Comment by roblabla
6 days ago
[citation needed] here. The tech sector is still well and alive in EU, and outside adtech (which was hit hard by GDPR - that was the point) doesn't seem to have been visibly impacted.
6 days ago
[citation needed] here. The tech sector is still well and alive in EU, and outside adtech (which was hit hard by GDPR - that was the point) doesn't seem to have been visibly impacted.
AI research was mostly funded during the 2010s by Google (funded by ads) and FAIR (Facebook AI Research, funded by ads).
Killing off adtech didn't reduce the number of ads seen by people in Europe or make any observable difference to anyone's lives, but did help ensure a company capable of developing LLMs could not arise,
You say this as if ad revenue is the only possible way we could have done AI research - which is an _extremely_ weird take given the history of academia and R&D. Today adtech companies just make up the richest companies in the world, so it's not very surprising that they're the ones behind LLMs - they have more money to throw at the problem than most. I'm pretty confident that - if adtech companies didn't exist, we'd find other means of funding AI research (private investment, public funding, R&D spend from non-adtech companies, etc...).
When the internet was researched and developed, it wasn't funded by adtech, and yet it managed to develop it just fine.
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Also, the point of GDPR wasn't to reduce the number of ads. It was to prevent massive, indiscriminate information gathering. Now, whether that was successful or not is debatable - I have my own gripes on GDPR enforcement (I really hope the banners will get nuked out of existence).
I think the weird take is to assume it could have been otherwise when almost all the work was ad funded. It's not a coincidence it was Google and Facebook doing the research, IMO. Universities did a bit but like usual with academia the moment it benefited from large scale engineering to make progress they lost out to commercial labs.
"The tech sector is still well and alive in EU" [citation needed]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_N3-FKbi5c
https://www.cer.eu/insights/europe-has-produced-tech-champio...
https://www.investeurope.eu/news/newsroom/state-of-european-...
The tech sector represents 15% of EU's GDP. I currently work in the tech sector in europe, there's no shortage of companies hiring (both startups and enterprise), and anecdotally, from my personal network, enough startups are surviving the 5 and 10 years mark that I'm pretty confident there's enough new ideas/companies (as opposed to only having old/legacy enterprises) to ensure the good health of the sector.
Now, I will acknowledge that funding is more complicated in the EU compared to the US - but that's something that has been acknowledged by EU leadership and is being actively worked on. The Draghi report lays out a vision for how this can be achieved, with recommendation on what steps to take to achieve that vision. https://commission.europa.eu/topics/competitiveness/draghi-r...
So yeah, the tech sector is still well and alive in the EU, and there is reason to believe that it's going to get in an even better position.
Citation: Anybody working in tech in Europe can tell you this.