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- Hacker News
- thanks chatgptby antiloper
- Clear giveaway: "Honest caveats"by coreyh14444
- Being slow is sometimes a problem.
But if the needed total revenue for an investment is so absurdly large, that we need to capture 5-10% of the labour market, being slow might mean not burning in the crash.
The US drove the CCCP to bankruptcy by investing in nuclear bombs. Maybe history repeats itself.
by niemandhier - The US was able to do that because a majority of the world including Europe was determined to exclude USSR from all trade and by putting them into extreme paranoia of total destruction. EU has lots of trading partners from the West and not everything is improved by AI.
Yes an economy that's being inflated by AI can affect acquiring of certain resources like DRAM or certain silicon quotas, if you're not joining the bandwagon. However there is enough in-house tech in Europe to prop up the critical industries that do not get affected by AI.
The US also needs someone to sell their stuff for keeping the inflated prices. A majority internal market is as unhealthy for the US as the EU.
by okanat - No, but EU can train an LLM to regulate others LLMby grigio
- Or force replaceable batteries with exceptions that every LLM passes anyway.
> If a battery can do 1000 cycles and remain above 80% capacity it is exempt
by slaw - Forget regulations, would it make sense for Europe to train a frontier model of it's own? Would it be sufficiently better than fine tuning a Chinese model? Would it actually be competitive with US frontier models? Would enough people pay to use it even within Europe to pay for the training costs? Do we have enough inference capacity that enough people /could/ use it? Would being "European" allow any governments in Europe to trust it, rather than deciding that actually there needs to be a French, German, Italian, Spanish and UK sovereign AI?
I am guessing that enough of these questions can be answered with "no" that nobody really wants to invest.
For the same reason there isn't really a serious third start up competitor to OpenAI and Anthropic.
by fancyfredbot - So your ideas of having AI sovereign is to turn to Chinese models? Do you know what their intention will be and where will they go?
You don't like US models because their values don't align with yours, but then you turn to Chinese models? See how hypocrite that is?
by signatoremo - Under normal circumstances, I'd agree with most folks here, it'd be highly unlikely.
However, we're (i think officially) in an arms race.
I wouldn't want to bet against anyone in these unprecedented times (with plenty of historical parallels).
by bushido - They could, but why? US and China has poured Trillion of USD into training and any semblance of getting those money back seems like some far fetched dream. Currently there is no realistic path to profitability with these models.
What I see as usable product in the future are smaller specialized models which are able to run and be trained with fraction of resources what goes to current frontier models.
by general1465 - Why even bother creating a repo like this? Why not just link to a ChatGPT conversation?by hbcdbff
- And at least save us the pain of trying to scroll through the bs intro. Just put the 10 or whatever bullet points right there.by bomewish
- What is this whole thing about Europe being behind on AI? Do Mistral and DeepL not exist? Yes, I know DeepL is niche, but IMHO it is the best translation model out there.by acatton
- It is behind in the sense that if tomorrow the US and China place an export ban on their models all we're left with are Mistral's ones.
They are not bad, and they have made huge progress, but you're still one year behind if not more.
May matter less and less as time progresses, or it may matter more if research further speeds up.
Honestly I wish capitalism and globalization kept working as they did for decades, but since more than a decade we're reverting to inefficient protectionist steps, one after the other.
by epolanski - I've tried using Mistral for various tasks, and it is so far behind the American models that I just never bother using it despite still having lots of Mistral API credits leftover. Even their OCR and TTS products are surpassed by generic US models - I use regular Claude Sonnet for OCR because it is more accurate than Mistral OCR.
