alt Hacker NewsTo be honest, living in Switzerland and speaking with peers, we're just exhausted by the constant AI hype. For a lot of us, the fact that Europe isn't frantically trying to scrape the entire internet and every book in existence for the next massive model isn't a bad thing. The big players are doing their thing, like with the nuclear arms race. We regulate a lot, too much a lot of the time, but sometimes that trickles down to other places too. A lot was done right, imo.
ETH Zurich and EPFL universities recently put out an open model called Apertus (was on the HN front page a few months back), it's not a frontier model, but they built it properly regarding copyright and data transparency.
It might look a bit slow or old-fashioned, but focusing on doing things ethically and legally feels like a much better path than just joining the race to scrape everything.
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also living in Swizerland and I disagree. Hard.
it's horrible that Europe is so backwards in AI. too much regulation and nothing to show for it. we should be way faster.
there is no money. the culture in both Europe and Switzerland is that you don't fail, while in the US it's perfectly fine to be on your 4th startup because the first 3 failed.
it's not that it LOOKS slow and old fashioned, it IS slow and old fashioned. it's horrible.
If these models ever reach the point where they are as good a programmer as a human is (and thus can self-improve completely independently), then there won't be an independent Switzerland much longer. AI race is a race for first place.
> like with the nuclear arms race
MacArthur was about to nuke the Chinese in the Korean war. China knows that nuclear weapons, AI and robotics are a matter of survival and not a nice-to-have.
Sir, I would suggest that if Europe fails to be economically competitive, the downstream implications on European society will produce much worse outcomes than (for instance) data transparency…
Doing things with ethical intentions does not necessarily produce outcomes that are beneficial for society at large.