Comment by sarusso
19 days ago
They allocated €37.4 million [1]. As an European, I truly don’t understand why they keep ignoring that the money required for such projects is at least an order of magnitude more.
[1] https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/pioneering-ai-...
Deepseek's release has shown that there's no great risk in getting left behind. All the info is out there, people with skills are readily available, creating a model that will match whatever current model is considered frontier level is not that hard for an entity like the EU.
For everyone here shouting that the EU needs to do something, be a leader, what have they lost so far by choosing to lead in legislation instead of development?
They've lost nothing. They've gained a lot.
They can use the same frontier level open source model as everyone else, and meanwhile, they can stay on top of harmful uses like social or credit scoring.
Also speaking as a European, legislation is kind of the point of a government in the first place. I do think the EU goes too far in many cases. But I haven't seen anything that makes me think they're dealing with this particular hype train badly so far. Play the safe long game, let everyone else spend all the money, see what works, focus on legislation of potentially dangerous technology.
> legislation is kind of the point of a government in the first place
I would personally consider legislation to be but one means to an end, with the point of a (democratic) government actually being to ensure stability and prosperity for its citizens.
In that framework, "leading with legislation" doesn't make any sense—you can lead with results, but the legislation is not itself a result! Lead with development or lead with standard of living or lead with civil rights, but don't lead with legislation.
Your formulation sounds like politician's logic: "something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do it". Legislation as an end in itself. Very interesting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vidzkYnaf6Y
> I would personally consider legislation to be but one means to an end, with the point of a (democratic) government actually being to ensure stability and prosperity for its citizens
You're correct, in retrospect I was a bit hyperbolic in my statement.
A better statement of my view is: the goal of a government should be the prosperity and wellbeing of it's citizens and the greater system we're all a part of (both geopolitical and ecological), and the best way we've so far discovered to do that is via legislation of an otherwise free market.
> They can use the same frontier level open source model as everyone else, and meanwhile, they can stay on top of harmful uses like social or credit scoring.
We are dependent on models created by USA and Chinese companies for access to the technology that seems to be the next internet - while the entire world is accelerating hard towards protectionism and tariff wars.
What could possibly go wrong
Yeah, this is exactly what scares me. But it also scares me that there's almost zero oversight on what USA and China are producing and the bias that could be embedded into these models by their creators...
I'm just not sure whether it's worse to be behind or to try to be in front by all means necessary.
I partially agree with you. The only problem is that these markets are highly monopolistic, and we will be creating another technological dependency on the US.
Deepseek didn't show anything except the compute cost of final model. We don't know how much data collection costed, how much unethical data like copyrighted data or OpenAI's data is needed, the cost of experiments etc.
> Creating a model that will match whatever current model is considered frontier level is not that hard for an entity like the EU.
If they have this as their top priority and allotted few billion dollars then sure. Not in the current form where the people involved are only involved for publication, not doing hard engineering things that takes months or years and they could do the same thing in OpenAI or Deepseek for like $1 million salary which both of them pay.
> lead in legislation
> legislation is kind of the point of a government
As an American, most of this post reads like doublespeak satire. I guess it's not, but just to put a transatlantic pov here.
I'll add a sports metaphor for good measure: in order to become expert football players, we'll get tickets to watch the best teams play.
I’ll add some European wisdom to your sports metaphor. You don’t have to become a big football player to make money in football. I’d rather make money from the tickets and rights than dedicate my life to a sport that’s only played in the US.
> As an American, most of this post reads like doublespeak satire
Yeah, you guys have a lot of brainwashing to get over. I can imagine that you're deeply conditioned to read any outside views on politics as satire.
One kind of brainwashing is the need to reframe everything political into sports metaphors. The EU is not a sports team. It's a political entity. Whatever you might have been taught, these are very different things, with different needs. You can't have meaningful conversations about a political entity via sports metaphors.
Well, maybe in US politics you can. There you have two teams determined to beat the other at all costs. EU politics isn't like that. We are trying to work together, not kill each other.