I could rant about this, I am just so disappointed at how Mistral completely gave up and pivoted into bespoke fine-tuning consulting. The terrifying thing is that they don't seem to even understand how far behind they are, as if they never tried Opus, let alone Fable / Mythos. Or they do understand and that's why they focus on consulting now.
by SyneRyder - Sure, theoretically, if it could come to an agreement, and meanwhile the cross-border cooperation of even the inter-EU countries is at an abysmal rate, and currently, even during a goddamn land war with Russia, Germany and France can't come to an agreement to build a fighter jet ensemble (together).by barrenko
- In a weird sense, the EU exemplifies what the USA would be like without a strong federal government: Dysfunctional as states compete with, undercut and stifle each other.by morkalork
- The fighter jet program was a jobs program, not dissimilar to how many US government programs are jobs programs by having different parts of it made in different states for no goo reason. Add in some nationalism and it was inevitable it would not work out.by pelorat
- This is unfortunately the problem. The level of the public debate is abysmal, most politicians push unbelivably stupid shit about immigration and other identitarian nonsense, budget gets spent to ensure cheese and wine have the proper AOC certifications on them. Honestly up to a point I even understand it, many people don't see themselves as having a meaningful identity as EU citizens and you can't force it upon them.
Asking for sensible AI policy is like asking for a base on mars.
by qsort - You mean like they've been doing since the 1950s with the the largest physics laboratory in the world (CERN)? Or more to the point, the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) of which 27/27 EU member states participate?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_High-Performance_Comp...
Even at the smaller level the ethos and ambition is clear - take EURO-3C: the Horizon Europe project aimed at delivering a pan-European sovereign infrastructure that integrates Telco, Edge, Cloud, and AI capabilities under a federated model which has 70+ Euro-participants.
https://www.medialaws.eu/the-euro-3c-initiative-a-new-dawn-f...
by piltdownman - Can Europe train a frontier AI model?
It seems unlikely at the moment. The writeup you have is quite interesting, but notably distributed compute for frontier is at least a bump in the road.
As other's have pointed out, if resources across Europe came together there could be a good amount of resources today to do so, but it is fragmented.
Project Glasswing, and most recently the blocking of Fable 5 potentially only for non-US citizens have sparked more attention in the political spheres regarding sovereignty/competitiveness of European AI.
There as also this great write-up which explains the trajectory Europe currently has when it comes to AI compute here: https://europe2031.ai/
So theoretically: yes, but there doesn't seem to be a big enough will to attempt to catch up with the trajectory of American hyper-scalers.
by ymir_e - Thanks! Will give it a read :)by smashini
- 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.by cmiles8
- 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.
by epolanski - Absolutely not, even if Europe was given all of the compute in the world. The issues are much much worse. Starting at "data privacy", continuing with the "EU AI Act" and just an overall mindset of regulation and German angst. Many structures in the EU actively prevent and fight against innovation. Oftentimes more subtle but the consequences stay the same. If you ever had to use one of the "sovereign" AI provides such as StackIT, OVH and the-like, I feel with you. It is just so bad in terms of product and performance, there is no comparison at all with Hyperscalers, and it shows. Eventually, it's a cultural and structural problem along the way and the future here looks horrible.by beernet
- Kimi was trained at cost, so were other models.
Sure some things are a hurdle, but in the end, being the first just means doing all the work.
by niemandhier - If your product can't function in a way that respects humans' right to privacy, your product is the problem, not the humans' rights.by ToucanLoucan
- Bullshit. The AI Act is not the problem, Mistral models are definitely usable and some were/are competitive.
European future looks bright compared to the political landscape the US has now
by mnewme - Are we talking about the EU or Europe?
The UK, for example, is outside the EU and arguably Europes strongest AI hub birthing DeepMind, Stability and others. Home to top universities etc.
I think compute is certainly our weakest point but it should be possible to train a frontier-ish model on Isambard-AI if you supplement it with other London based commercial compute for post-training.
by matt-p - Imo useful long-term innovation comes about during the conflict of fighting for and against the rate of technological change, and whatever proves inherently better is what's left after the dust settles. There's a point at which there's so much opposition that nothing innovative happens for too long, but uncontested innovation isn't something most people want either. If the future is uncompetitive but lagging behind the U.S and China, I'd struggle to see the problemby brailsafe