Can Europe train a frontier AI model on the compute it owns?

Sure, theoretically, if it could come to an agreement, and meanwhile the cross-border cooperation of even the inter-EU countries is at an abysmal rate, and currently, even during a goddamn land war with Russia, Germany and France can't come to an agreement to build a fighter jet ensemble (together).

qsort2• 1 month ago

This is unfortunately the problem. The level of the public debate is abysmal, most politicians push unbelivably stupid shit about immigration and other identitarian nonsense, budget gets spent to ensure cheese and wine have the proper AOC certifications on them. Honestly up to a point I even understand it, many people don't see themselves as having a meaningful identity as EU citizens and you can't force it upon them.

Asking for sensible AI policy is like asking for a base on mars.

davidguetta2• 1 month ago

reducing unskilled and hateful immigration is the democratic thing do

this has nothing to the other good idea which is to start building AI

mr_toad• 1 month ago

many people don't see themselves as having a meaningful identity as EU citizens

I sometimes wonder if the citizens of the United States (of America) even comprehend that the EU is not itself a sovereign nation (unlike the states in say, the USA, or Australia) and is just a union of sovereign polities.

Nobody in the EU is an EU Citizen unless they are a citizen of one of the member states.

pelorat• 1 month ago

The fighter jet program was a jobs program, not dissimilar to how many US government programs are jobs programs by having different parts of it made in different states for no goo reason. Add in some nationalism and it was inevitable it would not work out.

fragmede4• 1 month ago

If it's inevitable, then how come the F35's flying around? Sure there's some complaints to be made, but I've seen it work in person.

kube-system• 1 month ago

I always find it strange that being a "jobs program" is said as if derogatory, especially when talking about military equipment of all things. The free market optimizes for handling normalcy, not exception handling, like wartime. The reason to artificially these jobs is so that you have the factories and expertise to make these things when you need them.

ExoticPearTree9• 1 month ago

And what, they couldn't split the jobs 50/50 in any meaningful way so that everyone was happy? Dunno, you can let the french design and the germans build or something.

morkalork• 1 month ago

In a weird sense, the EU exemplifies what the USA would be like without a strong federal government: Dysfunctional as states compete with, undercut and stifle each other.

oliver236• 1 month ago

isnt the eu basically a less federalist version of the usa? how is it then that the usa claims its more free? the individual state members in the EU have more freedom than individual states.

someone explain this to me please

dofm2• 1 month ago

You don't think US states compete with, undercut and stifle each other?

Second question: you think the USA has a strong federal government?

I mean that is actually an open question even in non-Trump years, not least when one side of the political aisle was famously dedicated to shrinking it down so small it could be "drowned in a bathtub", to quote one of its more famous assholes.

piltdownman• 1 month ago

You mean like they've been doing since the 1950s with the the largest physics laboratory in the world (CERN)? Or more to the point, the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) of which 27/27 EU member states participate?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_High-Performance_Comp...

Even at the smaller level the ethos and ambition is clear - take EURO-3C: the Horizon Europe project aimed at delivering a pan-European sovereign infrastructure that integrates Telco, Edge, Cloud, and AI capabilities under a federated model which has 70+ Euro-participants.

https://www.medialaws.eu/the-euro-3c-initiative-a-new-dawn-f...

smashini7• 1 month ago

Compute 2027 coming soon ;)

graemep• 1 month ago

CERN is not an EU project, predates the EU, and is not located in the EU. EuroHPC JU includes a number of non-EU members.

I think that is the way forward: work with whoever has common interests and is willing to work together.

I think the point is that the EU does not necessarily make cooperation between governments any easier.

hbcdbff• 1 month ago

Why even bother creating a repo like this? Why not just link to a ChatGPT conversation?

graphime• 1 month ago

[flagged]

bomewish• 1 month ago

And at least save us the pain of trying to scroll through the bs intro. Just put the 10 or whatever bullet points right there.

ForHackernews3• 1 month ago

Who cares? Just distill some existing frontier models and run the inference yourselves. Instant sovereign AI.

sarjann• 1 month ago

Until they choose to lock their models down (e.g. Fable). Building policy off copying isn't reliable.

