Solely profit-optimizing free market thinking destroys society and the planet.
More like brainwashed. The propaganda for the American Way of Life™ is relentless.
Perhaps you’re thinking of wealth taxes rather than effective tax rates? https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/effectivetaxrate.asp
If everything is taken care of me from taxes, why do I need money? Take it all.
What about 40%? 50%?
Most people agree that taxes need to be paid for the common good of society. However, many people disagree about the correct amount and increasingly about the usage of said taxes.
That is the real problem in my opinion.
I pay about 6% for public services, around 8% for health insurance, and around 25% for the public pension insurance. The issue isn't taxes, it's almost entirely demographics.
So I wouldn’t say high taxes are fundamentally European.
Ireland is neither of those, fwiw. I get pretty decent money here, and pay a marginal rate of 52% on everything over 80k.
So, in a way, you get what you pay for.
I did work on some cool medical device and ML tech back in EU, associated with a university and later a start up. But regulation became a PITA.
What I probably miss the most about EU (apart from family) is good food.
In the US there's usually a good variety of food from all different cultures available. When I spent two months in Spain, I got really, really tired of the same three seasonings the Spanish put on everything. I craved Mexican food like crazy the whole time.
Spanish food is great, don't get me wrong - I wish we had it here in the sticks where I live - but I'm used to a bit more variety.
Europe gdp for same years (in trillions): 2015 16.89 2016 16.88 2017 17.88 2018 18.89 2019 19.31 2020 17.42 Now by simple math a healthy gdp growth is around 4%, so just by creating and/or backing up 2 similar companies (in Europe) will revenue ~2.5% of the total entire European gdp. What is going on, are the European Leaders sabotaging our economy on purpose?
Big claim. Apart from Mistral OCR, I didn't find any of their models remotely useful.
They do have a chance to become sole AI provider for France as French are trying to break from US tech, not because their product is useful.
Sounds like a cry to raise more money, which is inline with their initial pitch [0]
Based on what? is that a feeling or based on evidence?
I don't see why Mistral would stop getting better. It will, just more slowly. Eventually it will be good enough, and continue to be good enough.
I daily drive Ministral-3-3B-Reasoning, getting a nice 70 tok/s on my GPU. its actually much faster than Google/DDG searches and I use it a ton when coding to check methods and remember ways to implement things. Its better than the qwen stuff of the same size because its not filled with ccp bs.
You do know that mistral distilled from deepseek, yeah?
It's a bit deeper than that. If AI becomes as ubiquitous as imagined, which it seems it will, it's not just a "digital service". It's a primary utility - like electricity, water or highways. Because without it your productivity will plummet. We aren't there yet - we will be there in a few years.
Why would it plummet?
Surely we could just keep doing what we've been doing for the past 50 years. That doesn't go away because AI. The promise of AI is a productivity increase after implementing it. It doesn't change the productivity of not implementing it.
Europe has a golden chance with the current mass outflux of talent from the US and I really hope we grasp it. I just don't see my country (NL) doing that as our political class are nearly as stupid as the Americans.
The broader business world isn't "big tech", but it's still bigger than it.
They would never have been the success they were in the first place without California. It was the culture, the conditions (no non-competes) and the lax regulation (non-enforcement of rules aimed at avoiding monopolies which allowed Facebook to buy any emerging competitor not owned by the Chinese government) which created them.
Even if you consider open source, the majority of contributions are from US companies.
There are some companies contributing to GCC and clang from UK, GraalVM and V8 are partially in European sites but from American companies nonetheless.
There is OCaml in France, more no idea.
Europe is not Germany.
Electricity price is 2-3x times more expensive in Germany.
Electricity price for electricity intensive professional is around 12-14cts/kWh in France and can be reduce under 10cts/kWh for big consummers.
Which is competitive with the cost in several US states (it is still higher than Texas but not 3x).
Nordic countries should be able to align on that too.
Power matters, but what matters is power availability not cost.
For decades we've lived under the pretense that US is our main ally, and that realistically we'd never end up in a position where:
A) They'd become enemies.
B) They could just turn off access.
One silver lining with Trump becoming president, is that he forced European leaders to revisit those assumptions. Sure, Trump will not be around forever, but we know what types of leaders the US public is able to vote to the top, and what they are capable of doing.
Unless Trump invades Greenland and EU makes sure that US tech is off limits for at least a decade to come, a revolution happens in UK or France goes full nationalistic there won’t be “European tech” beyond niche. Currently the “American AI” isn’t American, it’s bunch of Europeans, Canadians and Asians building the AI that will serve US and EU customers under the supervision of Americans using European, Arab, Russian and American money.
It is incorporated in America but as Musk demonstrates, if you increase taxes or allow certain sexual relationships that CEO’s don’t approve they can just take it somewhere else.
And you know who realizes all this? The Nvidia CEO [1][2].
There is now a 70 year history of Europe being designed as and becoming comfortable with being a US vassal state, from the end of WW2 to Bretton-Woods, the Marshall Plan and NATO.
I don't see fascist takeovers in the UK, France or Germany as changing any of this. If anything, it'll just fracture any semblance of European unity. It'll be the enemy within as those forces will be most aligned with the US.
