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The “EU bad” line gets rolled out so often on HN it has become its own truth. “Everyone knows” that the EU tech industry is getting strangled by its technocrati

The “EU bad” line gets rolled out so often on HN it has become its own truth. “Everyone knows” that the EU tech industry is getting strangled by its technocratic regulators and that’s why the EU fails at tech har har look at these idiots. Etc.

carom 3y ago
Where are their datacenter scale computing companies? How many decades did it take for that to arrive there? It will be the same story with AI. European developer brain drain will continue with the brightest minds coming to America.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >European developer brain drain will continue with the brightest minds coming to America. No need to deal with all the US emigration issues and challenges. US big-tech already have offices in Europe where European devs, scientists and researchers contribute to the prosperity of the US tech sector because they get paid more than at EU companies, while still getting to enjoy the benefits of living in Europe vs the US.
  - YetAnotherNick 3y ago
    Paying 1/3rd for the same cost of living.
    - jdthedisciple 3y ago
      Haha, sad but seems true on the face of it?
    - hnlmorg 3y ago
      I’ve hired and worked in both California and Europe. The cost of living is definitely not the same.
      - YetAnotherNick 3y ago
        What's your point? There are places in California more expensive than most of Europe, and there are places in Europe which is more expensive than most of California. What I said was that if you take two cities which have same cost of living, the salary is like 2-3x higher in US.
        hnlmorg 3y ago
        I thought my point was pretty clear: there isn’t two cities with the same cost of living AND where the US still pays 2-3x higher in the US. Every time this conversation comes up on HN, the only examples people can cite is when remote working is taken into account. Which isn’t a fair comparison at all.
- hnlmorg 3y ago
  > Where are their datacenter scale computing companies There are loads. OVH and BT for example. Both of which predate AWS and GCP. > How many decades did it take for that to arrive there? Less time than the US. We also have, in general, faster internet at cheaper prices and better rural connectivity too. To be clear, I’m not suggesting Europe is better than the US. Just stating that this “innovation could only happen in the US” meme is bullshit. > It will be the same story with AI. I literally just said I work for an AI tech company in Europe. And my company is hardly an isolated case. > European developer brain drain will continue with the brightest minds coming to America. You do realise that London, Berlin and other European tech hubs have their fair share of talented engineers who have moved to that country for work too? America might have Silicon Valley but it’s hardly the only tech hub in the world.
  - dlkf 3y ago
    > OVH and BT for example. Both of which predate AWS and GCP. How is this not an own goal? These companies had a head start and they still lost. Not by a little, but by such a staggering margin that AWS does two OOMs more revenue. > I literally just said I work for an AI tech company in Europe. The argument is not ”there are no AI companies in Europe.” The argument is ”there are no competitive AI companies in Europe.” The only one I can think of is DeepMind, and they are A) English (no longer EU) and B) were acquired by Google ten years ago. What are these European tech companies that are competitive with Nvidia, OpenAI, Google, etc? I’d like to learn more. > You do realise that London, Berlin and other European tech hubs have their fair share of talented engineers who have moved to that country for work too? A lot of them work for subsidiaries of American companies.
    - hnlmorg 3y ago
