Comment by piskov
1 day ago
> I’m sure nothing good can come out of strong-arming some of the brightest scientists and engineers the U.S. has
And where would they emigrate? Russia? China? UAE? :-)
1 day ago
> I’m sure nothing good can come out of strong-arming some of the brightest scientists and engineers the U.S. has
And where would they emigrate? Russia? China? UAE? :-)
The UK and Europe welcome the US Footgun Operation. Plenty of opportunities for those top researchers and engineers over here.
The EU (which is not the same as Europe), is also looking a bit sharper on AI regulation at the moment (for now… not perfect but sharper etc etc).
The EU and UK is a long way from attracting top AI talent purely from opportunity and monetary terms.
Not to mention UK is arguably further down the mass surveillance pipeline than the US. They’ve always had more aggressive domestic intelligence surveillance laws which was made clear during the Snowden years, they’ve had flock style cameras forever, and they have an anti encryption law pitched seemingly yearly.
I’d imagine most top engineers would rather try to push back on the US executive branch overreach than move. At least for the time being.
For sure we’re not currently attracting the talent. There’s more to that than just money, but money is significant factor. When it comes to compensation, AI is too broad a category to have a meaningful debate. Hardware or software or mathematics or what kind of person? Etc.
I’m not gonna dispute the UK being further down some parts of the road.
Not sure what you’d count as top engineers, but I know enough that have been asking about and moving to the UK/EU that it’s been a noticeable reversal of the historic trends. Also, a major slowdown of these kinds of people in the UK/EU wanting to move to the US.
Google's Deepmind is UK based.
It is American owned now but it clearly hired enough talent for Google to buy it.
The EU and UK is a long way from attracting top AI talent purely from opportunity and monetary terms.
Which is why people are talking about this -- it's about ideology now.
You may personally be motivated solely by money. Not everybody is you.
4 replies →
Exactly. Attracting talent is not the same as having talent.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/education...
You attract talent for the same reasons china attracts sales; at the cost of your very own rights.
Look at the towns suffering around data centres for a start. The rest of us are happy to pay for what you'll do to yourselves.
Do UK and Europe have hardware manufacturing for those researches to work with once US imposes GPU export restrictions to them at the first whiff of competition/threat?
Yes.
And the US can’t realistically stop our well-funded homegrown AI Hardware startups from manufacturing with TSMC. This is part of why there’s funding from the EU to develop Sovereign AI capabilities, currently focused on designing our own hardware. We’re nothing like as far behind as you might expect in terms of tech, just in terms of scale.
Also, while US export restrictions might make things awkward for a short while, it wouldn’t stop European innovation. The chips still flow, our own hardware companies would scale faster due to demand increase, and there’s the adage about adversity being the parent of all innovation (or however it goes).
5 replies →
The GPUs and AIUs aren't being manufactured in the US.
The EUV and other factory equipment everyone's using is predominantly European. High-end testing tools used in R&D are largely European.
The fabs aren't, and that is no small thing. The tech stack is there though.
It's pretty tiresome that the HN audience keeps assuming Europe doesn't have "tech" because it doesn't have Facebook. Where do you think all the wealth comes from? Europe is all over everyone's R&D and supply chain.
1 reply →
To make 1/10th the salary they're making now?
You seem to have a very ill-informed view of UK/EU salaries in this particular sector; And also: yeah, people take salary hits to go do things they believe in (this is like, the entire premise of the underpaid American startup founder model) - it should come as no surprise that people are willing to forgo pay for reasons other than just building their own business / making themselves personally wealthy.
1 reply →
> To make 1/10th the salary they're making now?
Yeah, and also be slapped with some unrealized capital gains tax on assets they acquired while working in the US...
First, the difference isn’t that big in the economically stronger EU countries. Second, you need to factor in cost of living, which by most accounts is lower. Third, meaningful labor laws and a shared appreciation for work-life balance. And finally, to continue the sweeping generalizations, while we celebrate business acumen, we don’t fetishize wealth. People who flaunt money get made fun of, as do sigma grindset hustle bros.
I’ll take a pay cut any day for the ethos of the EU.
1 reply →
That much?
2 replies →
I agree. And even if those workers stay in the U.S., there’s absolutely no guarantee that they’ll do their best to favor the government’s interests — quite the opposite, if anything.
At the end of the day it’s a matter of incentives, and good knowledge work can’t simply be forced out of people that are unwilling to cooperate.
Well that's quite a leap to make. Plenty of room in between those options.
> ... UAE? :-)
At least you are not paying taxes for the things you don't agree on. It's indeed a strange time we are living in.