Does Europe need to train a frontier AI model, <i>at all</i>?<p>"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).<p>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.
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.
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?
> <i>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?</i><p>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, <i>e.g.</i> in seeking to ban facial recognition or social scoring, it does so clumsily.<p>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.
> What does it say about progress that the same laws that protect human rights also stifle innovation?<p>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?
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It might or might not be legal, but who's getting paid when ChatGPT uses knowledge from a phpbb forum from 2008? Is that human person well taken care of in today's society? I use ChatGPT too, but if ChatGPT's coming for all jobs, don't the humans that fed the machine have a right to not be lost and forgotten?
> <i>don't the humans that fed the machine have a right to not be lost and forgotten?</i><p>Honest answer, no, not if it was publicly published and available for free, not indefinitely.<p>From an ethical (not legal) perspective, 18 years seems long enough for something like that to enter the public domain.
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European countries have higher freedom of press than the US. Bearing arms is not a human right in Europe, different culture.<p>What? Europe has more human rights protections than the US and stronger enforcement of them, even against the state, by many metrics. Freedom of expression ends where other human rights begin, is protecting hate speech and Holocaust denial really something worthwhile?
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.<p>europe is huxley nightmarish utopia worst parts without any of the bright ones.
> We can debate the details and implementation but EU legislature is, at least in spirit, trying to protect human rights<p>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.
It's certainly a good question. On the idealistic side it's the right choice, people should have the right to have a say in their own data since it's implicitly copyrighted. GDPR has done wonders to prevent careless personal data leaks that are so common in the US, and other kinds of abuse.<p>In a more practical view though I'm not sure if it'll do anything to stop job replacement from automation as such. Most corporations seem all to eager to make deals with OAI or Anthropic here anyway, and if not that it'll be Chinese ones.<p>There is a question of "representation", like if a model cannot be trained on the data of one specific country with a specific language, then it does not learn it and the people of that country are now at a disadvantage when trying to leverage the result. Maybe that's a good thing, maybe not, depending on the perspective of how the model is being applied relative to the average person. If it's something that makes their job easier then it's a negative, if it's used by the government to automate scanning all chats then it would be beneficial for it to suck. For widespread languages that doesn't apply of course, so the UK and Spain might as well be exempt.<p>In general I think it's good for the EU to try and slow down adoption of bleeding edge tech so the US population with its lack of regulations can act as guinea pigs and absorb most of the early damage until we figure out what is the best approach when we get around to adopting it. Even if that means missing out on potential early upsides too. An old example is lots of late adopters going straight to gigabit fiber instead of being stuck on copper DSL.
You don't see how protecting the commons from being exploited by hypercapitalists for their own profit is protecting the rights of the average person?
Bullshit. The AI Act is not the problem, Mistral models are definitely usable and some were/are competitive.<p>European future looks bright compared to the political landscape the US has now
Some of those seem like good things TBH.
If your product can't function in a way that respects humans' right to privacy, your product is the problem, not the humans' rights.
"Innovation"
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.
I don't believe Europe can build models that can compete with American ones.<p>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.<p>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?<p>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.<p>What Europe should do is to finally tackle its fundamental issues with corporate laws, startups and incentivize more money to flow into venture capital.<p>Essentially we need a bunch of Mistrals, but with more competition and better incentives.<p>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.
You also need to scrape huge amounts of data with no regard for copyright which is:<p>1. No longer possible the same way it was for openai and anthropic and<p>2. Much more regulated in the EU<p>Also the EU would need state backing since we don't have the same private capital, meaning the regulations are even tighter.
You can do what frontier labs do today which is to properly license things that are copyrighted and use open source web crawls for things that don’t have copyright issues. You can then also commission new datasets (volume needed goes down when quality is high).<p>The European regulations are the thing that will kneecap anything meaningful coming out of Europe. Mind blowing to me that this is worth the tradeoff since Europe will be beholden to other frontier labs be it China or the US, so regulations accomplishing very little if anything on impacting actual AI development and losing vast amounts of leverage in the process.
Regulations aside, Europe is extremely divided. There's constant resistance from individual states, disputes and far right extremism gaining traction. At this point, it seems like EU can barely agree to make any decision.
> 1. In order to build competitive models, you need to offer competitive salaries and equity.<p>FWIW, for the equity part there's a proposal expected to pass for next year: <a href="https://www.eu-inc.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.eu-inc.org/</a> (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.<p>AFAIK it's designed by lawyers and old money, with little to no input from tech entrepreneurs.
It had input from entrepreneurs but was disregarded.
The culture's still all wrong. If you have a startup that failed in SV, that's par for the course. Better luck next time! If you fail in the EU, that's the kiss of death. Your startup <i>failed</i>???