ForHackernews3• 1 month ago

By then you've already distilled it. Copying is super reliable. It's a historically-proven way to get nearly the same thing at a fraction of the cost.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-mover_advantage#Second-m...

cmiles8• 1 month ago

The question was never do enough computers exist in Europe, but rather can Europe organize the capital and cross-company / cross-border relationships required to build a big model at scale. There the answer still looks iffy at best. This is where the US has, and continues to, thrive and where Europe can’t get out of its own way.

epolanski6• 1 month ago

I don't believe Europe can build models that can compete with American ones.

1. In order to build competitive models, you need to offer competitive salaries and equity. Europe has very old and inadequate corporate law virtually everywhere but in UK. European labs cannot attract talent that can build such competitive models with the proper lack of incentives.

2. In order to build competitive models, you need gargantuan amounts of compute. And thus capital. How can you compete when big tech can just cough a handful of equity and raise $ 85 B like Alphabet is doing right now?

3. In order to have these datacenters financially feasible you need cheap energy. We don't have it. Some places like France have clean one, but it's still not cheap enough, you're still paying a 45-50% premium over some random South Carolina.

What Europe should do is to finally tackle its fundamental issues with corporate laws, startups and incentivize more money to flow into venture capital.

Essentially we need a bunch of Mistrals, but with more competition and better incentives.

There's plenty of brilliant European engineers and scientists that would gladly take some pay cut to work in Europe instead of US and could bring their expertise here, but you still need the right incentives.

rootlocus4• 1 month ago

You also need to scrape huge amounts of data with no regard for copyright which is:

1. No longer possible the same way it was for openai and anthropic and

2. Much more regulated in the EU

Also the EU would need state backing since we don't have the same private capital, meaning the regulations are even tighter.

Theodores2• 1 month ago

As per your points, Europe really can't compete, particularly when power is considered. However, frontier models that require city-sized data centres might not be all they are cracked up to be.

In China they seem to be nonchalantly doing a lot with AI for specific rather than 'ask me anything' tasks. To them, they are quite used to everyday applications that work well within limited domains, no vast data centre needed, just on-device. Hence the hype is no big deal.

Europe needs to think again about what can be done to make Europe attractive for software development, and I have seen no helpful encouragement from UK or European governments over the last few decades. No word of a lie, all we got in the UK was the BBC Micro, way back in the early 1980s, and since then tech has been culturally uncool.

This cultural aspect has not gone away, if a guy is a software engineer then he isn't going to get lucky with the lasses, they will run a mile.

What gets me is that the UK or places in Europe such as those places where finance matters, could have had active policing and law enforcement of data breaches and hacking, with sensible standards for storing customer data, making Europe the best place to host your data, purely for the legal protections. But we ended up with cookie notices and anti-slavery statements.

alecco• 1 month ago

1. In order to build competitive models, you need to offer competitive salaries and equity.

FWIW, for the equity part there's a proposal expected to pass for next year: https://www.eu-inc.org/ (but it doesn't address taxes, cross-border employment, or anything significant so it's mostly moot). The main goal is to attract native VCs.

AFAIK it's designed by lawyers and old money, with little to no input from tech entrepreneurs.

quatonion• 1 month ago

Just as a reminder, Google DeepMind is right here in the UK, and there are hundreds, thousands of top AI researchers that are foundational to everything that the US is doing, as much, if more so than the Chinese contributions.

We need compute, yes, but we certainly aren't short of talent if we put our minds to it, and many of them are already here.

aleph_minus_one2• 1 month ago

In order to build competitive models, you need to offer competitive salaries and equity. Europe has very old and inadequate corporate law virtually everywhere but in UK.

It is a fact that a much smaller amount of money is available in the EU for startup investments.

But in which sense it the corporate law inadequate? As far as I am aware the laws allow quite a lot of freedom in setting up the corporate governance for many forms of companies.

