business risk than anything the US president could possibly do.
Laws are laws. Regulations aren't laws. Usually they are just extra hoops you have to jump through to do normal things. Paperwork, studies, government reviews, agency approvals, etc. These things slow down and encumber normal business. Some of them are important and necessary. Many are not.
I am not arguing for any law to be changed to allow someone to do things most people wouldn't want them to do. I don't think the VCs are arguing for that either. And that's not the case in the EU anyhow: laws are pretty similar on the major stuff among western countries.
I don't know why you're assuming that's my position, and I don't know why it's on me to avoid being "grouped" in with anyone. Assuming things that aren't true when you get defensive is your own personal issue, not mine.
They are exactly like the things you named. If you talk to a bunch of EU founders (not just a single loud one on X) you'll find regulations are low down on the priority list of things that make it harder in the EU.
My dad was a farmer under EU regulation and there was a stack of paper about 1 ft think to grow some barley. I don't know how that relates to AI. Another thing in Italy it's near impossible to fire people which makes people very reluctant to set up some business where cashflow for employment varies much.
I live in the UK where we seem quite good at inventing things but not that good at global profit making with a result that companies like DeepMind and ARM get bought by foreign investors.
> Another thing in Italy it's near impossible to fire people
It's just as impossible to fire people in Japan and Korea yet I'm quite sure they're doing quite a lot better at the startup per capita ratio when compared to population under 40.
Italy is also infamous in the EU for its bureaucracy, together with Germany. Look at how half of Italy's football stadiums are falling apart to a degree not seen in neighboring Spain or France.
I’m not all that convinced on the regulation part.
Ultimately it’s all about investing money to create real assets that generate cash flows. One can side step regulations to some extent whilst developing a product (nobody cares/notices until you are actually growing fast) and then deal with regulations later. Uber already showed this and the leading AI firms are following the same act - having ripped off a lot of content but nobody threw a fit until a legit asset came out of it.
Yes, let's ignore regulations that provide people with stable jobs, societies, and countries. Afterall what good is democracy when the alternative is making more money?
A lot of these are mostly well-meaning but have backfired. The only way an international business is going to consider investing in French workers, for example, is with relatively low salaries to offset the inability to fire them.
It's counterintuitive but if you allow "failing fast", you lower risk of new engagements, and this allows for more speculative bets on ideas and people.
Make it difficult to evict tenants? Expect more stringent requirements from landlords
Enact rent control? Initial rents are going up, new builds are are disincentivized.
I'm not saying these regulations are unilaterally bad - I'm saying don't be surprised that there are 2nd-order effects that are arguably just as bad, if not worse.
I would push back on a few things from what you mentioned.
> The only way an international business is going to consider investing in French workers, for example, is with relatively low salaries to offset the inability to fire them.
For European startups it’s different motivation. Lower salaries than in USA are an advantage, but job security isn’t a show stopper. First team is hired in fixed contracts, which may be converted to permanent with growth. In scaling phase you add external support, with e.c. 20% of workforce coming from outstaffing, so that you can react on the market and scale down when needed. If you are big enough to be called international business, you will not hire in one of the most expensive locations in the world (USA) unless you have a good reason. There exist other easy-to-fire tech hubs, and it’s not a big problem in Europe anyway (it’s just some more effort to execute, but even with payouts it’s probably cheaper than in US).
> Make it difficult to evict tenants? Expect more stringent requirements from landlords
In Europe there’s less homeless people. It doesn’t work like that.
>Enact rent control? Initial rents are going up, new builds are disincentivized.
It’s not rent controls that make markets inefficient. They are reaction to NIMBY regulations and disincentivized home ownership like in Germany.
Root cause is uncontrolled extraction of scarce resource (land) and the solution is actually to scale down for-profit rental market while aggressively subsidizing ownership and construction.
This is something you talk to people about that are in the western world but outside of the US (which includes me) but whenever I have the conversation people just can't grasp it.
The US, by having bad worker protections and privacy abusing tech companies, etc. have been able to pave the way for extreme amounts of innovation that just wouldn't happen anywhere else. The rest of the world then effectively has innovation subsidized since they import the finished product.
