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At this point I lost all hope for Europe playing any significant role in the AI race. If that’s a good or a bad thing I don’t know, but it seems to me like that
by king_crimson 1mo ago
At this point I lost all hope for Europe playing any significant role in the AI race. If that’s a good or a bad thing I don’t know, but it seems to me like that’s the reality.
- kubb 1mo agoIt's not a race. You don't get anything for winning.
- bpodgursky 1mo agoIt's red queen. You stay alive by winning, you lose everything by losing.
- ben_w 1mo agoNot sure you get either outcome in either case. Race dynamics increases p(doom) for everyone. The non-doom scenarios include "utopia for all", and "power flows to investors, not citizens of whichever nation the winning model's corp. was registered in". Independently, "oh look all the investors went bankrupt" can happen in both "doom" and "normal technology" timelines.
- procgen 1mo agoThe only prize is control of the light cone.
- ChrisClark 1mo agoUnless you manage to build a god, and keep it under control... okay, we're all going to lose
- Palpatineli 1mo agoHow about "being able to align ASI somewhat to your values"?
- ben_w 1mo agoTrue, but that isn't EU/US/China, it's OpenAI/Anthropic/Grok/ …/DeepMind (based in UK)/… DeepSeek With a lot of Chinese nationals in American companies, and an American corporation owning DeepMind, and a lot of people very upset with all of them at the same time, this is very messy.
- BenzeneDream 1mo ago? It absolutely is a race. Whether thats a positive thing or not is debatable but every lab is definitely in a race. What prize do you win? Imagine a world where only one country has AGI/ASI. Or a world where Europe only gets access to frontier models 6 months later. Far from ideal.
- ux266478 1mo ago> What prize do you win? Imagine a world where only one country has AGI/ASI. "Winning the race" doesn't give you that in any meaningful capacity. It gives you, at the absolute most, a temporary window where that's the case. See: nuclear weapons.
- xeromal 1mo agoRussia invaded Ukraine specifically because they have nukes. Everyone is afraid to fight back.
- jr3592 1mo agoAs if time isn't money? Everything is temporary... Getting somewhere first has immense value.
- ux266478 1mo agoA reductive equation, economics isn't thermodynamics. Money is fictional and value is subjective and unstable. Within this context, being first to AGI means nothing if the second invention of it comes 2 months later and works an order of magnitude faster than what the first iteration had self-improved to at that point in time. First mover advantage isn't decisive, you have to actually be able to capitalize on it in a robust way.
- fn-mote 1mo ago> works an order of magnitude faster This is the weakest part of the argument. Absolutely no reason to believe the second inventor will be 10x faster. Does this ever happen? Even in traditional manufacturing, the second “inventor” starts behind and has to improve their own process to surpass the first.
- tedggh 1mo agoA race to the bottom.
- InsideOutSanta 1mo agoWell, you get hundreds of billions in debt, and then you get open weight models distilling your proprietary models.
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- thadt 1mo agoYeah? And here I've been a happy Transkribus customer for some time now. If there are better models or interfaces out there for analyzing historical handwriting, I'll definitely take a look.
- pbkompasz 1mo agoNot being a rat in the rat race is the real win.
- hadlock 1mo agoMuch like spaceflight, aerospace or nuclear engineering, you need to retain local talent for national defense purposes. Being 70% as good is still way better than being 100% dependent and heavily leveraged by your opponents.
- dylan604 1mo agoBeing 70% as good in nuclear engineering sounds scary AF. How would you rank Chernobyl? Better or worse than 70%?
- lavieestdure 1mo agoBeing 70% as good does not mean causing accidents. Accidents are caused by systematic operational failures and fundamental design flaws.
- dylan604 1mo agoIf your employees are only 70% as good, as skilled, as knowledgeable while not knowing it, then you can absolutely kill a reactor just like Chernobyl. The overconfidence is what allowed them to put the reactor in the state they did and not realize the implications.
- hakunin 1mo ago70%… Not great, not terrible.
- simondotau 1mo agoFar worse than 70%. Chernobyl was a catastrophically flawed reactor design. Operators ran a badly planned safety test in which operators intentionally caused a dangerous state while key protections were disabled or bypassed.
- sscaryterry 1mo agoExactly, the intelligence/competence of the engineers running the plant had no actual bearing on the incident.
- t3hTao 1mo ago[dead]
- onetwig 1mo agoHuh? Mistral 7b was pioneering in its day and IMO they have been very on top of releasing niche useful models like moderation, OCR, etc. I’m glad Mistral is working on useful solutions. OpenAI/Anthropic is like a retarded little sibling chasing “AGI” and giving up on rich media and other modalities. OpenAI/Anthropic is the worst of the mainstream AI. It goes: 1. Gemini 2. Vidu 3. Le Chat (Mistral) 4. DeepAI 5. [insert MiniMax provider]
- fn-mote 1mo agoTotally fake post. Gemini in the top?? For what?
