This is a bottom feeder mentality. Europe has enough bright people and resources to truly compete in the AI race. There is something wrong when the only selling point is that it's local.
So not only outpriced, outperformed, but also outregulated.
Idk i wish there was some bright light in the future, but i dont see it
We need a lot more hardware for universal LLMs (probably 10x, if not more), and we need it to be cheaper.
If anything, I would fund a DRAM maker in Europe.
I wouldn't. I can think of at least 10 regulations (labor and environmental chef amongst them) that would render such a maker uncompetitive from the start. Chinese makers would eat its lunch.
Also, at this point DRAM availability is becoming a security risk.
The way is to factor externalities in the final price, reward sustainable behaviour and set better standards. And that's what's going on: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/12/how-europes-new-...
The same applies to labour conditions and quality standards. And don't bring up arguments like "it can't work" or "that hurt competitiveness": all workers around the world want the exact same thing, a livable planet for their children. The only ones to object are the global elite who one ends up defending when they make the current status quo sound inevitable.
Actually, they don't. First of all they want livable conditions for themselves. Ecologism is a hobby for people with full bellies.
I remember during communism which failed to even feed and clothe us - but The Party kept telling us that we were actually winning and we were so morally superior to those "corrupt capitalists". This is what happens when ideological justifications replace rational thought.
Then it's a good thing that Chinese bellies are satisfied, we can get to those existential problems, now.
Almost the entire planet where this debate is raging, is the part of the planet where people have full bellies. On average, too full, even.
Ecologism is also a hobby for people that don't want their kids to starve, as people living in Mesopotamia around the time of Akkad, or people around the Sea of Aral starting in the 1980s have discovered.
Exactly. And most of the pollution happens in the other part.
We’re crippling our economies and render our companies uncompetitive to merely export environmental effects around, while pushing our voter base to the extremes.
All for naught too, because when the orc armies come (attracted by our weakness to even defend ourselves) they will do the the environment what they did in Ukraine…
Where does it happen exactly?
> All for naught too, because when the orc armies come (attracted by our weakness to even defend ourselves) they will do the the environment what they did in Ukraine…
Who are the orcs here? Russia? Europe is rearming like it's the 1980s.
And with half the score of the top models, that's where Mistral is at.
As it is now, no tech company in the EU will use it, if they were just 80% from the top, that would be more feasible.
What moat does Google have that's so special in search?
You need to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to scale globally in search. And you have to take the market away from Google at the same time. Good luck.
OpenAI and Anthropic are doing that right now in LLMs, hyper scaling to a billion people. Having a billion users you can actually serve is a moat.
When OpenAI is done attaching a full ad model to GPT, they'll be able to serve a billion users profitably globally with zero subscriptions. This is what keeps Google up at night: ~$500 billion in ad revenue up for grabs circa 2030.
Any service with hundreds of millions of users is a lucrative ad business. TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Google, Amazon.
OpenAI's moat, if they get there soon enough, is that they'll be able to lean into a high margin ad business to press down on the market and kill everybody. You won't be able to serve the infrastructure to compete at the cost structure they'll able to subsidize at via the high margin ad business. This is an extraordinarily straight-forward move, and it's comically anti-competitive, and nobody will stop them from doing it. Their mistake is that they're at least two years behind where they should be in advertising.
Anthropic is the one at the most risk from the Chinese models, they have the weaker everyday consumer side. Enterprise won't be supported by an ad model very well.
I’m surprised that there’s no domestic chip production either, we don’t have our own CPUs or GPUs, meanwhile China is spinning up manufacturing so they don’t have to work around the Nvidia export restrictions as much.
I like Mistral and there’s cool stuff going on like how EuroLLM models know Latvian language and all the other EU ones better than way bigger models, but we don’t have anything frontier.
At the very least, they should be distilling Kimi K3 and GLM 5.3 as much as possible and working on MoE models like ~35B and ~120B versions to match Qwen.
The CCP is able to plan the economy. We used to be able to do that in the 60s-70s, at least in France, but that mindset is long gone.
I haven't heard of updates on ESMC in a while, but that has been a thing on the horizon for a while, with production planned to start in fall 2027 last I read.
EU needs to meet their own demand, the US wants to be the global provider.
Isn't it to be the globally dominant provider of such a service? Everything else is in service of that goal.
After all, what else than governments and corporations will be left after the rest of us poors will inevitably be priced out of the economy?
Care to elaborate why you consider this an absolute must? I don't see why, say, France can't build an "AI valley" somewhere near to on of their nuclear power plants and commit to provide X amount of energy for some fixed price for a decade. To me the main reasons for not building top AI labs with frontier models in EU seems to be:
- Venture money is not there (or people controlling the money are not on board to invest into such labs).
- Weak political will from countries who could do that to actually go for it.
- Top scientist who could work on it choosing to go for much higher payouts in the US.
One single frontier computing cluster costs some €30-40B initially and becomes virtually worth zero every four years. That’s the equivalent of France’s full-year VC market for all industries combined times three. A single Member State, already indebted far beyond sustainable limits, cannot subsidize expensive, long-term 40bn€ hardware risks from its national budget more than 33 times without both falling foul of state aid rules and blowing up the debt crisis even more seriously than it already is.
The three factors you mention, missing VCs, political reluctance, and brain drain, are by-products of exactly these fragmented fiscal structures. European capital is not missing; it is frozen at 33T€ (roughly) in risk-averse national bank deposits and Member State pension regulations instead of in one unified Capital Markets Union to pay for high risks related to enormous tech bets. Similarly, leading researchers are not looking to work on a better salary but for liquid equity, which is not available at the high valuations seen in the NASDAQ through deeply integrated public markets.
With insufficient scale for an entire continent in finance, even the best AI valley in a single country will hit the wall much faster than a US hyper-scaler investing greater amounts in CAPEX in one single quarter than every member state treasury.
Money flows globally. The question is why are investors choosing not to invest as much in Europe?
Access to money isn't the issue.
You are saying "right now" as if EU is seriously investing into developing its own AI hardware (both training and inference) but I'm not aware of any serious attempts to build such supply chain in EU.