I also found most US startup opportunities to be practically enabled by shitty service provided by the incumbents, whether it is the state or the banks or the healthcare system.
Take Cost Plus Drugs, for instance. Or companies enabling faster cash transfers over the internet, like Paypal. Or healthcare insurance plans from Oscar Health or prescriptions from Truepill. Or videos made by Khan Academy, which are currently in use in many schools across the US.
Yes, let's ignore all nuance in the discussion and presume that the people saying EU has too many regulations must be saying that the only alternative is ZERO regulations.
Makes sense. You’re saying why would regulations matter when clearly they can just be ignored.
For venture ultimately it’s a soulless moneyman’s game. Really they have to pick winners, and anybody can look at the landscape and see there’s just not gonna be a Pierre Zuckerberg or a Klaus Kalanick. And if there ever is, he’ll need to raise lots of money anyway, which would come from venture.
> there’s just not gonna be a Pierre Zuckerberg or a Klaus Kalanick
Which is very much a positive. Those two aren’t a boon to humanity, they very much made everything worse at a global scale. We need fewer people emulating them, not more.
I don’t consider VC investments to be particularly beneficial to the world. This idea of “let’s use capital to make it faster for people to exploit others with the only goal of generating more capital” does more harm than good.
Venture Capital is how entrepreneurs get off the ground and are able to try out new ideas. It is of both the entrepreneur's interest and the investors' interest that the product or service being developed captures value in the market, so they can reimburse their original investments. Without Venture Capital, we are limiting business creation to people who are already wealthy, which severely limits the pool of potential creativity that the society can utilize.
We have regulations in place to make it more difficult and more risky for businesses to engage in immoral behavior, but these regulations usually appear after observing bad behavior.
The funding allocation is a reflection of different cultures really.
I’m from the UK but there’s no way there’s the same density, drive, and hunger to take risk, to the extent that you find in US. Also there’s a lot more synergy in the US vs a fragmented Europe.
I’m also from the UK and I think this is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
As a UK founder that has raised in the UK, I have seen our US competitors raise substantially more with substantially less traction, so in future I’m significantly more tempted to look across the pond for raising. It has little to do with my culture vs theirs, and all to do with where the opportunity sits.
Many of the other founders I know with the “drive and hunger” as you put it, have already made the same jump.
This seems pretty limited to tech. For example in domains like media and marketing - I mean startups in these fields, not "marketing team of a tech startup" which is tech - the amount of "drive" feels the same whether the US or the EU.
So it's purely tech. And there, that extra "drive" that leads to the US and modern VC culture seems to largely be based on a hunger for power and immense wealth, when it comes down to it. I know everyone pretends it doesn't, changing the world for the positive, blah blah. But when push comes to shove, that's the outcomes we're seeing.
There are places with the same entrepreneurial drive that are part of the EU. But look at an LP-facing deck for a VC fund in Europe, and I can't recall ever seeing an investment with a little flag of Poland.
My belief is the underlying dynamics are less about, generalizing about cultures. Like you're right that that's what US VCs say, and collective belief is truth in markets even if it is not truth in reality. The bigger factor is EU, meaning French, Dutch, German, Swiss and Italian capital, are concentrated into the hands of large, opaque family trusts, structured primarily around tax evasion first and foremost, and other feudal issues, rather than minimizing the downsides of real risk or whatever, and that feudal stuff means, why do early stage investing? Without that there's little innovation. Hence Mistral, a growth stage company that everyone is happy making the growth stage, "dot AI" and "dot EU" winner. Presumably for EU sovereign wealth to be forced to buy.
Yet the UK did produce Deepmind. Which you can look at both ways since it got gobbled up by Google. But it at least came from the UK.
I assume the article excludes the UK, I feel like UK has much more of a startup and VC scene than Europe does and I wonder if that is part of the issue : if you do want to create a startup, the London is a better place than mainland Europe. So even startups that for whatever reason won't take US funding still land outside Europe.
