alt Hacker NewsAt 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.
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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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Even Africa will surpass Europe with its massive data center upstarts breaking ground.
[dead]
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]
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.