At this point I lost all hope for Europe playing any significant role in the AI race. If that’s a good or a bad thing I don’t know, but it seems to me like that’s the reality.
At this point I lost all hope for Europe playing any significant role in the AI race. If that’s a good or a bad thing I don’t know, but it seems to me like that’s the reality.
Commoditization is a beautiful thing. It seems Anthropic and OpenAI are really struggling to maintain much of a moat. Mistral might not be leading but it's not trailing by that much either. And of course the Chinese are doing their own thing quite successfully.
The reality is that the US is betting its economy on data centers at great expense and is exposing its economy to great risk.
Also while geographically a lot of the money and processing power is in the US, the US has been relying on immigration to power its universities and especially AI research has roots all over the globe. India, China, Russia, Europe, etc. AI related know how is finding its way back to all these places.
So, I'm not too worried about the long term here. It will be interesting to see if Anthropic and OpenAI survive their IPOs. Seems like a risky financial bet at this point given the apparent lack of a moat. But if it works out, it will result in a lot of that IPO money being invested in data centers abroad. Including in the EU. Because data residency is a thing here and the EU is too big of a market for companies with that kind of valuation to ignore. We also produce a lot of energy infrastructure (e.g. gas and wind turbines). Those data centers will need lots of power.
Nothing to worry about for europe. Open source and open weights will enable europe to pick up the slck when the party is over. Then the US markets will possibly regret the AI-bubble.
Much like spaceflight, aerospace or nuclear engineering, you need to retain local talent for national defense purposes. Being 70% as good is still way better than being 100% dependent and heavily leveraged by your opponents.
It gets a little weird when you start thinking of AI like that, because AI is very corporately based in the US and China, but not as heavily that when from a talent position.
Demis Hassabis and Google's Deep Mind are all British in terms of location/talent, but they certainly aren't from a coorporate perspective (Deep Mind work might happen in London, but it is owned by Google, as US company)
(I don't know a lot about nuclear/aerospace industries, I'm guessing there more location centered just in virtue of being based around physical things, but I could be wrong)
Being 70% as good in nuclear engineering sounds scary AF. How would you rank Chernobyl? Better or worse than 70%?
Being 70% as good does not mean causing accidents. Accidents are caused by systematic operational failures and fundamental design flaws.
If your employees are only 70% as good, as skilled, as knowledgeable while not knowing it, then you can absolutely kill a reactor just like Chernobyl. The overconfidence is what allowed them to put the reactor in the state they did and not realize the implications.
Far worse than 70%. Chernobyl was a catastrophically flawed reactor design. Operators ran a badly planned safety test in which operators intentionally caused a dangerous state while key protections were disabled or bypassed.
Exactly, the intelligence/competence of the engineers running the plant had no actual bearing on the incident.
Chernobyl was basically Russia then. The more honest comparison would be the numerous nuclear power plants in France.
70%… Not great, not terrible.
It's not a race. You don't get anything for winning.
Well, you get hundreds of billions in debt, and then you get open weight models distilling your proprietary models.
? It absolutely is a race. Whether thats a positive thing or not is debatable but every lab is definitely in a race. What prize do you win? Imagine a world where only one country has AGI/ASI. Or a world where Europe only gets access to frontier models 6 months later. Far from ideal.
> What prize do you win? Imagine a world where only one country has AGI/ASI.
"Winning the race" doesn't give you that in any meaningful capacity. It gives you, at the absolute most, a temporary window where that's the case. See: nuclear weapons.
Citing nuclear weapons isn't the flex you think it is. There are only 9 countries that have nuclear weapons and they absolutely flex this power over non-nuclear powers (see Ukraine, Germany, SE Asia etc..)
Europe already has an innovation problem that's already causing structural economic instabilities which Germany has been struggling (and lately failing) to prop up.
As much as it pains me to say this, AI is already a tech revolution and it seems like Europe is just ignoring it. There's more innovation in 3 blocks in downtown San Francisco than the entire continent of Europe.
> There are only 9 countries that have nuclear weapons
QED being first didn't grant exclusivity.
The premise wasn't that AGI isn't useful. There are actually layers to the metaphor where first-mover advantage of AGI is even less meaningful than it was for nuclear weapons, but I leave those as an exercise to the reader to discover.
Nobody argued exclusivity. But there have been clear advantages to having nukes first.
> Nobody argued exclusivity.
And I quote:
> Imagine a world where only one country has AGI/ASI.
> first-mover advantage of AGI is even less meaningful
This is your opinion. Lots of tech money appears to disagree.
