As you said, in spirit. In fact the EU’s AI Act is not really human rights legislation. (It exempts military and national-security uses.) Where it comes close, e.g. in seeking to ban facial recognition or social scoring, it does so clumsily.
So in practice, the EU has passed a series of laws that essentially make AI a monopoly of military and intelligence-community interests while forcing its consumers to use foreign products. Not exactly a win.
Innovative methods to destroy human life are "stifled" by measures intended to preserve human life. What to you mean by "progress" -- the betterment of the human condition, or the enrichment of the few and powerful?
The EU can and should reform many parts of its sclerotic laws and bureaucracies. Whether it can do so before it becomes a subservient puppet state which serves as a battleground for competing powers remains to be seen.
Protect human rights as defined by EU legislature, obviously. And privacy in public places, for example, doesn't seem to be an undebatable human right.
Heck, I hate street views disfigured by huge privacy blobs.
That's an unfounded assertion. Of course, politicians will claim this to be the case. I don't see how patronising citizens protects their human rights, though.
Perhaps it merely says that certain good positive things stifle other good, positive things?
Having 24 languages is a good, positive thing for the EU's cultural distinctiveness, respect for citizens' heritage, and the fairness of the nexus of power not excluding speakers of any country's language.
And yet it's a major barrier to cross-border trade, military cooperation, popular support of closer political ties, and the prospects of any EU companies growing large enough to counterbalance the amazons and facebooks of the world.
A ban on cracking eggs serves the interests of eggs, while stifling the omelette industry.
Feels like a reaaaaal roll of the dice
Claiming that GDPR and the EU AI Act "protect human rights" is very, very far-fetched. How does the training of, say, Claude or GPT-X models, hurt human rights?
europe is huxley nightmarish utopia worst parts without any of the bright ones.
And, btw, the bang per buck that I got from OVH was better than EC2.
Why don't you ask yourself: how come those brilliant European minds couldn't find a job that pays well enough at home? Why could they in the US? There are many more Chinese and Indian, and other internationals working for US companies, outnumbering Europeans. It's not like Europe was intentionally targeted by US companies.
Real GDP has grown 84% in the US since 2000 [0]. EU grown 40-45% in the same span. The two regions were basically had the same economic output in 2000. Europe has been left behind economically.
Living in Europe is nice (I love Europe by the way), but the question is why EU can't compete with the US and increasingly China. Sooner or later that'd affect your living standard as well. Look at how much China has caught up with the West in terms of quality of life.
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.
European future looks bright compared to the political landscape the US has now
State regs often fail to grapple with the future, and at best slow it down and at worst smother it.
Sure some things are a hurdle, but in the end, being the first just means doing all the work.
AI Act regulates high risk AI systems and banns AI systems like social scoring. Most of the AI applications are not regulated.
Did you read the GDPR and follow court rulings regarding AI training. OLG Köln saw no violation in Meta‘s training of user data in Insta and FB.
It is obvious that you don’t know what you are taking about.
I’am tired of unfounded EU bashing. The guardrails in place are not hindering
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...
I think that is the way forward: work with whoever has common interests and is willing to work together.
I think the point is that the EU does not necessarily make cooperation between governments any easier.
Asking for sensible AI policy is like asking for a base on mars.
I sometimes wonder if the citizens of the United States (of America) even comprehend that the EU is not itself a sovereign nation (unlike the states in say, the USA, or Australia) and is just a union of sovereign polities.
Nobody in the EU is an EU Citizen unless they are a citizen of one of the member states.
this has nothing to the other good idea which is to start building AI
someone explain this to me please
Second question: you think the USA has a strong federal government?
I mean that is actually an open question even in non-Trump years, not least when one side of the political aisle was famously dedicated to shrinking it down so small it could be "drowned in a bathtub", to quote one of its more famous assholes.
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.
1. No longer possible the same way it was for openai and anthropic and
2. Much more regulated in the EU
Also the EU would need state backing since we don't have the same private capital, meaning the regulations are even tighter.
FWIW, for the equity part there's a proposal expected to pass for next year: https://www.eu-inc.org/ (but it doesn't address taxes, cross-border employment, or anything significant so it's mostly moot). The main goal is to attract native VCs.
AFAIK it's designed by lawyers and old money, with little to no input from tech entrepreneurs.
This has always been an argument for "peace time" underperformance of european tech sector but I don't buy this argument for critical national security needs. Historically countries never needed to top the compensation charts to get talent. What they do need is a clear mission and ambition. This is what is missing in Europe
We need compute, yes, but we certainly aren't short of talent if we put our minds to it, and many of them are already here.