That's why Mistral is not focused on raising venture capital. Instead, they prioritize securing government contracts; hence their significant political lobbying efforts.
There's this sentiment in Germany that if you can't make in industry, you work for the government or - even worse - become a politician. It seems like Mistral took that to the next level; they can't compete so they do lobbying instead.
Being European, I love the idea of European AI labs. But I wish there was more competition.
That being said, as a German for example, I can't think of an AI company successfully training a competitive foundation model here. The copyright mafia would take your investor's money before you could even finish the first training run (hyperbole.)
I like the "european technology" movement not because of any nationalist ideas, but because it stimulates technological innovation and creates a new dynamic.
I've tried Mistral a few times, at first it seemed promising (though lagging) but at some point it seems like they stopped focusing on AI and shifted their focus to being a mouthpiece for EU policy and pushing for regulation. I can't really take any of their announcements seriously anymore.
A couple of weeks ago they were calling for a European AI tax to pay creatives.
58 Minute reading time. I read the first dozen pages or so and I'm not sure what the goal of this thing is, why they wrote it, who they wrote it for? Is it aimed at European governments? Or companies? Or people? Or something else?
> This playbook provides a clear, actionable framework to position Europe as that powerhouse, accelerating AI development and adoption, attracting and retaining top talent, simplifying regulation without sacrificing values, and mobilizing public and private investment to build homegrown AI infrastructure. Only with it, Europe can ensure AI is not only developed in Europe, but for Europe and on Europe’s terms.
playbook for what?
> This document is not a theoretical exercise. It is a practical playbook
Seems quite theoretical? A lot of random statistics, and all the sections start with abstract empty claims in 'not x, y' slop format "Artificial intelligence is not an abstract promise. It is a tool that fulfills its potential when embedded in the real economy."
I'd love an executive summary of this for anyone who has AI tokens to spend (I've got some other stuff to get done with what remains of my quota this week). I'm not saying this report is bad, I'm just saying it didn't do enough to convince me to read it, and it has some patterns that would make me guess it's bad.
I don't understand why European providers can't just host open-weight models developed by the Chinese, or distill Google/OpenAI/Anthropic models to produce their own models on the the cheap.
Nobody acts like you need to invent steel to have a steel mill.
Reads like asking for a EU handout. It touches on some visible issues in the single market, but most of what I've seen is not warranted. Eg. minimum spending quotas for AI work/integration/research, using European models (basically today = use Mistral), or carving residency process exceptions for AI researchers.
I feel like Europe needs to remove barriers and let people do things freely rather than stuff like "Empower AI students". Ambitious people will naturally find a way to get stuff done and you just have to allow it to happen and not get in the way. At least "EU AI talent visa" sounds like it can work by removing barriers to relocate.
> The question is no longer whether Europe can compete, ...
But it, too, do not ask myself this question any more.
Since EU seems to have already lost completely.
Even Proton's new local AI service uses Ollama, which was developed in USA and is pretty outclassed. Does HN say europe can do more than hope to catch up in five to ten years, if the race is still on then?
The paper has plenty of things, but seems to me the gist of it is that they want to secure the public procurement cash flow in lieu of venture capital? I may be reading this wrong, but all the labels and normative proposals listed point to that.
It seems every AI company eventually concludes that lobbying is required for them to operate. That suggests to me that they know they have no real moat.
I'm a fan of Mistral, but this seems to be 80% "make Europe more startup-friendly in general" rather than anything specific to AI.
Given how un-startup-driven adoption of new technologies usually happens in Europe, I don't see this playbook becoming a cornerstone of how AI adoption will pan out in Europe.
I don't really care about the content, but European software is also when you switch to the tab the energy consumption of your MacBook quadruples due to some inane animations.
META used to hire in Netherlands until it stopped and left. I wondered why and a few times I heard that it was because it was hard to be dynamic in the country with the stubborn labour laws. The anecdote confirms my own bias but there seems to be not much mention on encouraging risk taking allowing dynamic entrepreneurship in this playbook, which leads me to believe this is a non issue?
