Comment by SwellJoe
18 hours ago
It obviously does not. But, there is nothing preventing it. The US has given away all of our foreign scientists, if Europe wants them. All Europe has to do to take the lead in tech is ramp up research spending by an order of magnitude or two to match what the US used to spend (the US still outspends Europe on research, even after massive haphazard cuts and disruptions). Europe also has to welcome immigrants. Another thing many European countries have not always been great at, and some recently have become quite bad about. The regressive nationalist right is ascendant in many places, including some European countries.
I am going to ramp up building open source alternatives to every part of the stack. I am encouraging every YC founder to do the same. I am buying as much hardware as I can afford to have my own inference and training stack and funding researchers at Duke and CM to strengthen local and open source AI.
I am also assembling the largest in home robotics training data set available which will be open source.
Want to help?
Kinda, yea. I've never been able to afford to fully prioritize values-alignment in my work, but it is something I care about, and building anything proprietary and US-controlled feels increasingly bad, because even if a company's mission isn't evil, the state has demonstrated a strong willingness to force their hand if they can be useful to them at all, and punish them arbitrarily if they do anything that the ruling party dislikes. I do have bills to pay, but if you can meet my relatively (as tech workers go) modest needs and have a real plan to make something that enables rather than impedes digital sovereignty, I'd be interested in hearing what I could do to help
The kind of funding it takes to take on US tech corporations, especially in AI, will be astronomical. For an open source solution, it will take state action, and given how unpopular AI is with average folks (an entirely reasonable position for average folks to take when they see the new robber barons who're leading the AI charge), I'm not confident there's political will for it. If a few of the larger rich European nations really committed to funding research at a level competitive with the US, though, even if not specifically AI-related, the result would be an eventual end to US tech hegemony.
I was hoping the European AI companies and projects like Mistral and Apertus would, you know, do something good. But, their models trail not only US models, but Chinese models, including smaller ones, by a significant amount. I guess there's also the ethical component. Mistral is reportedly not plagiarizing like US companies, and isn't distilling US models like the Chines companies. Cheating gives one a leg up if there are no referees.
Anyway, I work for a robotics company, and I'm always interested in what's happening with open robotics stuff, including AI.