627467• 1 month ago

you need to offer competitive salaries and equity

This has always been an argument for "peace time" underperformance of european tech sector but I don't buy this argument for critical national security needs. Historically countries never needed to top the compensation charts to get talent. What they do need is a clear mission and ambition. This is what is missing in Europe

mnewme13• 1 month ago

FLUX by Black Forrest Labs would disagree there and it is built right in Germany.

solumunus• 1 month ago

They really shouldn’t.

acatton• 1 month ago

What is this whole thing about Europe being behind on AI? Do Mistral and DeepL not exist? Yes, I know DeepL is niche, but IMHO it is the best translation model out there.

epolanski6• 1 month ago

It is behind in the sense that if tomorrow the US and China place an export ban on their models all we're left with are Mistral's ones.

They are not bad, and they have made huge progress, but you're still one year behind if not more.

May matter less and less as time progresses, or it may matter more if research further speeds up.

Honestly I wish capitalism and globalization kept working as they did for decades, but since more than a decade we're reverting to inefficient protectionist steps, one after the other.

Slartie• 1 month ago

How exactly do you - or the Chinese, for that matter - place an export ban on an open weight model?

SyneRyder3• 1 month ago

I've tried using Mistral for various tasks, and it is so far behind the American models that I just never bother using it despite still having lots of Mistral API credits leftover. Even their OCR and TTS products are surpassed by generic US models - I use regular Claude Sonnet for OCR because it is more accurate than Mistral OCR.

I could rant about this, I am just so disappointed at how Mistral completely gave up and pivoted into bespoke fine-tuning consulting. The terrifying thing is that they don't seem to even understand how far behind they are, as if they never tried Opus, let alone Fable / Mythos. Or they do understand and that's why they focus on consulting now.

JumpCrisscross7• 1 month ago

Did Mistral really throw in the towel on building frontier models?

htrp• 1 month ago

Or they do understand and that's why they focus on consulting now.

Cohere would like a word here

isoprophlex• 1 month ago

Just post the prompt that generated this slop next time. Then we'd have a chance of seeing some original thoughts, instead of a bunch of web searches filtered through a bucket of mediocrity.

smashini7• 1 month ago

You're cute when you're cranky

oneshtein2• 1 month ago

Just use AI to summarize to the prompt.

beernet3• 1 month ago

Absolutely not, even if Europe was given all of the compute in the world. The issues are much much worse. Starting at "data privacy", continuing with the "EU AI Act" and just an overall mindset of regulation and German angst. Many structures in the EU actively prevent and fight against innovation. Oftentimes more subtle but the consequences stay the same. If you ever had to use one of the "sovereign" AI provides such as StackIT, OVH and the-like, I feel with you. It is just so bad in terms of product and performance, there is no comparison at all with Hyperscalers, and it shows. Eventually, it's a cultural and structural problem along the way and the future here looks horrible.

LastTrain5• 1 month ago

Some of those seem like good things TBH.

throw-the-towel• 1 month ago

Yes, but they are incompatible with being on the forefront of AI.

rootlocus4• 1 month ago

We can debate the details and implementation but EU legislature is, at least in spirit, trying to protect human rights. What does it say about progress that the same laws that protect human rights also stifle innovation?

BjoernKW4• 1 month ago

We can debate the details and implementation but EU legislature is, at least in spirit, trying to protect human rights

That's an unfounded assertion. Of course, politicians will claim this to be the case. I don't see how patronising citizens protects their human rights, though.

beernet3• 1 month ago

What does it say about progress that the same laws that protect human rights also stifle innovation?

Claiming that GDPR and the EU AI Act "protect human rights" is very, very far-fetched. How does the training of, say, Claude or GPT-X models, hurt human rights?

boothby• 1 month ago

What does it say about progress that the same laws that protect human rights also stifle innovation?

Innovative methods to destroy human life are "stifled" by measures intended to preserve human life. What to you mean by "progress" -- the betterment of the human condition, or the enrichment of the few and powerful?

nradov3• 1 month ago

And yet the EU legislature seems to be actively hostile to some human rights, such as the right to free expression and the right to keep and bear arms. How do you account for that discrepancy?

JumpCrisscross7• 1 month ago

EU legislature is, at least in spirit, trying to protect human rights. What does it say about progress that the same laws that protect human rights also stifle innovation?

As you said, in spirit. In fact the EU’s AI Act is not really human rights legislation. (It exempts military and national-security uses.) Where it comes close, e.g. in seeking to ban facial recognition or social scoring, it does so clumsily.

