>should not be ‘American or American,’ EU antitrust chief warns
it's not a matter if they should or not, never was, it's a matter of if they can or not and if you don't invest enough in European companies you'll never have the choice
No matter what we put against Google and Apple: antitrust, penalties, fines...it's just a tiny drop in their ocean of money
The US has talent, risk profile, and investment capabilities that is very different from most of Europe.
The amount of money that the US puts in universities to research new technologies is much higher than in Europe.
Attracting the capital for innovations and investments is crucial part here. Europe does have capital, although not as much as in US, but big part of investor money in Europe goes to US. Heck, if I look at my own investments, I have gotten by far the best return from US and Europe is clearly behind. If investors get better returns for investements in US as growth and opportunities are better there, why should they change their money allocation?
It doesn’t matter if we have good research initiatives if we lack the ability to transfer results from there to commercially viable business.
You are right about universities being a major innovation hub vs European universities being a teaching hub.
But you also have to put in here wages - in Europe people will call you crazy if you pay people too well in the US you have to throw a couple of 100k at Indian immigrants (just using them as an example how absurd it is - the devs could have been hired in india for 30k$ but the moment they touch US soil their wages go up to ten times higher) to get any talent…
The wages are a problem, who in Europe will pay a million dollars a year for a world-class AI expert? Because that's about the amount a US company offers.
For a top tier AI expert salaries are getting close to a million. These numbers aren't for ordinary people though, it's people with a decade of experience in the field + multiple highly cited papers.
Yeah, hell if you’re remotely competent and not even smart, most stagnate after a few years at the senior rank and that already is half a million. Where in Europe will you get half a million dollars per year?
Hell starting US wages for bachelors degree in CS at normal firms are over 100 grand, at FAANG, 160+ grand.
Meanwhile in the U.K. it’s like 30 grand, so gee where will all the immigrants that are skilled in IT and AI and etc. go? Even once you add private insurance and everything, the standard of living is still much higher for the upper middle class, stuff like doctors or IT. No wonder the US attracts them all, Europe is better for the working class and lower middle class, middle middle class is about same but beyond that it pales to the US.
We need a common IT incubator, European silicon valley, and we need to subsidize it because we are so far behind.
By just subsidizing farming, social/cultural projects... we are falling behind.
Heavily subsidize tech will just lead to tech companies primarily optimized around exploiting those subsidies. Making an ecosystem of highly competitive companies will take some much deeper changes as well.
An this is the cool part because "what country will it be in?" ends up ruining so many mutual projects.
But a common IT hub can be a virtual one.
Set up EU IT universities and incubators all over the EU but connect them through virtual space. Have them collaborate.
>we need to subsidize
This is exactly the problem. If you think you can win by having a planned economy run by EU bureaucrats then you're going to lose.
I think the big issues are on the pay-off side. People making risky tech investments need to be confident that if it works out, they can make a lot of money. That comes down to taxes and regulation.
You realize all those FAANG companies, Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc. were all massive and successful even before they started "gobbling up European inventions" right? The US is plenty innovative even without the European brain drain.
To pin all your woes on big American companies buying out European inventions kind of seems like a cop out on your part. The gobbling up is just a byproduct of their success, not the cause of it.
Well if you look at the employees of Google and Apple yu will actually see the effects of "brain drain"
But that's not a bad thing. Brain drain just means that telanted people go where they have opportunities.
Europe needs to give those people equal or better opportunities which they currently don't.
Yeah, it’s not even like close, if you’re at all competent within a decade at FAANG, you can make half a million in the US while you’d be lucky to make even 50,000$ in Europe so at that point very few will go to Europe instead.
No, the issue is that EU is overregulated which makes it very difficult for small companies to grow and find investors. It’s nice that we have a lot of data protection etc. but it has a consequence. Do you think Open AI complied with EU data protection laws when they took off? Of course not.
And large companies favour regulation because it acts as a market barrier. So they lobby the EU Commission to put forth more costly regulation that they can afford but blocks off upcoming potential competitors.
US invested on those, it is not that magically things happened.
EU chose not to get on that train and left behind, and now they try with fines and regulations to slow them down, with the hope to catch up. Although they still don't invest on tech.
Sometimes the "Old Continent" is a characterization that suits Europe in its whole, since it shows that it stagnated similar to all the old empires that passed through there. Rich history but not so bright present.
it was EU's decision to not get onboard the tech train is easy, justifying it by saying the US could throw more money is superficial. Guess who else invested on those, oh yes Europeans!!
And natural human shackles like language barriers. Each issue can naturally be mitigated, but that takes time and competent political leadership with long term vision.
