EU software scene would take a decade to catch up. Only alternative being if AI really delivers on being a force multiplier - but even then EU would not have access to SOTA internally.
Given what happened with DeepSeek, "not state of the art" can still be simultaneously really close to the top, very sudden, very cheap, and from one small private firm.
Not really with the EU data sources disclosure mindset, GDPR and all that. China has a leg up in the data game because they care about copyright/privacy and IP even less than US companies. EU is supposedly booting US companies because of this.
The data sources is kinda what this court case is about, and even here on HN a lot of people get very annoyed by the application of the "open source" label to model weights that don't have the source disclosure the EU calls for.
GDPR is about personally identifiable humans. I'm not sure how critical that information really is to these models, though given the difficulty of deleting it from a trained model when found, yes I agree it poses a huge practical problem.
> and even here on HN a lot of people get very annoyed by the application of the "open source" label to model weights that don't have the source disclosure the EU calls for.
That's because they are obviously trained on copyrighted content but nobody wants to admit it openly because that opens them to even more legal trouble. Meanwhile China has no problem violating copyright or IP so they will gladly gobble up whatever they can.
I don't think you can really compete in this space with the EU mindset, US is playing it smart and leaving this to play out before regulating. This is why EU is not the place for these kinds of innovations, the bureaucrats and the people aren't willing to tolerate disruption.
What does the EU lack? Is it the big corp infra? Or something more fundamental?
In my opinion, we lack two things:
a) highly qualified people, even European natives move to Silicon Valley. There is a famous photo of the OpenAI core team with 6 Polish engineers and only 5 American ones;
b) culture of calculated risk when it comes to investment. Here, bankruptcy is an albatross around your neck, both legally and culturally, and is considered a sign of you being fundamentally inept instead of maybe just a misalignment with the market or even bad luck. You'd better succeed on your first try, or your options for funding will evaporate.
Worth pointing out that DeepMind was founded in London, the HQ is still here, and so is the founder and CEO. I've lived in North London for 8 years now, there are _loads_ of current-and-former DeepMind AI people here. Now that OpenAI, Anthropic, and Mistral have offices here the talent density is just going up.
On risk, we're hardly the Valley, but a failed startup isn't a black mark at all. It's a big plus in most tech circles.
The UK is a bit different in this regard, same as Scandinavia.
But in many continental countries, bankruptcy is a serious legal stigma. You will end up on public "insolvency lists" for years, which means that no bank will touch you with a 5 m pole and few people will even be willing to rent you or your new startup office space. You may even struggle to get banal contracts such as "five SIMs with data" from mobile phone operators.
There seems to be an underlying assumption that people who go bankrupt are either fatally inept or fraudsters, and need to be kept apart from the "healthy" economy in order not to endanger it.