Discussion

European AI A playbook to own it.

rvnx: TL;DR: some bullshit blog post to get grants from European Union

sixhobbits: 58 Minute reading time. I read the first dozen pages or so and I'm not sure what the goal of this thing is, why they wrote it, who they wrote it for? Is it aimed at European governments? Or companies? Or people? Or something else?> This playbook provides a clear, actionable framework to position Europe as that powerhouse, accelerating AI development and adoption, attracting and retaining top talent, simplifying regulation without sacrificing values, and mobilizing public and private investment to build homegrown AI infrastructure. Only with it, Europe can ensure AI is not only developed in Europe, but for Europe and on Europe’s terms.playbook for what?> This document is not a theoretical exercise. It is a practical playbookSeems quite theoretical? A lot of random statistics, and all the sections start with abstract empty claims in 'not x, y' slop format "Artificial intelligence is not an abstract promise. It is a tool that fulfills its potential when embedded in the real economy."I'd love an executive summary of this for anyone who has AI tokens to spend (I've got some other stuff to get done with what remains of my quota this week). I'm not saying this report is bad, I'm just saying it didn't do enough to convince me to read it, and it has some patterns that would make me guess it's bad.

spiderfarmer: Mistral is the only AI bot I haven’t blocked from my server.

amarcheschi: Do they respect robots.txt?

camillomiller: I find it so funny that the people leading AI today have names that could be the characters of a bad scifi novel.Amodei (love of god) Altman (alternative to man?) Arthur Mensch fighting from the ethical side

AIorNot: this whole timeline feels like a Bad Cyberpunk novel, Trump, Musk etc

BoorishBears: Interesting reading this with> Tell HN: docker pull fails in spain due to football cloudflare blocknext to it on the front page

tclancy: Other than you seeing a thing you want to see, why? There’s a pretty well known story behind that. Also, this post was written by a mensch, so have some respect.

__natty__: I like the "european technology" movement not because of any nationalist ideas, but because it stimulates technological innovation and creates a new dynamic.

dwedge: I've tried Mistral a few times, at first it seemed promising (though lagging) but at some point it seems like they stopped focusing on AI and shifted their focus to being a mouthpiece for EU policy and pushing for regulation. I can't really take any of their announcements seriously anymore.A couple of weeks ago they were calling for a European AI tax to pay creatives.

dr_dshiv: “European AI tax to pay creatives”Love that idea.

dwedge: I mean we already pay a tax when buying phones or storage because it's assumed we'll use it for piracy so why not.

simianwords: META used to hire in Netherlands until it stopped and left. I wondered why and a few times I heard that it was because it was hard to be dynamic in the country with the stubborn labour laws. The anecdote confirms my own bias but there seems to be not much mention on encouraging risk taking allowing dynamic entrepreneurship in this playbook, which leads me to believe this is a non issue?But messagebird is another example.

BoorishBears: I'd say that situation is representative of a very apropos mentality from a very apropos entity... but this reaction to even mentioning that is the mostly telling of if there's actually the right kind of willpower to make what they're advocating happen on the ground.

a3w: The site starts with> The question is no longer whether Europe can compete, ...But it, too, do not ask myself this question any more. Since EU seems to have already lost completely.Even Proton's new local AI service uses Ollama, which was developed in USA and is pretty outclassed. Does HN say europe can do more than hope to catch up in five to ten years, if the race is still on then?

ForHackernews: I don't understand why European providers can't just host open-weight models developed by the Chinese, or distill Google/OpenAI/Anthropic models to produce their own models on the the cheap.Nobody acts like you need to invent steel to have a steel mill.

rjtavares: It's important to note that these efforts aren't nationalistic - they're multilateral. In fact, European nationalists are consistently trying to sabotage European efforts.On the bright side: people seem to be moving away from such nationalistic ideas. Here's to Orban being the first of many defeats for them in the near future.

hobofan: I'm a fan of Mistral, but this seems to be 80% "make Europe more startup-friendly in general" rather than anything specific to AI.Given how un-startup-driven adoption of new technologies usually happens in Europe, I don't see this playbook becoming a cornerstone of how AI adoption will pan out in Europe.

mhitza: Indeed very slop-feeling "whitepaper", might as well be written by chatgpt/claude because it has the tropes.Multiple sections have expandable subsections for more details on proposals.

thrance: "European nationalists" as in "nationalists which happen to reside in Europe", not "Chauvinistic European federalists", which feels like a rare breed.

ks2048: Why do you say they "stopped focusing on AI"? I see a pretty consistent release of pretty good products - particularly in speech and OCR.

dwedge: I used their OCR against a few hundred page PDF that was printed text but missing the OCR. It cost me $5 and was useless, it did worse than tesseract. That's how all my experience with mistral is

edwinjm: If they want to improve but find that European regulations are the main obstacle, it makes sense they focus on that.

dwedge: Maybe I wasn't very clear. It seems like they are in support of those regulations. They seem like an EU mouthpiece

SyneRyder: I used to use Mistral OCR, but found it was better just to write a program that sent the documents to Claude Sonnet to OCR instead. Claude is far better quality, better formatting and fewer errors.I'm also using Voxtral TTS to try to replace OpenAI. It "works", but I've had problems with volume levels being radically different between different audio chunks. It doesn't seem to "understand the full text" the way OpenAI's voice models do, which can be more expressive. Voxtral sometimes sounds robotic in the reading. And some Voxtral TTS output contains music in the background occasionally, which suggests their training corpus isn't that clean. Try generating a personalized news podcast, and the intro may occasionally sound like the music for BBC News underneath....As for not focusing on AI, there's this interview in the Big Technology Podcast 2 months ago, where the Mistral CEO says their main focus is on helping companies fine-train models for internal use, over being a general model builder.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxUTdyEDpbU&t=1357s

sva_: There's this sentiment in Germany that if you can't make in industry, you work for the government or - even worse - become a politician. It seems like Mistral took that to the next level; they can't compete so they do lobbying instead.Being European, I love the idea of European AI labs. But I wish there was more competition.That being said, as a German for example, I can't think of an AI company successfully training a competitive foundation model here. The copyright mafia would take your investor's money before you could even finish the first training run (hyperbole.)

imbus: I like the sentiment. Keeps a lot of people out of politics so the few can rob everyone else blind. No no, you don’t want this job it’s for loser hacks only.

enejej: It’s a load of nonsense.They essentially want a bunch of stuff and most importantly funding from the EU and using the FOMO angle to get them to act. This of course is not on merit. They see that no other lab in Europe really exists and are trying to seize an open opportunity.

____tom____: Sounds like the tax on recordable CDs.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levyRidiculous, and it didn't take money from the right people or give it to the right people. I would expect the same from an AI tax.

zmmmmm: The glaring number to me is only 5% of VC funds vs 52% in the US. That's 10x more opportunity despite roughly comparable economies. As long as that is true, it seems like it will always be impossible to get an organic startup industry working in the EU. Any startup that is any good will almost certainly end up getting a round of investment from the US and most likely move their base of operations there.I wonder if recent US actions will start to influence this as there now appears to be more risk in sending your money to the US or founding your company there as a foreign entity than there used to be.

enejej: The funding allocation is a reflection of different cultures really.I’m from the UK but there’s no way there’s the same density, drive and hunger to the extent that you find in US. Also there’s a lot more synergy in the US vs a fragmented Europe.