Comment by 0x3f
6 hours ago
> the EU is hardly buzzing with AI innovation
Depends what you mean. The academic work seems largely... fine? Plenty of good work came out of Europe or European researchers. It seems the problem is more "trying to build a trillion-dollar company of any kind".
It's an interesting question: does the EU seek only to regulate successful modern American companies to death, or home grown ones too? Probably not a gamble worth taking.
Something commercial? Mistral is the only significant European LLM I'm aware of, and it's not frontier level. Then a dearth of EU-owned hyperscalers, AI-focussed data centers, GPU/CPU/memory manufacturers, even cheap energy...?
The issue with EU is its not one market, for funding or deploying a company of any kind. There is both no funding scale and no easy distribution scale. Same thing with any kind of lobbying you need to do to move laws to be more amenable to tech, you have to do it 20+ times. Nobody does this, which is why smart EU and UK talent migrates to the US, scales, then just uses the weight of their US business to change reality around them in the EU anwyay. For the most part.
Yes, the EU is a bit of a strange half-measure. I understand why the cultural barriers are resistant to change. But standardization of regulations across the single market has been incredibly slow. I'm not sure it will ever happen.
I wonder if the incumbents in each country actively lobby against it. I suppose it's easier for massive corporations to deal with cross border issues. The onerous regulatory boundaries are a nice price of entry for them that keeps out upstarts.