So while I do understand the need for regulations, they shouldn't regulate themselves into irrelevance. I don't think there's an easy solution to this.
Also he constantly complains about regulations etc but some striking things come out of it from time to time. For example he complains that its hard to get access to the EU's supercomputer and compares this to US where you can just buy tens of thousands of GPUs from Nvidia and not go through the EUs bureaucracy and never occurs to him that you can do the same in EU and the the EU funded supercomputer is just an extra.
Its just so weird, the mentality is very different. Maybe it works when you are working on a niche and it is a good way of making a living or even getting rich but that's not how you build empires.
The regulations are just a meme at this point, no one seems to know what regulation stopped them from doing the thing they will do. IMHO the reality is that you can just built the thing in USA and access EU markets from there and there's no need for replication in EU, therefore EU has plenty of startups but very few scale ups and unicorns and that's not going to change unless EU closes its markets to USA.
Unless something changes, that's going to continue :(
According to Jensen Huang, "the AI race" will be determined primarily by the price of electricity.[0]
Until very recently the EU stated that being carbon neutral by 2050 was of overriding importance[1].
Which is it?
[0] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell... [1] https://climate.ec.europa.eu/eu-action/climate-strategies-ta...
I'm ok with that. Not every continent/country/economic bloc has to have the same goals. Competing with the US or China in the 'AI race' is a race you're probably going to lose anyway. And it's going to make fuck all difference to the vast majority of the population anyway. Healthcare, education, life/work balance. All much more important and don't require competing in the 'AI race'. The EU has made some missteps with its tech regs but it's worth it to be able to download or delete my data from any service and that's something Americans are also benefiting from as most companies didn't bother geo-locking it.
You could argue economic success has a knock on effect on everything else in a country and it does to some extent. But, while many European countries have their problems socially and politically over the last decade none of them have come anywhere close to the train wreck that is US.
More seriously: what is the benefit for the citizens of Europe to chase trends? AI is shaping up to be a bubble. Even if "market remains irrational longer than you stay solvent", what is the purpose? Clean air, clean water, all that has value. Line going up, what does it give me?
In general, I don't understand the need to colocate data centers with the companies programming them - I'm sure there are many jurisdictions other than the US or EU that could spin up cheaper power.
I’m sure like with everything “green” they can get around having to use cheaper, dirty energy by buying enough indulgences^w carbon offsets.
I think 'tech' as a category doesnt make much sense any more. It's like saying 'road-based business'. Most companies are 'tech' companies.
Ignoring the technical element, what are US megacorps that account for all the GDP growth of the last while?
Mostly ad market monopolies, then mostly massive-scale IP theft, etc.
I think the EU is 'behind' the US only in it's inability to be well-positioned to build massive rent-seeking megacorps. I dont see where-else this gap is supposed to be.
What, on 'tech' should the EU be doing differently? Just allowing megacorps to add 30% to every transaction?
If this US tech bubble bursts, it's not clear that the EU won't be better positioned to pick up the pieces.
Giving money to random tech schmoocks and seeing the valuation of their thing gettign to 1B, then lobbying for laws to make it monopoly. This kind of thing.
That and selling icecream flavor preferences of 1B people to guess who is more susceptible to brainwashing, so you friends can get reelected.
All very nice technology, including the one which destroys entire solar system to make a sacrifice big enough to summon Cthulhu.
Good point. I think that the EU has an opportunity to really grow here by focusing on intellectual property enforcement, patents, copyright, and generally more strict enforcement on making sure returns for ideas go to the first person to think of them. The EU already has a pretty strong governance lead and should double down on where its strengths lie.
Buddy, EU didn’t even sign up for the race
What I'm more worried about is that they'll drag us down into another financial crash like in 2007 when the AI bubble bursts and investors get pissed that they've spent trillions on hot air.
I don't mean to be a dick but I'm getting a bit tired of all this constant survival of the fittest mentality and the idea that they have the best country in the world when in fact it is pretty awful if you're not rich (especially when in poor health). There's a lot of things we do a lot better in Europe and I'm glad to live here. Especially the last year. I don't want Europe to become more like the US.
I wonder what harm companies are even claiming. But honestly makes perfect sense that Germany's current conservative government is in favor of it. Giant GDP boosts are always just one deregulation away, hm?
Honestly, reducing the complexity of incorporating and paying taxes in Germany would quickly improve the dire situation of startups here. It's so bad right now that a tax advisor straight up told me to move to a less business-hostile country.
When they say less bureaucracy / deregulation, they just talk about tax cuts, less consumer protections and at worst artificially boosting large companies that are not innovating.
What is desperately needed is making the system less cumbersome and convoluted
I believe german citizens are actually against it. I may be wrong, but this is my personal observations. Source: I have tried to incorporate in Germany and I have incorporated in Poland.
2014 83,270
2015 85,800
2016 93,570
2017 84,340
2018 80,020
2019 87,600
2020 68,990
2021 61,520
2022 75,610
2023 80,280
Yup, definitely looks like no Europeans have ever considered moving to the US...
In a game of cat and mouse, the cat only has to win once.
In other words, the Commission can propose laws as many times as they want, and if they pass even once, the Parliament has no power to repeal it.
I'm not sure why you are singling out the EU Chat Control, when all the US "tech" sector have been playing this attrition game for 40+ years already...
It is indeed an attrition game, and the dominance of the adtech surveillance capitalism is the proof that we are already on the loosing side.
Fully anonymized health data I can somehow understand, but what kind of AI needs to be trained with "a person's religious or political beliefs [or] ethnicity", anonymized or not?
It's a category thing. There is personal data and then there is sensitive personal data, which is the enumerated list you quoted.
Snarky non-answer reply is of course -- the kind of ШІ that makes autistic roman salutes and accelerates from 0 to 1933.