So in practice, the EU has passed a series of laws that essentially make AI a monopoly of military and intelligence-community interests while forcing its consumers to use foreign products. Not exactly a win.

retinaros• 1 month ago

no its not. its about mass surveillance and mass population control. regulating, watching, punishing and jailing the taxpayers while letting millions of people enter illegally and destroy the society from both sides.

europe is huxley nightmarish utopia worst parts without any of the bright ones.

mmarq2• 1 month ago

EU legislature is an actual corpus of laws. It’s imperfect, but it’s arguably better than having a guy that can block a model or threat companies because they crossed him.

michaelt2• 1 month ago

What does it say about progress that the same laws that protect human rights also stifle innovation?

Perhaps it merely says that certain good positive things stifle other good, positive things?

Having 24 languages is a good, positive thing for the EU's cultural distinctiveness, respect for citizens' heritage, and the fairness of the nexus of power not excluding speakers of any country's language.

And yet it's a major barrier to cross-border trade, military cooperation, popular support of closer political ties, and the prospects of any EU companies growing large enough to counterbalance the amazons and facebooks of the world.

A ban on cracking eggs serves the interests of eggs, while stifling the omelette industry.

nekitamo• 1 month ago

You can protect human rights without stifling progress. It's not a "pick one of the above" situation.

The EU can and should reform many parts of its sclerotic laws and bureaucracies. Whether it can do so before it becomes a subservient puppet state which serves as a battleground for competing powers remains to be seen.

MattDamonSpace• 1 month ago

“Human rights” as defined by the continent that brought you both The Enlightenment and The Holocaust

Feels like a reaaaaal roll of the dice

red75prime4• 1 month ago

EU legislature is, at least in spirit, trying to protect human rights

Protect human rights as defined by EU legislature, obviously. And privacy in public places, for example, doesn't seem to be an undebatable human right.

Heck, I hate street views disfigured by huge privacy blobs.

poszlem• 1 month ago

That's a bit like arguing that the USSR was, in spirit, trying to defend workers' rights, and therefore we should not have opposed it. At some point, the gap between what something claims to be "in spirit" and what it actually is in practice becomes too large to ignore.

jimbokun• 1 month ago

That bureaucrats can kill any kind of progress with the best of intentions.

frollogaston12• 1 month ago

That's a loaded question.

yeoyeo42• 1 month ago

this is true, but in practice the EU and its local governments have a giant issue with incompetence when it comes to the specifics of regulation. it's overregulated and sometimes even in such ways that it doesn't even achieve the protection it seeks to generate, so a net loss in both directions.

ToucanLoucan2• 1 month ago

If your product can't function in a way that respects humans' right to privacy, your product is the problem, not the humans' rights.

aspenmartin6• 1 month ago

You can grumble about the way things are but Europe being so far behind a technological race with important geopolitical ramifications means that you guys are cutting off your nose to spite your face. Have fun with zero of European regulations impacting frontier development and then eventually having to depend on it.

throwaway-blaze2• 1 month ago

Dont make the assumption that the laws and regulations in place respect human rights and are a 100% good. They also entrench EU bureaucratic power (and thus the power of the ministers) without regards to future technology.

State regs often fail to grapple with the future, and at best slow it down and at worst smother it.

kgwxd• 1 month ago

"Innovation"

mnewme13• 1 month ago

Bullshit. The AI Act is not the problem, Mistral models are definitely usable and some were/are competitive.

European future looks bright compared to the political landscape the US has now

Saline9515• 1 month ago

Do you think that companies and States will use "usable" models from Mistral (who has left the race anyway), or frontiers/near frontier ? It's akin to say that walking a good enough means of transportation and we don't need anything else. One day the guys in charriots will remind you of the dire reality.

sajithdilshan13• 1 month ago

Political landscape of the US right now will change in few years like it has been changing for the last 250 years. USA does not equate to its current political situation. But EU would keep on rotting from inside and I would eat my hat if Mistral doesn’t go out of business in next 5 years

brailsafe• 1 month ago

Imo useful long-term innovation comes about during the conflict of fighting for and against the rate of technological change, and whatever proves inherently better is what's left after the dust settles. There's a point at which there's so much opposition that nothing innovative happens for too long, but uncontested innovation isn't something most people want either. If the future is uncompetitive but lagging behind the U.S and China, I'd struggle to see the problem

fxtentacle• 1 month ago

The thing that nobody talks about is how many EU citizens already are working on frontier models, just inside US companies. That’s why the prohibition was so crippling for Anthropic.