      > How is this not an own goal? These companies had a head start and they still lost. They’re hugely successful corporations. Saying they’ve “lost” is a tad ridiculous. Plus monopolies are bad for innovation so you could argue that Europe has a healthier ecosystem because it is tougher on monopolies than America. > The argument is not ”there are no AI companies in Europe.” The argument is ”there are no competitive AI companies in Europe.” You phrase that like it was a quote but in fact it wasn’t. The point being argued was that AI start ups couldn’t exist and I demonstrated they could. Europe is also a hotspot of AI research: https://odsc.medium.com/top-ten-european-ai-research-labs-for-2022-9c19ea60d3cd https://odsc.medium.com/top-ten-european-ai-research-labs-fo... > The only one I can think of is DeepMind, and they are A) English (no longer EU) and B) were acquired by Google ten years ago. England was in the EU 10 years ago, EU legislations were carried over to English law after “Brexit” and the fact that they were good enough to be bought by Google also demonstrates that European companies can be seen as a threat. > A lot of them work for subsidiaries of American companies. And a lot of them don’t. I had my worked for a single American subsidiary in my 20 years of experience in Europe. Same is true for a lot of my friends too. I really do get fed up with how some Americans believe it’s impossible that any other country could be successful.
- zirgs 3y ago
  Not everyone wants to uproot their life and leave their friends and family behind.
- fxtentacle 3y ago
  European LLM beating OpenAI davinci at NLP: https://www.aleph-alpha.com/luminous-performance-benchmarks https://www.aleph-alpha.com/luminous-performance-benchmarks It'll probably be "good enough" for most industry usecases ;) And you can run it offline and on-prem, which is a big deal to the many companies who DO NOT want their internal data leaking to OpenAI. And the Carrefour AI stuff is hosted on OVH cloud (in France), I believe: https://www.carrefour.com/en/news/artificial-intelligence-optimise-carrefours-supply-chain https://www.carrefour.com/en/news/artificial-intelligence-op... OVH has roughly 15% of the revenue that Google Cloud makes in Europe. So I'd put them at a similar size to Oracle Cloud, but clearly larger than DigitalOcean.
l5870uoo9y 3y ago
I haven't spoken to a single technical person in Europe who doesn't despise the GDPR. It is only praised by the Eurocrats themselves or the whole pack of NGOs/think tanks who lives off EU funding. As a guy with a startup I naturally fear this will be as counterproductive as GDPR or the decades of lawsuits against various foreign tech corporations. The fundamental problem is however with the political class.
- sensanaty 3y ago
  > I haven't spoken to a single technical person in Europe who doesn't despise the GDPR Then I suspect you haven't spoken to anyone technical. Every single person in my company on the dev team (myself included) is extremely pro GDPR, not the least because it provides us safety from leeches that would try to impose some horrid user-violating tracking in the app we make. The greedy suit wants us to track every millimeter of the user's mouse on the page? Nope, thanks, better luck next time! > As a guy with a startup... If your startup can't exist without hoovering infinite user data in perpetuity, then your startup shouldn't exist.
  - snordgren 3y ago
    The problem is that many European startups don't exist because potential founders don't want to have to deal with GDPR when they could focus on building a good product first. And yes, tracking what users focus on is very relevant to building a good product. But that kind of entrepreneurial mindset is largely absent in Europe - my guess is most Europeans with such a mindset eventually go to America, whether they were born in 1850 or 1985.
    - hnlmorg 3y ago
      There are no shortage of European startups and GDPR is really doesn’t prohibit a startup…unless your business model is trading personal data. And if it is, then you deserve to be regulated.
      - astura 3y ago