Sehr gut! I need to show it to my colleagues. Unfortunately half of them are on vacation currently and another half on sick leave. We decided to make a Teams call in August to discuss how to proceed with this.
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I don't think it's regulation, btw. Starting and running my company in the UK pre Brexit was way easier than doing it in the US. Keeping the IRS happy is no joke.
Society seems to rely on a tiny pool of overly-motivated people to do most of the work. There has historically been a healthy pipeline and many good reasons to convince them to leave Europe. And apparently sufficient safeguards to stop them building too much if they stay, based on the lack of success the EU has had in tech.
Let's not act like "entrepreneurship" is necessary at all to develop technology. Western governments simply have no ability to find their own destination as any attempt to get off the US big tech ramp comes with threats to destroy defense treaties, weapons contracts, and tariffs with their major ally.
Hardly anything to do with "entrepreneurship" and more about the insidious nature of US imperialism and how damaging neoliberalism is to the world.
Good on Europeans for rejecting this American blight.
> Looking at the US culture, it's not hard to see entrepreneurship as a societal disease.
It's easy if you're in some nihilistic and cynical echochamber like reddit. For everybody else, entrepreneurship is still quite celebrated and seen as a positive for society.
Maybe you just live in an echo chamber such as reddit where you believe entrepreneurship means making millions of dollars in the tech industry.
That's still very highly celebrated. Interestingly enough, people with Mediterranean backgrounds also feel this way (there's lots of crossover here btw).
Owning your own business is one of the best things one can do in that culture. There's a story in a Taleb book about a Lebanese (I think?) man who went on to become one of the execs at Mobil or some other oil company, and his mother was still disappointed that he didn't own his own company.
And yet I can’t name a single entrepreneur that I know personally outside of tech.
> Every single person who starts their own restaurant, painting company, events planning company, etc. is an entrepreneur.
These are completely irrelevant to this thread, so I'm perplexed that you're perplexed. Read the thread, see that it's about differences between the US and the EU, and then realize what is meant by entrepeneur _in context_. Europe isn't very different from the US when it comes to plumbing company owners.
>Good on Europeans for rejecting this American blight.
Reject it? They pay hundreds of billions for it. Every year. For decades now.
Europe runs on American tech, using American and Chinese hardware, powered by American energy, and protected by American defense.
Surely you're confused here, because Europe didn't reject these things, they offshored them and then teased Americans about working so hard. Europe's economic situation right now is borderline catastrophic, mostly because they built a society on someone else's support in the uncannily calm times after the wall fell.
Once you get off the ground though, you get most of the same benefits as Europeans, while taking home much more income. Especially in tech, the benefits and pay can be extravagant (Netflix famously had a year of maternity leave). Although you will likely work more time overall.
Keep in mind that generally social media is full of young American people. Once people get into their career, they don't spend much time on doomer social media. It's also socially taboo to not jump on the "conditions are so hard now" bandwagon.
If you can get into the top 40% in America, you will have what you need to live a pretty decent life.
The US sucks if you don't have very valuable skills, there aren't many guarantees.
But if you do have valuable skills, it's very hard to make a case for living in Europe. Once you reach the top 30-40% of Americans, you're living like the top 10% of Europeans.
That's why the US has been draining EU tech workers for a few decades now. The value prop from the US is much better if you're a strong player.
But I'm also not supposed to be saying any of this, because like a good little medium 6 figure household, I'm supposed to be wearing the mask of "difficult economic times" so as to appear virtuous and sensitive to others.
Besides, if you work for 10 years in US big tech, you can retire after that.
I wonder if recent US actions will start to influence this as there now appears to be more risk in sending your money to the US or founding your company there as a foreign entity than there used to be.
There's no shortage of capital in Europe. But nobody wants to take the risk. Meanwhile in the US, people are putting 10-100x the capital at risk. So you can say what you want about it looking scary to you to invest in the US, but the people with capital to invest clearly don't see it that way.
More often when you hear VCs give interviews, they are saying the opposite: that never-ending EU regulations introduce more business risk than anything the US president could possibly do.