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Personally I'm rather happy that the allocation was not too large at first, even that is quite a sizeable sum. The EU is great at kickstarting projects that sound like a panacea, but end up not leading to anything. Once they have something to show, by all means, throw more money at them.
The trap that these EU projects typically fall into is that they burn all of the grant funding on paying politically connected consultants to write reports. No one gets around to building an MVP.
I thought that was the point?
As said before in another comment. The project can likely make use of 'free' EuroHPC resources, which will also be funded simultaneously with hundreds of millions. Still not Stargate, but if they can actually innovate something beyond the obvious (like R1) I think the money is still useful.
On what basis are you are stating this? I'm asking because I have been involved in another project like these (15M budget) and the main issue was the lack of computing resources allocation, because no one thought about it (true story).
The application process IMHO is quite complex (thwy want compute estimations and CVs etc).However if you figure how ist works it is at least relatively easy to get batches of 100k GPU hours via EuroHPC. Currently few calls are open, but there is typically at least also national infrastructure. Again this is nothing compared to what OpenAI or Meta has access to. I just got 25k node hours on Meluxina for a fine-tune project. My colleague got quite some GPU compute oh Germany's Tier3 NHR Clsuter (Horeka with >700 A100/H100 GPUs).
Because Europe does not have enough money. This comes from taxes i.e. as an EU citizen you pay for the fun.
Private sector often does not fund projects like these as they have bad return on investment.
>Because Europe does not have enough money.
They seem to have enough to send overseas and to spend on illegal economic migrants.
>Private sector often does not fund projects like these as they have bad return on investment.
Then why does the private sector in the US fund projects like these?
Because America has the best private capital and startup ecosystem in the world it has a good chance of picking the big winners. There is no corresponding European ecosystem, only a bunch of small national ones. In fact, European investors are not betting on EU startups because they are unlikely to be able to scale to beat US and Chinese competitors due to lack of market and capital market scale.
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> They seem to have enough to send overseas
If you mean the NDICI stuff, that's hardly 'sending money overseas', and it's a fairly tiny fraction of spending.
> and to spend on illegal economic migrants.
... What are you talking about here? What portion of the EU budget is spent on that? What activity specifically?
In the real world, most EU spending is on regional development, agricultural stuff, and operating the EU (civil service, enforcement bodies, etc etc). The EU is not a country and has only a very small budget (about 170bn/year).
These millions were allocated for business-class tickets and accommodations for the talking members of this task force. So, 37.4m is plenty.
I have zero doubt that nothing else will come out of this.
Source: have been working with major UN and international bodies on the software side.
Not anymore, with Deepseek's stuff right? Which is open.
DeepSeek had plenty of R&D expertise which were not included in the (declared) model training cost. Here we are talking about building something nearly from scratch, even if there is an open source starting point you still need the infrastructure, expertise and people to make it work, which with that budget are going to be hard to secure. Moreover these projects take months and months to get approved, meaning that this one was conceived long before DeepSeek, thus highlighting the original disalignment between the goal and the budget. DeepSeek might have changed the scenario (I hope so) but it would be just a lucky ex-post event… not a conscious choice behind that budget.
What do you mean, "nearly from scratch"?
Aleph Alpha is a business that has been going for some time in this sector, at least a couple of years with commercial LLM products. It's likely they'll provide hardware and base models for this project.
DeepSeek probably spent closer to two billion on hardware. And then there’s the energy cost of numerous runs, staff costs, all of that. The 5.5m cost was basically misleading info, maybe used strategically to create doubt in the US tech industry or for DeepSeek’s parent hedge fund to make money off shorts.
https://semianalysis.com/2025/01/31/deepseek-debates/
I mean, I get that the current strategy by most participants seems to be burning billions on models which are almost immediately obsoleted, but it's... unclear whether this is a _good_ strategy. _Especially_ after deepseek has just shown that there _are_ approaches other than just "throw infinite GPUs at it".
Like, insofar as any of this is useful, working on, say, more techniques for reducing cost feels a lot more valuable than cranking out yet another frontier model which will be superseded within months.