Comment by pembrook
5 hours ago
Sovereignty over what though?
The last 3% of the stack? They’re essentially borrowing Chinese open source distillation/innovation off the US frontier running on US/Taiwanese designed chips and calling it EU made. This is better than nothing of course.
But is sovereignty really an end in itself? So the EU becomes IT independent…cool, then what? I mean the Yugo was sovereign, it didn’t do much good when the society itself failed to produce prosperity and collapsed.
It seems to me the EU is expending enormous effort on the appearance of “sovereignty” over what is ultimately…the last-mile consumer toilet paper purchasing conversation data…of an aging, increasingly irrelevant population on the political/economic stage.
Meanwhile domestically the entire economic model is failing and the “union” is getting shakey as its 2 biggest members turn more nationalist.
Maybe this “oh you cant compete but here’s a trophy for sovereignty” attitude isnt helping. Less clapping along with the EU bureaucracy’s latest make work projects like transitioning to a new Word processor. If we want the EU to succeed, more tough love is needed imo.
it's industrial policy, which is of course the minimum for being able to even think about having independent thoughs when it comes to international relations.
hard to stand up for EU (or even national) values if some dude in Washington has the keys for most of your military
having at least some in-house expertise is the first step.
I agree, but my point is I don’t think we should be cheering on a group of 600 million highly educated people struggling to achieve the bare minimum.
We should be shaming them into contributing something useful to the rest of world in the most important development of our current time (AI) instead of clapping for domestic regulatory moats.
They aren't struggling. They have generally outperformed all US open-weights model releases by a decent margin. OpenAI and Anthropic have no similar product.
From where I'm standing, as an American, we should be shaming OpenAI and Anthropic for both pushing towards an IPO while neither of them have profitable revenue streams. In pure game-theory terms, you could successfully argue that the US is the biggest loser of the AI race: an economy propped up on artificial Nvidia margins and terminally reliant on neoliberal trade.
Even if global war doesn't tear down the TSMC house of cards, neither the government, the banks, nor the global economy could underwrite an OpenAI IPO. They make no money!