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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

You're entirely free to move. The reason why there are no ChatGPT competitors of EU origin is the same reason why there is no SpaceX competitor in Europe. And that's not necessarily anything to be ashamed of, it simply means that the USA has the advantage and that once you reach a certain concentration of wealth it tends to lead to further concentrations of wealth. 400 years ago Europe was ascendant, today it is America and 30 years from now it will be China or India. That's just how it goes, and if it makes you feel ashamed realize then that there are no ChatGPT competitors from any other continent.

In a race like this the first mover advantage is very large, and highly driven by available funding, not by the availability of founders (of which Europe has plenty).

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Your mentality is too defeatist. Certainly there are some structures in our countries that make it harder to achieve such successes, but nothing says we cannot restructure our countries and improve. It is really partly a lack of will and partly due to bad leadership.

I'm pretty well versed in how the tech world is financed and based on a very large amount of experience it is plain obvious to me that even if the EU would come up with a viable competitor to ChatGPT before they would be a serious threat they would be bought out by US money. This is what wealth concentration is all about. You can't compete with an advantage like that.

That being said, as you've pointed out the concentration of wealth can (and does) move location over time.

So, clearly there is some way of competing with any "currently established" location. :)

So if Europe has great founders and great engineering culture why doesn’t exactly this happen more often? ;)

Seems to me we’re mostly busy doing what ChatGPT can now do automatically: building mediocre SaaS apps.

EU has all the ingredients to build a competitor. And the first mover’s advantage can be compensated by other things. The reality is that the EU tech community is just shitting their pants to throw their hat into the ring.

The EU doesn't have the money or the regulatory framework, to begin with. See how quickly they are working to make sure nobody can build this (well, make it work within the EU)

> EU has all the ingredients to build a competitor.

... Except for VC funding from non risk averse investors.

You are not going to build an EU openAI on Horizon2020 grants. Also EU investors are closer to business angels when you compare with the VC funding scene in the US.

Precisely. Anybody ignoring that factor is limiting their understanding of why this keeps happening.

Someone like you probably said that it was too late to launch a Ford’s competitor when they released the T in 1908.

The financial climate in 1908 was entirely different from the one in 2023. Please try to understand that I would love to see an EU competitor to every US firm that operates at scale in Europe for something that Europe could provide itself. Then maybe check out my bio and see that I've been a tech investor since ~2007 and have a significant amount of money on the line to back EU companies and to help them succeed when and where I can.

Even so, I'm realistic enough to know that there is no way the EU VC scene could compete with Sandhill Road when it comes to valuations and that's why any significant success created in Europe will sooner or later be US based. Examples aplenty.

It is literally 100X easier to launch an openai competitor than a spacex competitor.

The latter requires massive upfront non-retrievable investment.

100X easier is probably true. That still doesn't make it easy in an absolute sense. Check out the founders of openai and see how many of them are from Europe. Then realize that they are in the United States for one reason only: access to money. No EU VC is going to be able to match the kind of funding that is available in the US, and the longer that situation persists the bigger the chance that there will never be a reversal.

My grandmother had a nice proverb that roughly translates to 'the devil shits on the larger heap'. It is meant to convey the picture that once there is a large pile of money somewhere that that pile will grow faster than a smaller pile of money simply because having access to large amounts of capital means you can place larger bets and absorb more blows. The EU capital climate is comparatively risk averse simply because there is less money to go around.

I think you overemphasize money. Money is part of it, but there’s also a cultural issue. Crab mentality is rampant and encoded in both social norms and legislation/ regulation.

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