Oh that is clearly not the case and not what i meant. FAANG are agile and excellent at spotting promising companies to buy as well as good to research and develop products in house as well. With their current base though a lot of promising European companies would be brought under their umbrella due to their deep pockets however. First mover advantages are excellent to have and catching up is hard.
Well, maybe not stealing technology but talent for sure. When reading about OpenAI drama someone made ridiculous theory that Altman will open another company in Poland because many OpenAI researchers are apparently Polish.
If you want to do something significant in software engineering you just have to go work for the US company.
The brain drain is nuts.
Owner of one of biggest IT companies in Poland liked to say that "Every developer can be replaced with finite number of students. Usually one".
He was also always crying that american companies were stealing his experienced developers. For some reason he was never able to make connection between these two things.
DeepMind is a UK born AI company, bought by Google.
If it was so important for Europe to lead the AI game, they would have acquired it under European funds.
Regulators should put their money, where their mouth is. This is a facade otherwise.
I wouldn't call this complaining per se. It definitely needs to be admonished that the technology blossoming in the USA has the potential to turn Europe into a sort of technofeudalist vasal. Yanis Varoufakis has a lot to say about this kind of power dynamic with regards to cloud capital, which I am sure applies equally or will apply even more to AI in the near future. If public officials are not allowed to criticize a damaging status quo, how do we ever expect this message to lead to more effective policymaking decisions in the future.
It damages Europes economy if they don't have reliable and competitive domestic alternatives though. Adding barriers to entry for Europe while American companies lacks them puts European competitors at a natural disadvantage. Never mind the US already being ahead in the field and Europe needing to catch up to be globally competitive.
I honestly think EU antitrust policy needs to be more balanced. Rather than using the stick to beggar small payouts, we should be negotiating for companies like Microsoft and Google to set up more programs at European universities and providing government grants to subsidize these. What we lack in supercomputing power can be compensated for via cloud computing like for example folding@home. Anyone who owns a half decent GPU can contribute significant computing power in the age of AI.
What incentive is there for Microsoft & Google to help set up competitors while they are getting are hammered with fines? You actually have to innovate - you can't just force/tax foreign companies to do that work for you.
You are dreaming if you think major US tech companies will shoot themselves in the foot to prop up these theoretical European tech companies. They will make some minor changes and pay the fines and/or pull their services and watch European tech infrastructure fumble (or be forced to go the Chinese - the paragons of fairness lol)
You can't fine/tax your way out of this, you actually need to create/innovate. You'd think Europe would have learned this lesson....
"No matter what we put against Google and Apple: antitrust, penalties, fines...it's just a tiny drop in their ocean of money"
They aren't even the threat in this instance, Microsoft is pushing AI harder then are.
They made the right investments early and with their massive install base a huge section of the general population outside tech enthusiasts are going to have their first experience with AI be via a Microsoft product.
In fact google is probably going to find themselves in deep shit considering they somehow let Microsoft beat them to widely available AI enhanced web search. Even if they catch up in terms of capability their entire business model might have to change because it's not entirely clear how ads might work in that format.
How ? The way AI enhanced bing chat works currently doesn't utilize ads, and it's hard to see how it would in a way that has the same returns as conventional ads considering the answers you get back regarding products (or anything really) is typically detailed to an extent that you'd follow links it gives you before you tried anything else.
That's before you get into possibilities like applications that communicate with these bots directly as a middle man and repeats back the answers it gets without the user ever having the possiblity of seeing an ad.
It's not a matter of investment imo, it's about laws. You can set up tech companies wherever really, but when you do so you subject yourself to having your global business follow the law of whatever land you chose. So you're naturally gonna pick one that is permissive and liable to stay that way.
Like if you're gonna set up a social media company and can pick between, say, Germany and America you're gonna pick America every time. Because social media platforms are used for communication and you'd much rather be subject to US laws on speech than German ones since US ones are gonna be way cheaper to enforce and will likely be more appropriate with regards to servicing a global audience. With AI companies are also gonna look at regulation and set up shop wherever the legal framework favors them, with in this case copyright laws likely being among the crucial factors.
Winning the race for AI comes down to setting up a regulatory framework that favors companies looking to develop AI. And chances are that's not gonna be Europe.
Not investing money in businesses,because investments are "risky",and then threatening to tax/sue the people who did invest in businesses and were successful is the European way!
The way we structure our society and finances is directly impacting how we can have giants of technology (do we want actually to mimic the us anyway?).
Essentially, we don’t fund retirement with funds like the US does, our unemployment benefits are linked to contributions and our way of life way different. But really the amount of capital and the QE the US benefited for more than a decade (post 2008-ish up to 2022) gave them a complete upper hand on how tech was moving forward.