And, btw, the bang per buck that I got from OVH was better than EC2.

signatoremo2• 1 month ago

The thing that nobody talks about is how many EU citizens already are working on frontier models, just inside US companies

Why don't you ask yourself: how come those brilliant European minds couldn't find a job that pays well enough at home? Why could they in the US? There are many more Chinese and Indian, and other internationals working for US companies, outnumbering Europeans. It's not like Europe was intentionally targeted by US companies.

Real GDP has grown 84% in the US since 2000 [0]. EU grown 40-45% in the same span. The two regions were basically had the same economic output in 2000. Europe has been left behind economically.

Living in Europe is nice (I love Europe by the way), but the question is why EU can't compete with the US and increasingly China. Sooner or later that'd affect your living standard as well. Look at how much China has caught up with the West in terms of quality of life.

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1

niemandhier3• 1 month ago

Kimi was trained at cost, so were other models.

Sure some things are a hurdle, but in the end, being the first just means doing all the work.

matt-p• 1 month ago

Are we talking about the EU or Europe?

The UK, for example, is outside the EU and arguably Europes strongest AI hub birthing DeepMind, Stability and others. Home to top universities etc.

I think compute is certainly our weakest point but it should be possible to train a frontier-ish model on Isambard-AI if you supplement it with other London based commercial compute for post-training.

killerpopiller• 1 month ago

Did you read the AI Act?

AI Act regulates high risk AI systems and banns AI systems like social scoring. Most of the AI applications are not regulated.

Did you read the GDPR and follow court rulings regarding AI training. OLG Köln saw no violation in Meta‘s training of user data in Insta and FB.

It is obvious that you don’t know what you are taking about.

I’am tired of unfounded EU bashing. The guardrails in place are not hindering

ymir_e• 1 month ago

Can Europe train a frontier AI model?

It seems unlikely at the moment. The writeup you have is quite interesting, but notably distributed compute for frontier is at least a bump in the road.

As other's have pointed out, if resources across Europe came together there could be a good amount of resources today to do so, but it is fragmented.

Project Glasswing, and most recently the blocking of Fable 5 potentially only for non-US citizens have sparked more attention in the political spheres regarding sovereignty/competitiveness of European AI.

There as also this great write-up which explains the trajectory Europe currently has when it comes to AI compute here: https://europe2031.ai/

So theoretically: yes, but there doesn't seem to be a big enough will to attempt to catch up with the trajectory of American hyper-scalers.

smashini7• 1 month ago

Thanks! Will give it a read :)

intoXbox• 1 month ago

This has factored out product development, which is more than compute resources. Just like any industry, some organisation needs to take ownership and responsibility to convert technology to a usable product.

general1465• 1 month ago

They could, but why? US and China has poured Trillion of USD into training and any semblance of getting those money back seems like some far fetched dream. Currently there is no realistic path to profitability with these models.

What I see as usable product in the future are smaller specialized models which are able to run and be trained with fraction of resources what goes to current frontier models.

evilturnip• 1 month ago

I feel like the very thing that EU is great at: more consumer friendly and anti-corporate legistation, also hamstrings it for innovation. Why would VCs invest in AI there instead of in the US where they don't have to worry about any of that.

bushido• 1 month ago

Under normal circumstances, I'd agree with most folks here, it'd be highly unlikely.

However, we're (i think officially) in an arms race.

I wouldn't want to bet against anyone in these unprecedented times (with plenty of historical parallels).

thomascountz3• 1 month ago

Does Europe need to train a frontier AI model, at all?

"Training a frontier AI model" is a euphemism. The AI industry is, at present, a disproportionately resource-intensive and exploitative activity which carries only an religious promise of making up for itself at some future date (note that the beliefs being touted to board members are different than the gospel spread to users).