Propaganda AI. The EU openly declared that it will create a ministry of truth. Officially called 'fighting disinformation' of course.
Does anyone seriously expect EU legislation will protect people from the obvious: training AI on chat messages and then using violence (ie. police action) just based on online messages?
Oh right.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/policing-speech-online-germany-...
I don't. I was just letting people know the title here was different than the source.
You need the big paradigm shifts that come from an innovation economy; for that, capital must flow easily, risk-taking (both companies and individuals) be rewarded not punished, and a stable job is kind of a bad thing (people get too comfortable)..
Meanwhile in more mature sectors, job security (so people can have mortgages and families) and market stability should be fostered and corporate overreach & power be checked.
Advanced economies are a mix of sectors which need almost opposite policy.
The problem is it all gets lumped under “technology”.
Brussels knifes privacy to feed the AI boom
That's inflammatory, but the current OP is inaccurate.
Like nobody requested that encrypted chats stop being encrypted or that X becomes a censorship target of EU comissars
With chat control yes, that was totally evil. But I consider GDPR and DSA/DMA forces of good.
The idea that there's no mandate for these things is not true.
This whole thing is obviously biased, because of money.
- I have been at a lot of public debates/consultations in Brussels on the GDPR as early as 2012. I have seen first EU people there screaming at US/BigTech lobby groups trying to influence the debate in their favor.
- When we started to understand what the regulation would look like everybody started to panic about what it would cost to comply in the public and private sector. Everybody started to appoint a Chief Data Office or Chief Data Protection Officer. Consultancy firms were hired everywhere.
- At the same time "The Cloud" was starting to creep up in those organizations, first as what we were calling "shadow IT". But the decisions maker didn't wanted to hear about "The Cloud" or loosing control of their infrastructure.
- After usually a year of study on the GDPR issue the decision makers were told that:
1/ Our infrastructure and software stack will need deep work to comply and it is gonna cost a fortune.
2/ The business is asking for agility and is already using the cloud.
3/ Look Google, AWS and Azure have a "GDPR compliant" certificate from EY (the same firm who is usually hired for compliance study and work).
So GDPR pushed everybody to hyperscalers ironically, because Big Tech is playing chess and know how decisions are made and how to work the system.
Also I have never seen a big company centering or even using a Hertzner, OVH or Scaleway.
What is probably going on is Big Tech went back to the Commission and explained the new legislation they have to pass.
And my guess is it is not gonna help any EU based AI company stay competitive or get any significant market share.
The EU will give them pennies to compete with OpenAI and Google and tell them that Europeans are smarter than Americans so David should be able to beat Goliath. Also the EU AI models have to be trained on renewable energy or whatever.
Washington is rotten but Brussels is about the same (or worst).
Seeing as the Americans firms have in fact rolled out their systems, it's unlikely to be a legal problem withe GDPR. Maybe copyright is a problem.That would have been a solved problem if that regulation requiring people to list their training data had been applied fully.
This won't make any difference for AI and will reduce EU cohesion, as a belief in privacy is a shared European value.
go outside and you will see people share almost nothing in common. It's ridiculous to pretend all people in europe agree on this matter, but nobody outside europe doing it.
When you don't have something most people accept not having it and it becomes normal not to have it, and I think that's the case with privacy in the US and outside the EU in general.
Which let's be honest has not achieved its intended target. Google/Apple/etc can easily afford to break GDPR and get caught up in fines while as a small business owner it was a huge and complicated liability.
ofc politico will frame this as a negative, it seems their only mission is to make moloch grow.
1) Maybe we (EU citizens) are just way less interested in hustle culture compared to other regions. We can keep complaining about regulation and the difficulty of incorporating, but these feel like excuses. Estonia and Portugal come to mind as places where incorporating is practical but not a game-changer. Let's face it: we're just not as interested in launching stuff? We have cushy jobs, with lots of benefits, and launching a business is less required to lead a good life (i.e. we have less inequality ti push against).
2) I've started a company in Belgium of all places. Having worked in Germany for a long time: hey German buddies, it's not the difficulty of starting a business. It's much better over there. Also: deregulating the labor market more would place the majority of us at the mercy of companies a la USA. No, thanks.
3) We're not behind on tech because of the GDPR. Many things in this omnibus are just plain stupid. We should stimulate deeper tech, fundamental research, supporting all the open-source developers we have, and perhaps invest in European structural alternatives. Promote AI? Give me a break.
4) I'm a certified GDPR whatever (2 online courses). It's really not that much of a problem. If you know what data you're collecting and why, your Privacy Policy writes itself. Otherwise you use one of the services that does it for you.
5) Do we have a problem with tech salaries more than a generalised issue with rampant inflation? Because I've never had a single colleague or acquaintance move to the US because of a better salary. Not a single one. On the other hand we're in a parenting group that's full of people that came here to start a family due to the benefits we have. Improving things overall would fight any brain drain more than stimulating tech unicorns.
6) Speaking of which… I'd like to find again the study on the economic tissue of countries. It showed that it's SMEs that employ the most people and pay the bulk of the taxes. Good, decent, boring businesses. We could do less with the nonsensical fantasy of the startup unicorn as a paradigm of entrepreneurship. Okay, I'm sore from having my equity stolen at the last gig, but my point stands. Our parents and grandparents just went to business if they had to. Heck, with the current lack of jobs, many of us will do the same. Let's not pretend that we're missing a startup scene. Berlin was a great place for startups and I can't name a single of the places I've worked that is consequential to anything. Maybe Delivery Hero? But not even that one, they barely made a profit at the time.
Honestly, let's stop whining so much and get yet another sector given the neoliberal deregulation treatment. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but posts complaining about EU regulations at this point feel like karma farming.