Why can the Chinese build models and Europe cannot? The algorithms behind this stuff are not that complicated, are they? Is it the cost of energy? The illegality and difficulty of obtaining all the data in the world? Lack of capital to start moonshot labs? Lack of optimism?

The Chinese just seem to have an ability to get it done without anywhere near the GPUs of the US and Europe can buy these GPUs.

I think relying on the US and China for AI is probably not ideal? For example I think Qwen have not released the Omni models as open weights in the past, it’d be good to know if they’re doing this here?

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EagnaIonat an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> and Europe cannot?

Well there is Mistral. The EU is ahead on specialised models than general purpose LLMs.

There is.

- Flux3

- Kyutai (Open source AI lab)

- H Company

- LightOn

- AMD Silo (Finland)

- OpenEuroLLM and EuroLLM

There is probably more, but that's off the top of my head.

	▲	miohtama 32 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		These are mostly not significant businesses with large value capture or creation. I hope it could change though.

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miohtama 34 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In Europe AI is seen as evil that must be stopped. Unlike in the US, AI doomers have Commission well manned. Ursula addressed this in her State of Union speech yesterday. The EU rather chooses consumer protection, even if it means killing AI and maintaining status quo.

Because any AI company would be hit by hate and regulation derived from this, no VC invests in the EU. It's more state and large enterprise investments, good old East Germany style. And historically it has not been that efficient.

Or simply: lack of risk taking appetite.

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apexalpha an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The Chinese were directed to it from their government.

We have no such government with a mandate to do that.

	▲	EagnaIonat an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		While there is no official mandate, many countries of the EU are working on models that are government funded. The main one (IIRC) is Spains ALIA. https://alia.gob.es/eng There is also OpenEuroLLM and EuroLLM. https://www.openeurollm.eu
	▲	jambutters an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Nah, they wouldn't have released deepseek open source if they were the case
	▲	podocarp 20 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Source?

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rw2 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Great engineering schools and good tech companies to train them post graduation.

Europe has none;

The best tech university in Europe when compared to Chinese/US equivalents won't even rank in the top 10.

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trvz an hour ago | parent | next [-]

ETH Zürich is up there high, particularly for computer science.

The LLM they were involved in last year (Apertus) still was a letdown.

As someone who actually went there, my impression is that Europe in general is complacent when it comes to computers, and any bright eyed student will get their motivation choked out of them in academia here.

If you want to do things with AI in Europe, you can have a bigger effect by working for a consulting company than being at a university. That's … not a good sitatution.

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danielscrubs 43 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The "Attention is all you need" paper authors where four (!) Europeans and one from US, amongst others. The "Top 10" lists are just complete rubbish, not worth the paper they are written on.

Europeans do not have the hustle mentality to break the law like Uber so you wont see them compete in anything data heavy. They also are quite risk adverse, probably from having a lower Gini coefficient.

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bitexploder an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Simpler view for me: this is one of the most capital intense technologies to exist. Europe does not have enough capital to compete. China is building its own chips. It’s own everything. Silicon up. How do you compete with that. Only Google and maybe Aamazon is doing it domestically.

	▲	EagnaIonat an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> How do you compete with that. I feel people are too focused on US/China and don't pay attention to what is going on in the world. ASML in the Netherlands for example was the only company in the world that makes EUV lithography machines, which all the major chip companies depend on. China recently reverse engineered their work to create machines since late 2025, but not sold commercially. Ireland has chip production facilities. EU might not be in the top 2, but it is not out of the running at all.

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ffsm8 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

It's well documented that the Chinese models were enabled by training on openapi and anthropics models...

Europe actually follows americas rules, hence they're not doing that.

It's braindead for sure considering how the US treats europe, but it is what it's