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tangled 2 hours ago

Europe absolutely needs a home-grown AI lab, especially with Pax Americana looking increasingly shaky.

LLMs embody value systems, and American and European values are not the same (yes, there are overlaps, but also key differences).

More nefariously, I can also imagine LLMs that silently degrade their reasoning when used in a national security context of a non-US country.

So, Mistral may not be competitive with OpenAI and Anthropic, but in many contexts that doesn’t matter. And, perhaps this gap could be closed with more funding (the three billion funding figure is a rounding error next to US labs). I’m sort of surprised that the EU isn’t stepping in to support them.

bambax an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> I’m sort of surprised that the EU isn’t stepping in to support them.

It is! The second largest investor in this round is Scaleup Europe Fund:

https://eic.ec.europa.eu/eic-fund/scaleup-europe-fund_en

easytiger 26 minutes ago | parent [-]

Do you think that's a good thing?

AureliusMA 9 minutes ago | parent [-]

European money invested in a European company ought to be a good thing, don’t you think?

AureliusMA 7 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Europe has no budget of their own like the USA and China do, because there is no debt nor taxation at the European level. That’s the reason for the complication you are noticing.

andsoitis 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> LLMs embody value systems, and American and European values are not the same (yes, there are overlaps, but also key differences).

There are also some areas where values across Europe are quite divergent. Think LGBT rights and social acceptance, religion & secularism, immigration & multiculturalism.

And countries don’t fall into neat “liberal west vs conservative east”. Spain is exceptionally liberal on LGBT issues while remaining more religious than some northern countries; Denmark is socially liberal but has adopted relatively restrictive immigration policies.

swiftcoder 33 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> Spain is exceptionally liberal on LGBT issues while remaining more religious than some northern countries

When you move here, "more religious" turns out to pretty much be window dressing. Yes, they still celebrate a bunch of the old catholic holidays, parading saints around on feast days, but apart from a handful of older folks, nobody actually believes.

Particularly when compared to the US, where a large minority is still going around loudly thumping bibles, Spain is a very secular country.

dist-epoch an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

You are conflating two concepts into one words, immigration and illegal immigration are not the same thing

fallingbananna 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>I’m sort of surprised that the EU isn’t stepping in to support them.

On a similar note: Why does it have to be the EU to step up?

Why doesn't EU rather speed up making VC investments more attractive, so that EU and banks don't do the majority of investing?

*I don't have answers to these questions. It just frustrates me how many investments here come from politicians and banks, rather than from investors, people, and companies.

AureliusMA 5 minutes ago | parent [-]

It’s a different culture with different rules, if it was that easy it would have been done already. See my other comment about lack of budget at a federal level.

world2vec 20 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"Pax Sinica", Chinese Peace

dist-epoch an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> with Pax Americana looking increasingly shaky.

that is being replaced with Pax Silica

https://www.state.gov/pax-silica

utopiah an hour ago | parent [-]

This "Non-Signatory Participants : Taiwan *" is so weird precisely because Taiwan is the one who started the Silicon shield few years ago by making TSMC central to the whole ecosystem.

pembrook an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> LLMs embody value systems, and American and European values are not the same

Your values and American values might not be the same, but to say even most of Europe feels the same way is a big stretch. And not even the US has very many shared values anymore.

If we’re being honest, Europe doesn’t actually have much of a common value system outside of whatever is momentarily trendy in the urban monoculture, which is why it refuses to work together on most things and is currently being torn apart at the seams (see the rise of nationalist far right parties in most states).

The EU are a collection of states where the average citizen can’t even communicate with their neighbor in a common language beyond the level of a 4 year old. How could they possibly be aligned on a value system in the same way the US is.

AureliusMA 4 minutes ago | parent [-]

This is a spectacularly prejudiced and insulting comment.