The horseshoe theory is in full swing lately, in UK after right wing libertarian rule came the left wing labour and now it’s once again the right wingers. They again won’t solve anything and more swings will happen until someone realizes that it’s the US trade that isn’t working.
The rest of Europe is similar, they just happen to have more damping as most have fractured parliaments with no one having majority but the general direction change is happening regardless. People aren’t going to be like “tough luck, we choose poorly to rely on US and we will be permanent underclass from now on”.
For one thing, there's nothing remotely left wing about Starmer's Labor government. Labor is firmly a center-right party. So were the Blair and Brown governments. So we've had unbroken right-wing rule in the UK since Thatcher was elected almost 50 years ago.
If Jeremy Corbyn had been elected, he may well have been a left-wing PM but he wasn't. Instead, the threat of that caused Labor insiders to engage in a vile character assassination scheme that brought Keir Starmer to power, all to support US imperialism. There's nothing remotely left-wing about that.
Basically everything that's in the Draghi report.
Meanwhile, EU bureaucrats' heads appear to remain firmly buried in the sand.
He definitely did a lot to help, but the damage needs to be irreparable so that business can feel safe from US competition. He needs to do do something so outrageous that Germany would not mind losing the US car market for example.
The difference now is that he's turning the screws and putting the pressure on. Call this "the hard way". I can understand why EU leaders do not like this one bit. But also, they had their chance...
They're monopolies or quasi monopolies.
China has their own because they block Apple Microsoft and Google, they are not competing with them.
It's ok to think it's a benevolent dictator type situation but it is what it is. In fact the usual reply to this isn't a rebuttal but rather "what alternative is better?" to which I have no answer.
they’re so hostile to it (lawfare) and have seemingly little innovation comparatively
why is that?
This just isn’t the case in my country and most of Central/Eastern Europe at all. I’m under 30, when my parents were my age, this country had just started recovering from communism.
Besides, there’s more to economy than just AI. If anything, I’d rather see my tax money invested into multiple different fields than having it gambled on a single hyped tech field that might as well turn out to not be so easily profitable or world changing in the end.
There’s so much more to say, but it’s a big mess. And European voters and politicians are far too slow and unfocused to change their system drastically. By the time those incentives and problems are fixed it will be too late to be anything but a vassal state.
I felt for a while the "European Union" has been turned into a foil for nations that had absolutely no intention to really integrate. Unless actual integration, simple one rule for all on the continent, happens within the next handfuls of months, then this ship's going down and I organize to exit stage left, Trump ain't Xi.
It's one of the things that have been recently brought up again in the EU parliament, but getting everyone to agree on a common stock market is not going to be easy.
To stay at your level of discourse:
this is some next level cope the amount of wasted effort to get to the same result in the EU when compared to the US or China is insane, a major drag, and is taking hardworking people down the drain
The 1st and 3rd AI nations in Europe are not in the EU though, so if you restrict it to just the EU it falls well behind china
He is trying to justify the continued existence of the AI bubble in his country, claiming that, somehow, us Americans have figured it out and made LLMs work. We haven't, nobody has.
LLMs don't work. They cannot think. They do not understand what you are asking them to do. They statistically reproduce text written by other people, and they cannot do so well. They are not good assistants, they are not good code authors, they are not good debuggers, they cannot help you find security exploits... they can only mimic what it'd look like if they did, as long as you don't squint too hard.
All of the LLM startups are very quickly running out of runway, and will most likely never become profitable. OpenAI may collapse next year. Anthropic may collapse in 2028. Microsoft/Github seems to be pulling back on their Copilot bullshit and may just end up killing it entirely.
Arthur Mensch is just trying to keep Mistral alive a little bit longer until the bubble pops, and is saying whatever whatever it takes to get a little more blood from that stone.
What is the reason for the recent deluge of CVEs with working exploits to open source projects then?
Is this just a clever application of the harness, so its not inherently LLM at all? Did Anthropic figure out how to take the next step that changes my mind on LLMs? Is this actually just Anthropic committing an interesting case of fraud and using some human labor intensive loop with LLMs? Is this not LLM inference at all, and they're just using only the perplexity measurement on the input code to accelerate where human eyeballs look?
Anthropic refuses to release their model under an accepted open weights license, and that isn't a good sign.
explain why they can do multiplication problems they've never seen before? I can give them two 50 digit numbers right now and they'll multiply them. its because they generalize from previous data.
You need to be able to write a good spec period, and this has been true as long as programming has existed. The problem is, LLMs cannot write them themselves, and have trouble reasoning out the unstated parts of complex problems if the spec doesn't spell it out.
Developers familiar with the problem space being worked on, however, can reason out the unstated parts, because the unstated parts are usually the bread and butter of the problem space.
Side note: this is often why LLMs trained on synthetic text perform weirdly or badly... the synthetic text is written by people not familiar with the thousands of individual problem spaces that exist out there, and miss important facts or nuance.
LLMs trained on real text, however, is often done without proper license, and are essentially lossy compressed piracy archives. You're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't.
