Comment by ithkuil
2 years ago
Why do they gate access at country level if it's about language. I live in Europe and speak English just fine. Can't they just offer it in English only until the multi-language support is ready?
2 years ago
Why do they gate access at country level if it's about language. I live in Europe and speak English just fine. Can't they just offer it in English only until the multi-language support is ready?
Could be a legal issue, privacy or whatnot.
Yep, there is a big reason why Europe has so few successful big tech companies, it is a regulatory hellscape. They have so many pointless privacy regulations that only the “big” companies can even hope to compete in many markets like ad tech.
There is a big reason why the USA outside of Silicon Valley and Seattle has so few successful big tech companies: because success begets success and capital breeds more capital. If it was just European regulation you'd expect SV equivalents everywhere except for Europe. That didn't happen.
And the last thing we need is more competition in ad tech.
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Shouldn't be hard to just say so instead of claiming it's multilingual readiness?
Quite the opposite - it's not only hard it's also unwise.
Admitting that you know that your product may create legal liabilities is not a very smart thing to do.
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The UK is both in Europe and not on the list, which would be even more of an oversight, so I don't think it's that.
There must be mountains of legal concerns which vary by jurisdiction. Both in terms of copyright / right of authorship as well as GDPR/data protection.
Litigation is probably inescapable. I'm sure they want to be on solid footing.
Launching anything as a big tech company in Europe is an absolute nightmare. Between GDPR, DSA, DMA and in Google's case, several EC remedies, it takes months to years to get anything launched.
It's only a nightmare if you are an adtech company whose revenue relies on tracking users, and have a history of violating their privacy.
While that's usually my line too, in this case it's also a nightmare if you're selling access to an AI and it unexpectedly starts barfing up EU citizens' private data verbatim that 'somehow' ended up in the training set.
It's a nightmare for anyone that isn't a tiny startup that flies under the radar. See: shocking lack of global-scale innovative companies made in Europe.
I hope you're right. But do you have an alternative explanation for why there's seemingly far fewer companies coming from the EU?
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Bullshit. Read DMA text: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE...
That and the labor laws and very strict compared to the US. We have an office in Poland due to regulations most "employees" want to be contractors, this is due to a tax advantage / national healthcare I think. That said the offices in the US don't say it out loud, but in the EU seem to take a week off every other month for something.
At the end of the day, the employees have a much cushier life-work balance. You can argue (rightfully) that that's better for the people and society, but it also means it's harder for companies to succeed.
Being contractors is Poland - that’s because of the taxes exactly, not regulations per se.
Contractors get taxed 19% flat rate and a small% for health insurance (even less in IT - 9%?). Whereas full time workers get taxed similarly to people in the west.
Two sad things:
1. This stuff is available in like Angola and Thailand but not in Germany or France. Oh how the European giant has fallen.
2. ... but it's also not available in the UK. So the long shadow of EU nonsense affects us too :-(
Yeah having privacy protections for everyone really hurts us… Someone releases something shiny so we should just allow them to harvest personal data and manipulate markets so we get access to it… not really a society I think most giants want to live in. I prefer waiting a bit but knowing that Google needs to play on a bit more even field over here. Plus none of the GDPR or DMA are that bad. Just make sure you comply and get it over with. It’s not that hard to build a privacy centric product that doesn’t steal my data.
On 2 yeah it does. Seems like the UK keeps falling behind on everything now that it lives in the shadow of the continent and can’t seem to create any value and nobody cares about that market. So much for the MaSiVe TraDe DeALZ we were getting unlocked…
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OpenAI somehow managed to do a release worldwide.
A startup doesn't have the same target of its back as a large publicly traded corporation. It also has a different culture and is expected to take risks that non-startups aren't. In other words, not an apples-to-apples comparison.
Edit: grammar.
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OpenAI isn’t a monopolistic behemoth like Google with a cash cow to protect. Google attracts far more attention and has a lot more to lose.
For some values of "world".
But Anthropic still isn't available here. We will see what happens to Mistral (paris, $2B valuation !)
by not having lawyers and believing they did nothing wrong.
you typically see brazen behavior from ignorance.
They got banned in Italy pretty quickly.
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Launching a small company is an even bigger nightmare, and that's actually the bigger problem.
The legal cost of dealing with a few _mistaken_ (or fake) GDPR complaints can wipe you out.
The bigger company will have inhouse or retainered lawyers who'll deal with it.
Almost all regulation acts as a barrier which protects bigger companies who can pay lawyer fees without blinking.
It's amazing how much of the HN crowd sides with the bureaucracies which are basically pals of the guys with deep pockets.
> The legal cost of dealing with a few _mistaken_ (or fake) GDPR complaints can wipe you out.
No, they can't. It's not an automated system that automagically fines companies if they get flooded by fake emails or whatever, they're pretty reasonable most of the time and you get given plenty of chances to work with regulators before they decide to fine you even a single euro (assuming you're guilty in the first place). Even if you get fined, they're usually scaled to the severity of the offense as well as the company's size.
Plus the solution is super simple, just don't invasively track your users without consent! I love that I can use the GDPR to tell my manager to fuck off when he talks about using some invasive tracking bullshit on our users, I'm glad it's there.
I'm not sure if this[0] is the most up-to-date list (I've seen a number of these lists), but take a look yourself. Most of these fines are tiny, certainly not earth shattering for any company of any size with any stability.
And if your business can't survive the financial burden of complying with GDPR, then good. There's no reason for a small business to even be violating it in the first place, since we've had about a decade of forewarning at this point regarding these privacy laws.
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[0] https://gdpr-fines.inplp.com/list/
"raping and pillaging intellectual and privacy domains are harder where protected"