> never-ending EU regulations
Does anyone ever say what these regulations are? Or are they like "red tape" / "regulations on bendy bananas" / "WMDs" / "the war on christmas"?
Because without it, they will quickly be grouped into the “I want to do things which SHOULD be forbidden” crowd, which is a pretty vocal one.
I am not arguing for any law to be changed to allow someone to do things most people wouldn't want them to do. I don't think the VCs are arguing for that either. And that's not the case in the EU anyhow: laws are pretty similar on the major stuff among western countries.
I don't know why you're assuming that's my position, and I don't know why it's on me to avoid being "grouped" in with anyone. Assuming things that aren't true when you get defensive is your own personal issue, not mine.
I live in the UK where we seem quite good at inventing things but not that good at global profit making with a result that companies like DeepMind and ARM get bought by foreign investors.
> Another thing in Italy it's near impossible to fire people
It's just as impossible to fire people in Japan and Korea yet I'm quite sure they're doing quite a lot better at the startup per capita ratio when compared to population under 40.
Italy is also infamous in the EU for its bureaucracy, together with Germany. Look at how half of Italy's football stadiums are falling apart to a degree not seen in neighboring Spain or France.
Farming is unrelated to tech. I believe your dad.
Ultimately it’s all about investing money to create real assets that generate cash flows. One can side step regulations to some extent whilst developing a product (nobody cares/notices until you are actually growing fast) and then deal with regulations later. Uber already showed this and the leading AI firms are following the same act - having ripped off a lot of content but nobody threw a fit until a legit asset came out of it.
It's counterintuitive but if you allow "failing fast", you lower risk of new engagements, and this allows for more speculative bets on ideas and people.
Make it difficult to evict tenants? Expect more stringent requirements from landlords
Enact rent control? Initial rents are going up, new builds are are disincentivized.
Strong worker protection? Expect fewer highly paid roles (wage compression)
I'm not saying these regulations are unilaterally bad - I'm saying don't be surprised that there are 2nd-order effects that are arguably just as bad, if not worse.
> The only way an international business is going to consider investing in French workers, for example, is with relatively low salaries to offset the inability to fire them.
> Strong worker protection? Expect fewer highly paid roles (wage compression)
For European startups it’s different motivation. Lower salaries than in USA are an advantage, but job security isn’t a show stopper. First team is hired in fixed contracts, which may be converted to permanent with growth. In scaling phase you add external support, with e.c. 20% of workforce coming from outstaffing, so that you can react on the market and scale down when needed. If you are big enough to be called international business, you will not hire in one of the most expensive locations in the world (USA) unless you have a good reason. There exist other easy-to-fire tech hubs, and it’s not a big problem in Europe anyway (it’s just some more effort to execute, but even with payouts it’s probably cheaper than in US).
> Make it difficult to evict tenants? Expect more stringent requirements from landlords
In Europe there’s less homeless people. It doesn’t work like that.
>Enact rent control? Initial rents are going up, new builds are disincentivized.
It’s not rent controls that make markets inefficient. They are reaction to NIMBY regulations and disincentivized home ownership like in Germany. Root cause is uncontrolled extraction of scarce resource (land) and the solution is actually to scale down for-profit rental market while aggressively subsidizing ownership and construction.
The US, by having bad worker protections and privacy abusing tech companies, etc. have been able to pave the way for extreme amounts of innovation that just wouldn't happen anywhere else. The rest of the world then effectively has innovation subsidized since they import the finished product.
Take Cost Plus Drugs, for instance. Or companies enabling faster cash transfers over the internet, like Paypal. Or healthcare insurance plans from Oscar Health or prescriptions from Truepill. Or videos made by Khan Academy, which are currently in use in many schools across the US.
The EU has taken it to another level.
For venture ultimately it’s a soulless moneyman’s game. Really they have to pick winners, and anybody can look at the landscape and see there’s just not gonna be a Pierre Zuckerberg or a Klaus Kalanick. And if there ever is, he’ll need to raise lots of money anyway, which would come from venture.