It is a fact that a much smaller amount of money is available in the EU for startup investments.
But in which sense it the corporate law inadequate? As far as I am aware the laws allow quite a lot of freedom in setting up the corporate governance for many forms of companies.
In China they seem to be nonchalantly doing a lot with AI for specific rather than 'ask me anything' tasks. To them, they are quite used to everyday applications that work well within limited domains, no vast data centre needed, just on-device. Hence the hype is no big deal.
Europe needs to think again about what can be done to make Europe attractive for software development, and I have seen no helpful encouragement from UK or European governments over the last few decades. No word of a lie, all we got in the UK was the BBC Micro, way back in the early 1980s, and since then tech has been culturally uncool.
This cultural aspect has not gone away, if a guy is a software engineer then he isn't going to get lucky with the lasses, they will run a mile.
What gets me is that the UK or places in Europe such as those places where finance matters, could have had active policing and law enforcement of data breaches and hacking, with sensible standards for storing customer data, making Europe the best place to host your data, purely for the legal protections. But we ended up with cookie notices and anti-slavery statements.
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.
Cohere would like a word here
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.
"Training a frontier AI model" is a euphemism. The AI industry is, at present, a disproportionately resource-intensive and exploitative activity which carries only an religious promise of making up for itself at some future date (note that the beliefs being touted to board members are different than the gospel spread to users).
More accessible "non-frontier" models are being designed, built, and trained, while bigger models' gains are beginning to asymptote. Economically, Europe does not often hastily participate in new ways of wealth extraction, and with regard to sovereignty, I'd argue that "frontier" models are becoming a liability to the governments who build them and to the populations they're meant to lead.
Perhaps. While I'm more impressed by AI than I think you are, I do also say on occasion that recent developments in AI feels much like the 90s rapid development of computer graphics, in the sense we're overly impressed by what we see only to discard it quickly when the next improvement arrives: https://archive.org/details/nextgen-issue-26
If the US government declares no model ≥ Fable can be released, that could make it completely pointless for anyone in the USA to work towards superior models, which may cause rapid catching up, or may cause the investment bubble to pop and all the money to go away.
Or it may cause all the investment to go to not-USA. China's one possibility, EU is another. No idea which would be least-distasteful to the people currently eager to invest in AI.
You cannot have innovation at the speed and scale that you have in the US because the legislation is cumbersome and there is no unified market with the same rules.
Source: I am European.
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.
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?
Similarly I was not suggesting Chinese models are an alternative to sovereign AI. An alternative which might be able to fulfil some of the objectives of a real sovereign AI while being far cheaper.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-mover_advantage#Second-m...
We also have buerocracy and regulations problems, but not with the AI at all. Only with the military civil dual-use restriction of thermal cameras. The ones we are allowed to sell have ridicolous resolutions. It still works, but it's barely useful.
And our colleagues across town are also world leader in their AI field. They produce all the world best face recognition SW. They had to use tricks to overcome regulations, but it works. They have their own HW as us.
And again other colleagues across town do rent their GPU computes to train their models. That's for office OCR, and speech to text.
The town is Dresden btw
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.
> If a battery can do 1000 cycles and remain above 80% capacity it is exempt
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.
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).
What are we even doing here.
I'm still waiting for the European computer but all microcontrollers (no processors yet) made in EU have an ARM (British-American) Cortex and the RAM is made elsewhere.
They already tried training LLMs.
We live in a world where free open weight-models become competitive with frontier model within a year or two.
It is much more lucrative and proficient in term of business to solve real problems affecting the industries / govs with A.I right now than it is to do the arm race with OpenAI or Anthropic.
That is what Mistral is doing and that served them well so far.
The problem is not regulation and never has been. Regulation is a best a minor stone in the shoes of A.I company in Europe.
The problem is somewhere else: People fails to understand that there is no equivalent in the EU to the unlimited money tap of American VCs and private funding. That's just not a thing here, the investor landscape is much more dry.
Company here just cannot stay unprofitable for 25y while surfing on stocks valuation, it does not work like that in the EU.
And as such they cannot compete with behemoth like OpenAI that burn 80B$ a year of cash while staying afloat.
I do believe the approach of Mistral is the right one: Solve actual problems right now even if not Edge and construct on top of that.
Specially if politically speaking, the White House administration continue to give excellent arguments in favor of sovereignty for the incoming decade. It might be the best strategy they have.