carom 3y ago

Where are their datacenter scale computing companies? How many decades did it take for that to arrive there? It will be the same story with AI. European developer brain drain will continue with the brightest minds coming to America.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>European developer brain drain will continue with the brightest minds coming to America. No need to deal with all the US emigration issues and challenges. US big-tech already have offices in Europe where European devs, scientists and researchers contribute to the prosperity of the US tech sector because they get paid more than at EU companies, while still getting to enjoy the benefits of living in Europe vs the US.
- YetAnotherNick 3y ago
  Paying 1/3rd for the same cost of living.
  - jdthedisciple 3y ago
    Haha, sad but seems true on the face of it?
  - hnlmorg 3y ago
    I’ve hired and worked in both California and Europe. The cost of living is definitely not the same.
    - YetAnotherNick 3y ago
      What's your point? There are places in California more expensive than most of Europe, and there are places in Europe which is more expensive than most of California. What I said was that if you take two cities which have same cost of living, the salary is like 2-3x higher in US.
      - hnlmorg 3y ago
        I thought my point was pretty clear: there isn’t two cities with the same cost of living AND where the US still pays 2-3x higher in the US. Every time this conversation comes up on HN, the only examples people can cite is when remote working is taken into account. Which isn’t a fair comparison at all.
hnlmorg 3y ago
> Where are their datacenter scale computing companies There are loads. OVH and BT for example. Both of which predate AWS and GCP. > How many decades did it take for that to arrive there? Less time than the US. We also have, in general, faster internet at cheaper prices and better rural connectivity too. To be clear, I’m not suggesting Europe is better than the US. Just stating that this “innovation could only happen in the US” meme is bullshit. > It will be the same story with AI. I literally just said I work for an AI tech company in Europe. And my company is hardly an isolated case. > European developer brain drain will continue with the brightest minds coming to America. You do realise that London, Berlin and other European tech hubs have their fair share of talented engineers who have moved to that country for work too? America might have Silicon Valley but it’s hardly the only tech hub in the world.
- dlkf 3y ago
  > OVH and BT for example. Both of which predate AWS and GCP. How is this not an own goal? These companies had a head start and they still lost. Not by a little, but by such a staggering margin that AWS does two OOMs more revenue. > I literally just said I work for an AI tech company in Europe. The argument is not ”there are no AI companies in Europe.” The argument is ”there are no competitive AI companies in Europe.” The only one I can think of is DeepMind, and they are A) English (no longer EU) and B) were acquired by Google ten years ago. What are these European tech companies that are competitive with Nvidia, OpenAI, Google, etc? I’d like to learn more. > You do realise that London, Berlin and other European tech hubs have their fair share of talented engineers who have moved to that country for work too? A lot of them work for subsidiaries of American companies.
  - hnlmorg 3y ago
    > How is this not an own goal? These companies had a head start and they still lost. They’re hugely successful corporations. Saying they’ve “lost” is a tad ridiculous. Plus monopolies are bad for innovation so you could argue that Europe has a healthier ecosystem because it is tougher on monopolies than America. > The argument is not ”there are no AI companies in Europe.” The argument is ”there are no competitive AI companies in Europe.” You phrase that like it was a quote but in fact it wasn’t. The point being argued was that AI start ups couldn’t exist and I demonstrated they could. Europe is also a hotspot of AI research: https://odsc.medium.com/top-ten-european-ai-research-labs-for-2022-9c19ea60d3cd https://odsc.medium.com/top-ten-european-ai-research-labs-fo... > The only one I can think of is DeepMind, and they are A) English (no longer EU) and B) were acquired by Google ten years ago. England was in the EU 10 years ago, EU legislations were carried over to English law after “Brexit” and the fact that they were good enough to be bought by Google also demonstrates that European companies can be seen as a threat. > A lot of them work for subsidiaries of American companies. And a lot of them don’t. I had my worked for a single American subsidiary in my 20 years of experience in Europe. Same is true for a lot of my friends too. I really do get fed up with how some Americans believe it’s impossible that any other country could be successful.
zirgs 3y ago
Not everyone wants to uproot their life and leave their friends and family behind.
fxtentacle 3y ago
European LLM beating OpenAI davinci at NLP: https://www.aleph-alpha.com/luminous-performance-benchmarks https://www.aleph-alpha.com/luminous-performance-benchmarks It'll probably be "good enough" for most industry usecases ;) And you can run it offline and on-prem, which is a big deal to the many companies who DO NOT want their internal data leaking to OpenAI. And the Carrefour AI stuff is hosted on OVH cloud (in France), I believe: https://www.carrefour.com/en/news/artificial-intelligence-optimise-carrefours-supply-chain https://www.carrefour.com/en/news/artificial-intelligence-op... OVH has roughly 15% of the revenue that Google Cloud makes in Europe. So I'd put them at a similar size to Oracle Cloud, but clearly larger than DigitalOcean.

l5870uoo9y 3y ago

I haven't spoken to a single technical person in Europe who doesn't despise the GDPR. It is only praised by the Eurocrats themselves or the whole pack of NGOs/think tanks who lives off EU funding. As a guy with a startup I naturally fear this will be as counterproductive as GDPR or the decades of lawsuits against various foreign tech corporations. The fundamental problem is however with the political class.

sensanaty 3y ago
> I haven't spoken to a single technical person in Europe who doesn't despise the GDPR Then I suspect you haven't spoken to anyone technical. Every single person in my company on the dev team (myself included) is extremely pro GDPR, not the least because it provides us safety from leeches that would try to impose some horrid user-violating tracking in the app we make. The greedy suit wants us to track every millimeter of the user's mouse on the page? Nope, thanks, better luck next time! > As a guy with a startup... If your startup can't exist without hoovering infinite user data in perpetuity, then your startup shouldn't exist.
- snordgren 3y ago
  The problem is that many European startups don't exist because potential founders don't want to have to deal with GDPR when they could focus on building a good product first. And yes, tracking what users focus on is very relevant to building a good product. But that kind of entrepreneurial mindset is largely absent in Europe - my guess is most Europeans with such a mindset eventually go to America, whether they were born in 1850 or 1985.
  - hnlmorg 3y ago
    There are no shortage of European startups and GDPR is really doesn’t prohibit a startup…unless your business model is trading personal data. And if it is, then you deserve to be regulated.
    - astura 3y ago