You should at least try to explain your contrarian position, or cite your favorite source that makes an argument that you believe.
Lots of tech money is demonstrably wrong, at least in the general case. Microsoft's whole business model is to be the second mover. Patents exist because first mover advantage alone isn't enough to hold onto a win.
If AI is different, the onus is on AI folk to explain why, not the reverse.
The frontier labs are racing as hard as they can right now because they know as well as anyone else that they're at best 6 months, probably closer to 3 months, ahead of the generic commodity AI market. The majority of the tech money currently boosting them is a bet that either they can stay that far ahead without tripping, or that a moat can be engineered. It's not at all clear that it can - or, if it can, that it will before the money runs out.
> You should at least try to explain your contrarian position
FWIW I explained it fully and provided the argument, along with explicit grounding examples. Can you tell me what exactly you don't understand?
To quote your other post:
> This is the weakest part of the argument. Absolutely no reason to believe the second inventor will be 10x faster.
Nor is there any reason to believe that it will work at any usable speed. An LLM capable of AGI running at 0.000001tok/s isn't a very good head start. Nor is it a good moat if it can't actually realize anything material fast enough. Lord knows America has labor problems.
I'm demonstrating the context is a lot more complicated than "be first". There are innumerable specific examples. They're not guaranteed to happen, that's not the point being made.
Also "no reason" is curious when it's the explicit pattern this exact industry has exhibited. Chinese models lag a few months, and come in swinging with an order of magnitude more efficiency. Does it apply? Who can say. It's certainly on the table. Pretending like it's any more ridiculous than AGI itself is irrational.
> Does this ever happen? Even in traditional manufacturing, the second “inventor” starts behind and has to improve their own process to surpass the first.
To use the industry itself once again: Japan was the first to deep learning. Performance issues prevented them from capitalizing on it. Now they're barely even a player on the field. Interestingly and adjacent to the industry, Japan was second to symbolic AI, and the FGCS was lightyears ahead of America's crufty Lisp ecosystem. For a more modern example, Google was the first to transformers. Much of this revolution is thanks to them. A shame that Gemini is third-rate at best.
It's not unique to this industry. That second inventor more often than not does a better job than the original one. It's a pretty common pattern. Otherwise, we wouldn't need patents.
My "contrarian position" is anything but. There is nothing new under the sun. You don't just need to be first, you need to maintain exclusivity.
As if time isn't money? Everything is temporary... Getting somewhere first has immense value.
A reductive equation, economics isn't thermodynamics. Money is fictional and value is subjective and unstable. Within this context, being first to AGI means nothing if the second invention of it comes 2 months later and works an order of magnitude faster than what the first iteration had self-improved to at that point in time. First mover advantage isn't decisive, you have to actually be able to capitalize on it in a robust way.
> works an order of magnitude faster
This is the weakest part of the argument. Absolutely no reason to believe the second inventor will be 10x faster.
Does this ever happen? Even in traditional manufacturing, the second “inventor” starts behind and has to improve their own process to surpass the first.
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Russia invaded Ukraine specifically because they have nukes. Everyone is afraid to fight back.
This presupposes AGI or ASI are a real, reachable thing. My read is they might be, but not as LLMs. Until there's a fundamental rearchitecture, I'm AGI-agnostic and given that view, it doesn't seem rational to bet the house on it.
We'll see.
> Imagine a world where only one country has AGI/ASI.
You've fallen for the hype. The only way these AI companies can justify their bullshit worth and burn of capital is by promising a magical AGI. It's just marketing and it is still unclear if LLM's will ever be profitable.
If they won't - then EU is doing the right thing laying low.
> Or a world where Europe only gets access to frontier models 6 months later.
What a calamity!
> If they won't - then EU is doing the right thing laying low.
Exactly. People seem to forget that US is burning money at an accelerating rate without any promise of returns. This is a high risk situation. Time will tell.
> Imagine a world where only one country has AGI/ASI
My own bet is that this won't happen with the current race, but that's another discussion.
Anyways, bit of a doomer take but if I imagine a world with AGI/ASI, countries don't mean shit anymore. Humans are not the top dog anymore.
> Imagine a world where only one country has AGI/ASI
Who says the LLM race ends at an AGI/ASI finish line in the first place ?
How about "being able to align ASI somewhat to your values"?
True, but that isn't EU/US/China, it's OpenAI/Anthropic/Grok/ …/DeepMind (based in UK)/… DeepSeek
With a lot of Chinese nationals in American companies, and an American corporation owning DeepMind, and a lot of people very upset with all of them at the same time, this is very messy.