This sentiment is so wrong, yet so bloody persistent. I know plenty of european entrepreneurs, myself included, that went through one or more screw ups. All the ones that stuck with entrepreneurship eventually landed a hit.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
> all we got in the UK was the BBC Micro, way back in the early 1980s, and since then tech has been culturally uncool.<p>Off the top of my head, ARM is from Cambridge.
Can Europe train a frontier AI model?<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>There as also this great write-up which explains the trajectory Europe currently has when it comes to AI compute here: <a href="https://europe2031.ai/" rel="nofollow">https://europe2031.ai/</a><p>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.
Under normal circumstances, I'd agree with most folks here, it'd be highly unlikely.<p>However, we're (i think officially) in an arms race.<p>I wouldn't want to bet against anyone in these unprecedented times (with plenty of historical parallels).
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).
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?<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_High-Performance_Computing_Joint_Undertaking" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_High-Performance_Comp...</a><p>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.<p><a href="https://www.medialaws.eu/the-euro-3c-initiative-a-new-dawn-for-europes-digital-sovereignty-ambitions/" rel="nofollow">https://www.medialaws.eu/the-euro-3c-initiative-a-new-dawn-f...</a>
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.<p>I think that is the way forward: work with whoever has common interests and is willing to work together.<p>I think the point is that the EU does not necessarily make cooperation between governments any easier.
Compute 2027 coming soon ;)
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.<p>Asking for sensible AI policy is like asking for a base on mars.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.<p>someone explain this to me please
Sort of, if you squint right.<p>The EU is in some ways closer to a confederation, but with various "hacks" - in the form of various treaties - to try to work around the problems that led the US to abandon it in favour of a federal model.<p>It's largely down to very different levels of willingness to integrate more, and various levels of opposition to the kind of constitutional changes that would be required for a federal model.
Id say the EU is less federal because each member country maintains its own sovereignty and local laws. Its more of a coalition of the willing. While in the US the federal gov can override states. The EU also has each state vote on different legislations. (Massive oversimplification)
Because the laws are different? Are you really confused?
In the US, the freedom is explicitly for the people, not Federal nor State government. States are relatively more free than the Federal government, but both are greatly restricted by the Constitution. Before the Constitution, the US had a previous government under the Articles of Confederation (see below) that had many deficiencies and only gave freedom to member States.<p>The EU is organized more similar to the US under the Articles of Confederation.<p>The first American government (Articles of Confederation) gave State governments almost unlimited power e.g. they could print their own money. It did not grant freedom to the people in any meaningful way. States were free to abuse this power both against their own citizens and, more importantly, the other member States. This created many practical problems.<p>The second and current American government (Constitution) learned lessons from this experience. It removed a limited set of key powers from the States and gave it to the Federal government such as the creation of currency. It also forced all States to interact with each other on the same terms, with strict oversight from the Federal government. Additionally, it explicitly granted rights to the people rather than their State governments, since the States had demonstrated they could not be trusted to do the right thing. These changes forced the States to play nicely with each other and treat their people better.<p>These changes were a large improvement. Almost every law an American experiences is State law, because States have much more freedom to create laws. The Federal government can only make laws from a short list. Both State and Federal governments are strictly prohibited from creating many kinds of laws.<p>In the US, freedom is for the people, not for the member States. The Federal government has even less freedom than the member States to make law.
> In the US, the freedom is explicitly for the people, not Federal nor State government.<p>I don't see how anyone can make this claim in 2026 and not expect to be laughed out of the room? In practice, freedom is for sale; it's not available to the people nor the citizens.
The US lays claim to all kinds of bullshit. But more to the point; different values, different laws - does it matter how centralized the control is? I would argue neither is “more” free, just free in different ways. US has a huge problem in equal access to the law, which undermines freedom no matter how good the laws are.
You don't think US states compete with, undercut and stifle each other?<p>Second question: you think the USA has a strong federal government?<p>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.
>You don't think US states compete with, undercut and stifle each other?<p>Compete with each other, yes.<p>But all US states take pride in Silicon Valley being American.<p>No EU project for its own "Silicon Valley" can succeed, because the French would insist on it being in France, Germans would insist on Germany, Dutch in the Netherlands, etc.
Why even bother creating a repo like this? Why not just link to a ChatGPT conversation?
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.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>They are not bad, and they have made huge progress, but you're still one year behind if not more.<p>May matter less and less as time progresses, or it may matter more if research further speeds up.<p>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.
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.
thanks chatgpt
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.
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.
> Can Europe train a frontier AI model on the compute it owns?<p>No
Who cares? Just distill some existing frontier models and run the inference yourselves. Instant sovereign AI.
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.<p>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.
They really shouldn’t.
those that know, do not talk?
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