>Do they really need to be anything more than the best European option to be successful?

With government agencies and some large enterprise? NO, it doesn't need anything more than being European, though I fully expect each EU government will then want its own in-house AI in order to launder some taxpayer money to the right consultancies with ties to political parties.

With consumers on the open free market? YES it needs a lot more than just being European, since without any tariffs or regulations, consumers will always vote with their wallet for the best product and best value for money they can get, no matter where it comes from, no matter the geopolitics. Period. See Chinese made TikTok.

And if you look in the CONSUMER tech product market, it's been captured by US SW & HW, and Chinese HW with some Japanese presence. Other than Spotify, EU products are notoriously absent form the consumer tech industry since they couldn't out-innovate the US and they couldn't cost-cut China, so they got squeezed out.

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pegasus 6 days ago | parent [-]

Strange to assume an open free market and no tariffs in today's political climate.

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FirmwareBurner 6 days ago | parent [-]

Tarifs on AI software? Who? When? Where?

I'm talking about the present not making up streamen since that goes nowhere as anyone can make up anything.

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pegasus 6 days ago | parent [-]

There's been a lot of talk on European tariffs on US software services. We are in the middle of a tariff war, in case you didn't notice. Hardly a strawman...

	▲	FirmwareBurner 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		>There's been a lot of talk on European tariffs on US software services. If political talks were cookies I would have died of diabetes 500 times by now. Show me actions, not political posturing and virtue signaling to gain applause from the unwashed masses. Because the EU has been talking about digital sovereignty for 10+++ years now and nothing close to what the US has came out of it. Only more talks and more bureaucracy. But let's say they will actually do it, how are they gonna tariff US tech when it's being sold from Europe by EU companies? When my EU state buys AWS and Office 365, they don't buy from Amazon and Microsoft Seattle so you can tariff them, they buy from Microsoft Dublin and Amazon Luxembourg, both EU companies. That's why EU's tariffs on US tech are actually the fines they issue regularly on big tech companies. You make laws with a barrier so impossibly high (like having to eliminate "hate speech" in maximum 10 minutes since it was posted) that only your local companies can clear because they're small or absent in things like social media, and then the fines start rolling like off a money printer.