> there’s just not gonna be a Pierre Zuckerberg or a Klaus Kalanick
Which is very much a positive. Those two aren’t a boon to humanity, they very much made everything worse at a global scale. We need fewer people emulating them, not more.
We have regulations in place to make it more difficult and more risky for businesses to engage in immoral behavior, but these regulations usually appear after observing bad behavior.
I’m from the UK but there’s no way there’s the same density, drive, and hunger to take risk, to the extent that you find in US. Also there’s a lot more synergy in the US vs a fragmented Europe.
As a UK founder that has raised in the UK, I have seen our US competitors raise substantially more with substantially less traction, so in future I’m significantly more tempted to look across the pond for raising. It has little to do with my culture vs theirs, and all to do with where the opportunity sits.
Many of the other founders I know with the “drive and hunger” as you put it, have already made the same jump.
So it's purely tech. And there, that extra "drive" that leads to the US and modern VC culture seems to largely be based on a hunger for power and immense wealth, when it comes down to it. I know everyone pretends it doesn't, changing the world for the positive, blah blah. But when push comes to shove, that's the outcomes we're seeing.
My belief is the underlying dynamics are less about, generalizing about cultures. Like you're right that that's what US VCs say, and collective belief is truth in markets even if it is not truth in reality. The bigger factor is EU, meaning French, Dutch, German, Swiss and Italian capital, are concentrated into the hands of large, opaque family trusts, structured primarily around tax evasion first and foremost, and other feudal issues, rather than minimizing the downsides of real risk or whatever, and that feudal stuff means, why do early stage investing? Without that there's little innovation. Hence Mistral, a growth stage company that everyone is happy making the growth stage, "dot AI" and "dot EU" winner. Presumably for EU sovereign wealth to be forced to buy.
I assume the article excludes the UK, I feel like UK has much more of a startup and VC scene than Europe does and I wonder if that is part of the issue : if you do want to create a startup, the London is a better place than mainland Europe. So even startups that for whatever reason won't take US funding still land outside Europe.
Being European, I love the idea of European AI labs. But I wish there was more competition.
That being said, as a German for example, I can't think of an AI company successfully training a competitive foundation model here. The copyright mafia would take your investor's money before you could even finish the first training run (hyperbole.)
A couple of weeks ago they were calling for a European AI tax to pay creatives.
> This playbook provides a clear, actionable framework to position Europe as that powerhouse, accelerating AI development and adoption, attracting and retaining top talent, simplifying regulation without sacrificing values, and mobilizing public and private investment to build homegrown AI infrastructure. Only with it, Europe can ensure AI is not only developed in Europe, but for Europe and on Europe’s terms.
playbook for what?
> This document is not a theoretical exercise. It is a practical playbook
Seems quite theoretical? A lot of random statistics, and all the sections start with abstract empty claims in 'not x, y' slop format "Artificial intelligence is not an abstract promise. It is a tool that fulfills its potential when embedded in the real economy."
I'd love an executive summary of this for anyone who has AI tokens to spend (I've got some other stuff to get done with what remains of my quota this week). I'm not saying this report is bad, I'm just saying it didn't do enough to convince me to read it, and it has some patterns that would make me guess it's bad.
Nobody acts like you need to invent steel to have a steel mill.
> The question is no longer whether Europe can compete
What a nice tagline lol. You really can read it both ways.
> The question is no longer whether Europe can compete, ...
But it, too, do not ask myself this question any more. Since EU seems to have already lost completely.
Even Proton's new local AI service uses Ollama, which was developed in USA and is pretty outclassed. Does HN say europe can do more than hope to catch up in five to ten years, if the race is still on then?
> Tell HN: docker pull fails in spain due to football cloudflare block
next to it on the front page
Given how un-startup-driven adoption of new technologies usually happens in Europe, I don't see this playbook becoming a cornerstone of how AI adoption will pan out in Europe.
Europe can be a top player in AI —- but there is a cost.
But messagebird is another example.
Amodei (love of god) Altman (alternative to man?) Arthur Mensch fighting from the ethical side