alt Hacker NewsEurope absolutely needs a home-grown AI lab, especially with Pax Americana looking increasingly shaky.
LLMs embody value systems, and American and European values are not the same (yes, there are overlaps, but also key differences).
More nefariously, I can also imagine LLMs that silently degrade their reasoning when used in a national security context of a non-US country.
So, Mistral may not be competitive with OpenAI and Anthropic, but in many contexts that doesn’t matter. And, perhaps this gap could be closed with more funding (the three billion funding figure is a rounding error next to US labs). I’m sort of surprised that the EU isn’t stepping in to support them.
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> Europe absolutely needs a home-grown AI lab, especially with Pax Americana looking increasingly shaky.
The only problem (at least in the LLM space) is that you can do more in Europe by just getting the best Chinese Open weights model (do a finetune if you really want) and do more for cheaper than using Mistral.
> LLMs embody value systems, and American and European values are not the same (yes, there are overlaps, but also key differences).
There are also some areas where values across Europe are quite divergent. Think LGBT rights and social acceptance, religion & secularism, immigration & multiculturalism.
And countries don’t fall into neat “liberal west vs conservative east”. Spain is exceptionally liberal on LGBT issues while remaining more religious than some northern countries; Denmark is socially liberal but has adopted relatively restrictive immigration policies.
>I’m sort of surprised that the EU isn’t stepping in to support them.
On a similar note: Why does it have to be the EU to step up?
Why doesn't EU rather speed up making VC investments more attractive, so that EU and banks don't do the majority of investing?
*I don't have answers to these questions. It just frustrates me how many investments here come from politicians and banks, rather than from investors, people, and companies.
Europe has no budget of their own like the USA and China do, because there is no debt nor taxation at the European level. That’s the reason for the complication you are noticing.
"Pax Sinica", Chinese Peace
> LLMs embody value systems, and American and European values are not the same
Your values and American values might not be the same, but to say even most of Europe feels the same way is a big stretch. And not even the US has very many shared values anymore.
If we’re being honest, Europe doesn’t actually have much of a common value system outside of whatever is momentarily trendy in the urban monoculture, which is why it refuses to work together on most things and is currently being torn apart at the seams (see the rise of nationalist far right parties in most states).
The EU are a collection of states where the average citizen can’t even communicate with their neighbor in a common language beyond the level of a 4 year old. How could they possibly be aligned on a value system in the same way the US is.
> with Pax Americana looking increasingly shaky.
that is being replaced with Pax Silica
> I’m sort of surprised that the EU isn’t stepping in to support them.
It is! The second largest investor in this round is Scaleup Europe Fund:
https://eic.ec.europa.eu/eic-fund/scaleup-europe-fund_en