Comment by w3ll_w3ll_w3ll
5 days ago
We would build our own alternatives. Russia is a much smaller market (120 million people) and they have their own tech companies.
5 days ago
We would build our own alternatives. Russia is a much smaller market (120 million people) and they have their own tech companies.
> We would build our own alternatives.
Right, and we haven’t because we just don’t wanna? The gap between US/China and the EU in AI is becoming wider by the day.
Russia has like 3-4 large tech companies (Sber, Yandex, VK, and maybe Ozon). And they completely rely on foreign hardware. I don’t even want to imagine how could Russia start building frontier AI in these circumstances.
> Right, and we haven’t because we just don’t wanna? The gap between US/China and the EU in AI is becoming wider by the day.
We've repeatedly built things, they often get bought by US companies. This doesn't necessarily even involve them moving office, as for example Deep Mind was founded in the UK (while it was in the EU) and is still there (HQ: London; research offices in France & Germany so still in EU too) despite now being owned by Alphabet.
> Right, and we haven’t because we just don’t wanna?
We have, they get bought by American companies as their exit strategy.
If American companies decide to shutdown access then there's no pressure from the behemoths to stamp out competition, it would just be natural that alternatives take over since the market clearly exists and without American tech companies filling that market it would be pretty easy for alternatives to grow.
> Right, and we haven’t because we just don’t wanna?
The EU hasn't because European investors are shy about deploying capital. If you look at European weapons and aerospace, it's clear there's no particular technical or capability barrier.
There was a very real barrier to building tech companies. We couldn't listen to Spotify at work during the time people seriously called Berlin the "SV of Europe" (our office was in the neighborhood called "SV Backyard"). Why? We didn't have enough bandwidth, and the wait time for fiber was measured in years.
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We hadn't because we didn't have to.
It's actually pretty sad for the EU that the biggest tech company names on the continent are all Russian.
Not that "largest by market cap" says much, given that it corresponds to "oh look a monopoly" as much as it does "innovation and real growth" (and also "bubble"), but you're wrong.
Market caps of Russian examples from above:
Sber: $84 bn - https://companiesmarketcap.com/sberbank/marketcap/
Yandex: RUB 1327B (~= $17 bn) - https://tradingeconomics.com/yndx:rm:market-capitalization
VK: RUB 176.7B (~= $2.3 bn) - https://smart-lab.ru/q/VKCO/MSFO/market_cap/en/
Ozon: $8.9 bn - https://companiesmarketcap.com/ozon/marketcap/
Market caps of bigger EU tech firms:
- https://civixplorer.com/post/most-valuable-eu-companies-mark...
ASML, SAP, ARM, Spotify, ...
How do you define biggest? Can't be by market cap.
Don’t believe everything you read in Pravda.
It's a culture thing. There are even smaller markets like Taiwan that developed industries EU didn't. Western EU countries are very risk averse, anti-business and has too conservative hierarchy to develop this kind of culture. You can see it as early as in school system where the focus is on rising the floor while forgetting about the ceiling.
They'll blame it on WWII but both South Korea and Japan were similarly devastated and both managed to develop world-class technology industries in the ensuing decades.
Europe is the outlier and it's pointing to something fundamentally wrong that it was only able to produce a handful of interesting technology companies in all these years.
You're just blinded by propaganda. Europe has produced thousands upon thousands of interesting technology companies - it's just that very few of them are information technology companies.
Claiming that something is wrong with Europe in general because it didn't produce interesting technology is an utterly ridiculous and uninformed take.
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