A race to the bottom.
The only prize is control of the light cone.
It's red queen. You stay alive by winning, you lose everything by losing.
Not sure you get either outcome in either case.
Race dynamics increases p(doom) for everyone.
The non-doom scenarios include "utopia for all", and "power flows to investors, not citizens of whichever nation the winning model's corp. was registered in".
Independently, "oh look all the investors went bankrupt" can happen in both "doom" and "normal technology" timelines.
Unless you manage to build a god, and keep it under control... okay, we're all going to lose
Not being a rat in the rat race is the real win.
And US lost the significant role in chip/pc manufacturing. But if a product becomes commodity or utility (which at least for now it seems is the direction), with little lockin, it's not a big deal.
I hope we (EU) don't waste money trying to train local models (which at least some people in Poland try to do), and tries to build our own chips - AI chips have different architecture than regular processor/GPU, and TSMC doesn't need to be winner in this new race.
And if not this, then smaller labs, harnesses and actual application.
Mistral is (wisely) are changing their strategy. They switched to hosting open models and they are investing in hosting inference within EU.
Fine tuning an open model to European values is significantly cheaper than making your own model.
Even Africa will surpass Europe with its massive data center upstarts breaking ground.
> hope for Europe playing any significant role in the AI race
Ha. It's a large market of the LLMs consumption. So it which will affect the AI race. Just from other perspective than you assumed.
The largest non-US non-China model is Russian which surprised me.
Largest by what metric? And which model is that?
Largest by total parameters. GigaChat 3.1 Ultra: 702B
Huh, this is the first I've heard of that one. Has anyone here tried it? I assume the main appeal for those who use it is the country of origin, rather than performance?
Are you saying Russia is winning over Europe in AI already? Dang, sanctions really don't work.
GigaChat is russo-centric and is completely useless outside Russia itself, performs absolutely worse than Mistral once you start using English. Reminder that Russia's economy is smaller than Italy's alone. They are not winning over Europe in any single metric, let alone against the poorest country in Europe, which is not even part of NATO nor the EU, on the battlefield.
I've heard that before though. I don't think you can compare economies like that since Russia has "near infinite potential" in natural resources, people, etc which Italy doesn't.
They can kick into a true war economy and then become significantly more of a threat. They haven't done so yet because the middle-class population likes their luxury lifestyle (for now).
I highly doubt Ukraine will "win" - in fact I believe Russia is ramping up to find an excuse at some point to attack a NATO country, but in a way and during a point in time it's difficult for NATO to retaliate.
> I've heard that before though. I don't think you can compare economies like that since Russia has "near infinite potential" in natural resources, people, etc which Italy doesn't.
Fair enough. But most of the time, the figure is not used to say that Italy is more advanced than Russia, for whatever definition of advanced. It’s a check in the other direction: even if Russia does have advantages, in the grand scheme of things they are not that big.
> They can kick into a true war economy and then become significantly more of a threat. They haven't done so yet because the middle-class population likes their luxury lifestyle (for now).
They did, just in the parts of Russia that are poorer and less-connected (and less powerful politically). They leveraged their huge geographical advantage to spread the pain as much as possible in the regions that don’t matter politically. It is very difficult to see their situation and argue that they are not in a war economy. The middle class in Moscow and St Petersburg are sheltered, true, but still.
> I believe Russia is ramping up to find an excuse at some point to attack a NATO country, but in a way and during a point in time it's difficult for NATO to retaliate.
I don’t think that is likely. But then, of course Trump is making it more and more likely by the day as he insists on getting bogged down in Iran.
Yeah? And here I've been a happy Transkribus customer for some time now. If there are better models or interfaces out there for analyzing historical handwriting, I'll definitely take a look.
They've been unfortunately hugged by the "little death" of working with the EU institutions, though I wouldn't bet on them not coming back.
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Huh? Mistral 7b was pioneering in its day and IMO they have been very on top of releasing niche useful models like moderation, OCR, etc.
I’m glad Mistral is working on useful solutions.
OpenAI/Anthropic is like a retarded little sibling chasing “AGI” and giving up on rich media and other modalities.
OpenAI/Anthropic is the worst of the mainstream AI.
It goes:
1. Gemini
2. Vidu
3. Le Chat (Mistral)
4. DeepAI
5. [insert MiniMax provider]
Totally fake post. Gemini in the top?? For what?
Gemini is best at OCR and document extraction so far. We had tested for insurance needs. None match Gemini even flash level yet.
Same here. Maybe Fable is better but in terms of cost effectiveness it wouldn't even make sense to test it