More accessible "non-frontier" models are being designed, built, and trained, while bigger models' gains are beginning to asymptote. Economically, Europe does not often hastily participate in new ways of wealth extraction, and with regard to sovereignty, I'd argue that "frontier" models are becoming a liability to the governments who build them and to the populations they're meant to lead.

cyanydeez2• 1 month ago

it is a bizarre nuclear arms race. what they do need are the raw reaources and the capabilities to sefend themselves ans the capability for offense atleast as a threat.

thomascountz3• 1 month ago

I'm not sure I follow how this metaphor plays out. Many stand to gain by harming and threatening Europe and many stand to suffer if Europe is harmed or threatened. Far be it from me to claim Europe a perfected system, but there are globalized interdependencies which exist here. I think that I'm not seeing the indicators of hard benefits which correlate to the hypotheses put forward by the financial markets. In which ways are the trillions of dollars of value meant to manifest and how do we know when they begin to do so?

ben_w8• 1 month ago

Does Europe need to train a frontier AI model, at all?

Perhaps. While I'm more impressed by AI than I think you are, I do also say on occasion that recent developments in AI feels much like the 90s rapid development of computer graphics, in the sense we're overly impressed by what we see only to discard it quickly when the next improvement arrives: https://archive.org/details/nextgen-issue-26

If the US government declares no model ≥ Fable can be released, that could make it completely pointless for anyone in the USA to work towards superior models, which may cause rapid catching up, or may cause the investment bubble to pop and all the money to go away.

Or it may cause all the investment to go to not-USA. China's one possibility, EU is another. No idea which would be least-distasteful to the people currently eager to invest in AI.

ricardobayes• 1 month ago

I'm with you. I think we will need less "frontier" models in the future, but we'll reach for more specialized ones. A small, focused model trained to e.g. coding is within the realm of useful reality. JetBrains is making some moves in the field, and laudably, some of their work is open-weight.

ExoticPearTree9• 1 month ago

No, it cannot. The fundamental problem between the US and EU it is that in the US if something is not explicitly forbidden, it is allowed and in the EU if it is not explicitly allowed it is forbidden.

You cannot have innovation at the speed and scale that you have in the US because the legislation is cumbersome and there is no unified market with the same rules.

thinkingtoilet2• 1 month ago

It's not just that. The US models were trained partly due to massive theft. They illegally acquired (not used, that was legal) massive amounts of texts that they trained their model on. If you or me stole that much we would be in prison but if you're rich you get to do it and pay a small fine. It's not even the laws. It's in the US you're allowed to break the laws.

ExoticPearTree9• 1 month ago

I am of the opinion that if it is on the internet, it is free. Just like I find free movies, so do AI companies find free books or whatever they need for their models. What's so hard to understand?

amarant• 1 month ago

What? Your comment is 100% incorrect. In the EU everything is permitted unless explicitly forbidden.

Source: I am European.

flopbob• 1 month ago

It's sometimes very telling when other people think of you and your country. While I do agree we in Europe have sometimes too many rules, but I just can't understand the American obsession with freedom and being able to do things to the detriment of society

giacomoforte• 1 month ago

No because public EU compute is adminisered by physicists and although they are very competent in their own domains they are winging it when it comes to AI. It like expecting OakRidge to train LLMs...

They already tried training LLMs.

grigio• 1 month ago

No, but EU can train an LLM to regulate others LLM

slaw• 1 month ago

Or force replaceable batteries with exceptions that every LLM passes anyway.

If a battery can do 1000 cycles and remain above 80% capacity it is exempt

lou1306• 1 month ago

Are we really discussing a plan that has never been attempted before (training a frontier model on federated hardware) and that would require coordination on a continental scale, sketched on a five-page PDF on GitHub with no discernible author or affiliation? a PDF that, I am sorry to point out, reeks of AI prose in more than one passage?

What are we even doing here.

fancyfredbot2• 1 month ago

Forget regulations, would it make sense for Europe to train a frontier model of it's own? Would it be sufficiently better than fine tuning a Chinese model? Would it actually be competitive with US frontier models? Would enough people pay to use it even within Europe to pay for the training costs? Do we have enough inference capacity that enough people /could/ use it? Would being "European" allow any governments in Europe to trust it, rather than deciding that actually there needs to be a French, German, Italian, Spanish and UK sovereign AI?

