Europe decided to regulate the hell out of foreign AI instead of investing in their own systems. It's sad to see the European continent lost the race to create a decent startup ecosystem (no decent search engines, social networks, cloud, mobile OS) and now it seems to be hellbent in losing this battle.
>It's sad to see the European continent lost the race to create a decent startup ecosystem
What's ironic and sad at the same time is that pre-2022 Russia's Yandex(domestic Russian variant of Google) was lightyears ahead of what EU, a significantly richer and more capable block, had. IIRC, their reverse image search was so good, they had to nerf it because people were using it to find the identity of people from photos.
Same for Israel, their tech sector is probably greater than the EU one combined
Absolutely shameful how the EU kept managing to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory over and over.
Not surprising. All the Yandex people that moved over to here to the Netherlands that I know of are astounded about the insane difference in the tax burden between what they had in Russia and what they have in Western Europe (when their 5 year tax discount ends, that is). If the government takes the bulk of your income after a certain point, there isn't really that big of a push to create ground-breaking technology.
> If the government takes the bulk of your income after a certain point, there isn't really that big of a push to create ground-breaking technology.
I'm skeptical that high taxes is a large reason to lose to California of all places. Maybe in some important sense CA has "earned" that via talent and funding density while NL hasn't (from the perspective of a company, to be clear)
NL is a corporate tax haven in Europe(and also compared to California), that's why almost all US and foreign companies have their corporate HQs there, Dublin or Luxembourg.
Companies go there because taxes are low for them, not necessarily for their employees(ignoring the NL 5 year tax break for foreigners). It's kinda like the US Delaware of Europe.
We also have much nicer societies than Russia. It's a dictatorship ffs.
And yes having nice things cost money. And a safety net is important.
I would never want to live in America even if I got 3x my wage. Nor Russia of course but that's a foregone conclusion.
I think much of that is because European customers (both private and business) tended to prefer American suppliers over suppliers from European countries that were not their own. That may have something to do with most people in IT being quite fluent in English, while European products were all-to-often half-heartedly translated from German/French/Spanish/Polish/Italian/Ukranian.
In many cases, well-established and well-liked European services have been supplanted by American counterparts that came later and were not really better in any way. They did usually have much more money to burn though, undercutting pricing until competition was dead.
I'm speaking in the past tense, because now for the first time in the couple of decades I can remember, there seems to be a somewhat commonly held preference for European suppliers.
Frankly, being Russian myself, I'm also very disappointed by the state of tech in Europe.
But you know what hurts the most? That I know it wasn't always that way.
I'm sitting right now in the same country that invented the Minitel, built out the TGV network and the Grands Projets, and don't even get me started about the weird and wonderful machines they've got in that museum in Mulhouse, hell, you could go back in time to Gustave Eiffel. Industry and ambition used to be here. It was almost physically painful to discover that it seems to be gone now.
> It was almost physically painful to discover that it seems to be gone now.
It's not gone, it just needs to be re-discovered. And the bureaucrats need to flash some € then get out of the way.
The EU chips act was already largely a failure and they threw plenty of money at it. The problem with the Europe is they look to their bureaucrats to stimulate things then expect different results from the last 50 times.
Europe needs its own private industry that attracts talent and capital. It doesn’t need another EU press release talking about hopes and dreams
>The EU chips act was already largely a failure and they threw plenty of money at it.
Yep, the proof is in the pudding. They managed to grab defeat from the jaws of victory again when US got TSMC to open a fab there.
For example, both German and Austrian semiconductor companies are choosing to expand manufacturing in Malaysia and not domestically.
I don't know what more proof people need that the EU is cooked on manufacturing side.
>The problem with the Europe is they look to their bureaucrats to stimulate things then expect different results from the last 50 times.
The definition of insanity. This is a mentality problem and is deeply ingrained into the EU population. European people are always looking at the state to solve any problems including those of industry and free market, without realizing the state mostly isn't good at those things and they'd actually be better off with less government there. Whenever the state intervenes into the economy it just further supports the massive bloated legacy companies who lobby the politicians never the startup ecosystem. And then people mistake again by voting for more government hoping to fix that which just results in more expensive bloat and more red tape nor a competitive freer market with more capital and innovation.
>Europe needs its own private industry that attracts talent and capital. It doesn’t need another EU press release talking about hopes and dreams
Hey, it worked for the USSR, right? ;)
>It's not gone, it just needs to be re-discovered.
After how much time of not being discovered does it count of it being gone?
> And the bureaucrats need to flash some € then get out of the way.
And when is the EU gonna do that? When pigs fly?