2y ago

‘It’s just a matter of time’: why AI could help Europe create its own Apple or Google

www.theguardian.com

37 comments

We don't want them. Actually, Google and Apple and Microsoft need to be broken up.
- If that happens, they could make an aliance and be immune to anti-trust regulations because they would be technically different companies
  
  No they would be royally fucked if they do that. Price fixing is illegal.
The reason why the USA has so many tech gigants and the EU doesn't has nothing to do with talent or market size, but instead everything with low taxes, lax regulations, massive tax breaks and generally the political will to shovel billions into private companies and letting the population pay the bill for it.
Ireland and Malta are the countries most overseas tech companies (and gambling and porn companies) choose as their European seat, not because they have an amazing amount of great skilled talent, but because they have really low taxes and regulations.
Also, the EU really doesn't want companies that are so big and important that they are more powerful than the government.
Lastly, another issue is that the EU, when handing out money to companies, prefers the Airbus model. Instead of concentrating everything into one city, like in Shenzhen or Silicon Valley, they like to spread everything out over all of Europe.
None of that is even remotely changed due to AI.
- low taxes, lax regulations, massive tax break
  I call complete and utter bs. If taxes where a reason, Silicon Valley would be on Virgin Islands.
  Ireland and Malta are the countries most overseas tech companies (and gambling and porn companies) choose as their European seat, not because they have an amazing amount of great skilled talent, but because they have really low taxes and regulations.
  And this proves your view being overly simplistic and unconnected to the real world. They chose to settle their profits in these countries, not their development.
  Also, the EU really doesn’t want companies that are so big and important that they are more powerful than the government.
  Dude, holy shit. You're confusing the EU with China.
  Lastly, another issue is that the EU, when handing out money to companies, prefers the Airbus model. Instead of concentrating everything into one city, like in Shenzhen or Silicon Valley, they like to spread everything out over all of Europe.
  That's at least an interesting thought but probably neglectable in the bigger picture.
  The real reason is, that you need talent and you can attract global talent with the global highest pay. US was rich before, so global talent naturally gravitated towards it. Furthermore and probably foremost, the US were decades ahead of most countries after WWII. It is no suprise that computerization happened there first and that subsequent business models like private operating systems could develop there first, as a very result of that. Everything boils down to the trajectories of the war.
  
  I would like to add that foss is very strong in europe as well.
  Due to our ambitions in being privacy respective and libertarian for our software the communities thrived.
  
  I guess, you are American? In that case, please read up on European history.
No thanks, we good
I don’t see it happening. For the same reasons as why European tech startups failed to dominate the last three decades. The European market is culturally too fractured and European startups tend to focus on their own country’s market for too long. The US and China have a gigantic internal market with no language barrier and little cultural differences, companies from there can become big before they even go international.
It’s not a surprise that the European tech startups that do found international success are from small countries that speak English very well. Like Spotify, ASML and Skype. Businesses from there have no choice but to focus on the international market from the start since their internal market is too small.
I’m from the Netherlands and I think I have never used a product from a German or French tech startup even though they are my neighbors. The only German one I know is Wirecard and that was a fraudulent company. German and French startups think their own country’s market is the most important.
- I generally agree with you, but I think ASML is a bad example. They're not a startup, they make very specialized equipment for very specialized companies. You can find lots of european companies that are very successful in their sector that you never heard about.
- Not a tech example, but don’t forget about BioNTech, the vaccine maker
  
  Are they a startup?
- I thinky you're right and this also applies to the single market. The tech sector is fragmented not just because of language/culture but because of different regulatory regimes in each country. The EU tries to solve that for member states but even that is stymied by so many competing national interests. The EU can't seem to agree between it being a club of nations or a single state and so we end up with a mix instead - it fails to be the best of either option as a result.
  Also it doesn't help that the UK has left the EU nor the attitude in Europe generally allowing international companies to buy up tech companies. Look at ARM - UK based chip manufacturer but bought out by a Japanese company and now being floated on the US stock market.
  For me the failure of a European tech giant to emerge is in part due to a failure of the EU. It needs to decide what it wants to be and push in that direction. The half way house to try and keep everyone happy is not working and it is one of the reasons the UK left (it was a close referendum and many factors played into the vote but it's been easier for people to simplify that story to black/white and entirely the UKs fault and based out of narrow issues, so there has been no real look at the many factors that drove that decision and no effort in the EU to look at what it could and should be doing to be better).
Europe arguably already has created very successful AI powered products. It's not Apple level yet, but there is no denying the success.
Already quite old, but still better than most, if not all, alternatives is deepl.com to translate text. I very much prefer them over google translate, their results are just plain better.
LAION, which you may have heard of already due to their LAION-5B dataset is an organization that provides a set of images together with their captions to be used as training data. Googles imagen was trained on that for example.
It's a German non profit organization, the product is freely available for everyone.
Also in the realm of text to image AI is stable diffusion. Arguably the best text to image model for actual art, due to the widely available additions that allow fine-tuning of the results. Midjourney makes esthetically pleasing images and DALL-E can do text now. But there is simply no other text to image model that can produce a landscape view with exactly this or that shape. Or a portrait of exactly this person.
Stable diffusion is free and open source and provided for everyone free of charge. It was developed in Germany.
A lack of hyper capitalism makes these companies fail in the metrics usually used to determine success, but that doesn't mean they are unsuccessful or unimportant.
why AI could help Europe create its own Apple or Google
You can condense the article's answer to the question the headline asks down to one sentence: "Because AI is disruptive".
With the amount of money the EU currently invests, the amount of GPUs we have in comparison and the legislation, I seriously doubt it.
Mistral has proven to be capable. But AFAIK they just have one model to offer and it's surprisingly good for its size, but quite small. I wonder what they're working on to sell.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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Mistral develops large language models – the technology that underpins AI tools such as ChatGPT – and Mensch believes this could hand the initiative to a continent producing a new wave of fast-moving startups.
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And he has already achieved standing among his peers: he will be attending the global AI safety summit this week with other tech chief executives, world leaders, experts and civil society figures at Bletchley Park in the UK.
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Europe is a world leader in an array of industries from fashion to pharmaceuticals, cars and aerospace, but it has underperformed in tech, despite a skilled workforce, formidable academic talent and the opportunities afforded by the single market.
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Fredrik Cassel is a general partner at Stockholm-based venture capital firm Creandum, which has a record of picking winners, including Spotify, the £24bn music streaming business that is one of the outstanding European tech successes of the past few decades.
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A lot of European venture capital bets have not come off – as is standard in the industry – but Creandum’s instincts on the potential of companies such as buy-now-pay-later firm Klarna and fashion app Depop have been proved right.
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Tom Wehmeier, a partner at Atomico, says the tougher market conditions are due to higher interest rates in response to inflation in Europe and the US, which made it harder for tech firms to raise funds.
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The original article contains 1,412 words, the summary contains 254 words. Saved 82%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Are we talking about the country where a small group of people can enjoy the benefits of working 24 hours a day for a handfull of fancy tech companies all owned and controlled by an even smaller group of people while the rest of the country can't afford to live anywhere else than in their car, doing fentanyl all day? Wow, I really hope, one day, we're gonna have such a big fancy tech company, too!

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