I am guessing that enough of these questions can be answered with "no" that nobody really wants to invest.

For the same reason there isn't really a serious third start up competitor to OpenAI and Anthropic.

signatoremo2• 1 month ago

So your ideas of having AI sovereign is to turn to Chinese models? Do you know what their intention will be and where will they go?

You don't like US models because their values don't align with yours, but then you turn to Chinese models? See how hypocrite that is?

fancyfredbot2• 1 month ago

I was suggesting US models are very good, and would probably be preferable to a less capable sovereign AI. My point was that this makes building European sovereign AI unappealing.

Similarly I was not suggesting Chinese models are an alternative to sovereign AI. An alternative which might be able to fulfil some of the objectives of a real sovereign AI while being far cheaper.

jdkee• 1 month ago

europe2031.ai

niemandhier3• 1 month ago

Being slow is sometimes a problem.

But if the needed total revenue for an investment is so absurdly large, that we need to capture 5-10% of the labour market, being slow might mean not burning in the crash.

The US drove the CCCP to bankruptcy by investing in nuclear bombs. Maybe history repeats itself.

okanat2• 1 month ago

The US was able to do that because a majority of the world including Europe was determined to exclude USSR from all trade and by putting them into extreme paranoia of total destruction. EU has lots of trading partners from the West and not everything is improved by AI.

Yes an economy that's being inflated by AI can affect acquiring of certain resources like DRAM or certain silicon quotas, if you're not joining the bandwagon. However there is enough in-house tech in Europe to prop up the critical industries that do not get affected by AI.

The US also needs someone to sell their stuff for keeping the inflated prices. A majority internal market is as unhealthy for the US as the EU.

niemandhier3• 1 month ago

I was thinking about china driving the US to bankruptcy by commoditising LLMs, thus reducing the revenue.

rurban2• 1 month ago

We do. But only for a limited context space, plant images. We do train our own Foundation Model, and it works great. It's the world frontier model. The machine is expensive, yes, but the customers also pay a lot to get it's advantages. And we got the H100`s on ebay.

We also have buerocracy and regulations problems, but not with the AI at all. Only with the military civil dual-use restriction of thermal cameras. The ones we are allowed to sell have ridicolous resolutions. It still works, but it's barely useful.

And our colleagues across town are also world leader in their AI field. They produce all the world best face recognition SW. They had to use tricks to overcome regulations, but it works. They have their own HW as us.

And again other colleagues across town do rent their GPU computes to train their models. That's for office OCR, and speech to text.

The town is Dresden btw

smashini7• 1 month ago

Where can I get more info on the model, would love to read up about it

rurban2• 1 month ago

Not much. There is a patent: https://patents.justia.com/patent/12087031

adev_3• 1 month ago

Unpopular opinion: They can not and they should not.

We live in a world where free open weight-models become competitive with frontier model within a year or two.

It is much more lucrative and proficient in term of business to solve real problems affecting the industries / govs with A.I right now than it is to do the arm race with OpenAI or Anthropic.

That is what Mistral is doing and that served them well so far.

The problem is not regulation and never has been. Regulation is a best a minor stone in the shoes of A.I company in Europe.

The problem is somewhere else: People fails to understand that there is no equivalent in the EU to the unlimited money tap of American VCs and private funding. That's just not a thing here, the investor landscape is much more dry.

Company here just cannot stay unprofitable for 25y while surfing on stocks valuation, it does not work like that in the EU.

And as such they cannot compete with behemoth like OpenAI that burn 80B$ a year of cash while staying afloat.

I do believe the approach of Mistral is the right one: Solve actual problems right now even if not Edge and construct on top of that.

Specially if politically speaking, the White House administration continue to give excellent arguments in favor of sovereignty for the incoming decade. It might be the best strategy they have.

hulitu• 1 month ago

No. Computers are made in the USA or China, OSs are made in the USA (Linux, Windows, Mac).

I'm still waiting for the European computer but all microcontrollers (no processors yet) made in EU have an ARM (British-American) Cortex and the RAM is made elsewhere.

Can Europe train a frontier AI model on the compute it owns?

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