- missedthecue 1mo agoThe largest non-US non-China model is Russian which surprised me.
- sgt 1mo agoAre you saying Russia is winning over Europe in AI already? Dang, sanctions really don't work.
- IlikeMadison 1mo agoGigaChat is russo-centric and is completely useless outside Russia itself, performs absolutely worse than Mistral once you start using English. Reminder that Russia's economy is smaller than Italy's alone. They are not winning over Europe in any single metric, let alone against the poorest country in Europe, which is not even part of NATO nor the EU, on the battlefield.
- sgt 1mo agoI've heard that before though. I don't think you can compare economies like that since Russia has "near infinite potential" in natural resources, people, etc which Italy doesn't. They can kick into a true war economy and then become significantly more of a threat. They haven't done so yet because the middle-class population likes their luxury lifestyle (for now). I highly doubt Ukraine will "win" - in fact I believe Russia is ramping up to find an excuse at some point to attack a NATO country, but in a way and during a point in time it's difficult for NATO to retaliate.
- kergonath 1mo ago> I've heard that before though. I don't think you can compare economies like that since Russia has "near infinite potential" in natural resources, people, etc which Italy doesn't. Fair enough. But most of the time, the figure is not used to say that Italy is more advanced than Russia, for whatever definition of advanced. It’s a check in the other direction: even if Russia does have advantages, in the grand scheme of things they are not that big. > They can kick into a true war economy and then become significantly more of a threat. They haven't done so yet because the middle-class population likes their luxury lifestyle (for now). They did, just in the parts of Russia that are poorer and less-connected (and less powerful politically). They leveraged their huge geographical advantage to spread the pain as much as possible in the regions that don’t matter politically. It is very difficult to see their situation and argue that they are not in a war economy. The middle class in Moscow and St Petersburg are sheltered, true, but still. > I believe Russia is ramping up to find an excuse at some point to attack a NATO country, but in a way and during a point in time it's difficult for NATO to retaliate. I don’t think that is likely. But then, of course Trump is making it more and more likely by the day as he insists on getting bogged down in Iran.
- deadbabe 1mo agoEven Africa will surpass Europe with its massive data center upstarts breaking ground.
- kolinko 1mo agoAnd US lost the significant role in chip/pc manufacturing. But if a product becomes commodity or utility (which at least for now it seems is the direction), with little lockin, it's not a big deal. I hope we (EU) don't waste money trying to train local models (which at least some people in Poland try to do), and tries to build our own chips - AI chips have different architecture than regular processor/GPU, and TSMC doesn't need to be winner in this new race. And if not this, then smaller labs, harnesses and actual application.
- barrenko 1mo agoThey've been unfortunately hugged by the "little death" of working with the EU institutions, though I wouldn't bet on them not coming back.
- podgorniy 1mo ago> hope for Europe playing any significant role in the AI race Ha. It's a large market of the LLMs consumption. So it which will affect the AI race. Just from other perspective than you assumed.
- jillesvangurp 1mo agoCommoditization is a beautiful thing. It seems Anthropic and OpenAI are really struggling to maintain much of a moat. Mistral might not be leading but it's not trailing by that much either. And of course the Chinese are doing their own thing quite successfully. The reality is that the US is betting its economy on data centers at great expense and is exposing its economy to great risk. Also while geographically a lot of the money and processing power is in the US, the US has been relying on immigration to power its universities and especially AI research has roots all over the globe. India, China, Russia, Europe, etc. AI related know how is finding its way back to all these places. So, I'm not too worried about the long term here. It will be interesting to see if Anthropic and OpenAI survive their IPOs. Seems like a risky financial bet at this point given the apparent lack of a moat. But if it works out, it will result in a lot of that IPO money being invested in data centers abroad. Including in the EU. Because data residency is a thing here and the EU is too big of a market for companies with that kind of valuation to ignore. We also produce a lot of energy infrastructure (e.g. gas and wind turbines). Those data centers will need lots of power.
- abc123abc123 1mo agoNothing to worry about for europe. Open source and open weights will enable europe to pick up the slck when the party is over. Then the US markets will possibly regret the AI-bubble.
- whazor 1mo agoMistral is (wisely) are changing their strategy. They switched to hosting open models and they are investing in hosting inference within EU. Fine tuning an open model to European values is significantly cheaper than making your own model.