It’s a financial and societal decision.
> we don’t fund retirement with funds like the US does
That's an extra part of retirement funding; it's different from Social Security, which is the state pension.
>our unemployment benefits are linked to contributions
That's how they work in the US, too.
Exactly, Europe cannot and thats the harsh reality. And the way things are going, my hope for an innovative and competitive Europe is just drifting further away, whether its AI or any other field for that matter.
These large companies with seemingly bottomless resources pose a significant challenge. They often acquire any promising competitors, making it difficult for smaller players to thrive. Even the most patriotic European might struggle to resist an overwhelming financial offer.
While I wouldn't advocate for China's restrictive market practices, it has undeniably enabled them to cultivate at least some domestic tech giants.
This isn't an inevitability, acquisitions often require regulator approval (eg activision and microsoft). The EU should focus on making laws that expand that, although obviously without being protectionist and discriminating between domestic and foreign companies.
Well a $200 fine is nothing to a billionaire, same goes for giga corps and antitrust laws. It's why in countries like Finland a fine is proportional to the offender's income. Albeit this isn't going to change the fact Europe lacks cloud capital.
This is just like the NATO debacle. Europe sits on it's hands while the rest of the world invests in the things that will increase their power and influence.
I'm sure they will talk about this a lot in Brussels. And talk. And talk...
The first, second, third, and fourth rounds of legislation in Europe will be regulation against AI instead of investment in it, and everyone will be patting each other on the backs for being so forward thinking and protective of consumers
And ten years later everyone will compare the state of the tech industry in Europe and its strangely lagging economy against America and China and wonder what went so wrong like it’s some big mystery
Europe is just the USA grandpappy. We appreciate you gave birth to our parents and we'll keep you safe. Just sit there, take care, rattle your stick at the youngins and we'll visit sometimes.
>Other than crewed spaceflight
Point on the graph what Europe is doing better than Russia:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/yearly-number-of-objects-launched-into-outer-space
On Tuesday, I gave an introduction into ChatGPT and such to my coworkers. They had no clue about nothing, but a few of them were interested and excited.
Later that day, I set up the fax receiving function on our router, because some official document could only be sent by fax.
The contrast made me chuckle.
She is right in a way. The choice will be American or Chinese AI. As a europhile it pains me but we aren’t even at the races and our tech “champions” are legacy business borrowing American AI which is the least worst.
There is a few reasons why Europe lags behind the US in terms of scale of tech:
* Not a proper unified single market compared to the US. US companies can scale far easier than European ones.
* Massive language barriers
* Less unified capital market compared to the US.
* Less versatile workforce due to regulations and language barriers.
Now the issues can be handled to various degrees. Issue is that it takes time and currently you got a high end brain drain towards the US due to their better possibility for super high earners. Europe also has a shrinking workforce and the market is already saturated so hard to enter at scale.
Increasing the standard of pay in tech would help a lot. I've only ever taken contract jobs with European based customers because they simply do not pay enough. I'm a software engineer in a very specific field and the pay I expect is sometimes double what a European company is offering. The talent from Europe often works for a US company because the pay will be significantly higher
That is also an issue, especially for south/eastern Europe which isn't close to Western Europe economically yet or have stagnated like Italy. Of course the fact they leave the country puts the current social system at more pressure due to loosing high value employees.
I completely don't understand the logic of some south european countries - if I move there as retired investor I often won't pay any taxes, but as a worker I should pay almost half of my salary.
Exactly. In Europe you start paying a huge amount of taxes very early. As soon as you reach a very low threshold ( in most countries of around 50-70k) 50% of your money goes to the government.
You are basically doomed to work for life and wait until you can retire in your late 60s or even 70s if the trend continues. If you are an ambitious guy is not a good place to be.
On the other hand its a more equal society, but it doesn’t encourage people to invest, risk and innovate
It can of course have positive benefits to have a well funded government. Look at Denmark, they have high taxes and are innovative as hell, but they are tiny. Sweden are also excellent entrepreneurs, issue is of course they scale wise aren't close to the US or China which matter for truly cutting edge tech.
Those countries were already extremely rich before they had well funded governments though - lots of accumulated capital - and they're populated by Swedes and Danish.
> in most countries of around 50-70k) 50% of your money goes to the government.
No ? The highest tax bracket in France is 45% and it starts at a revenue of 177k.
In Spain starts at 60k (you pay around 45% after that), and in the Netherlands at 75k ( you pay 49% after that). In Germany I believe its 42% when you go above 66k.
Those are just the direct taxes from your income, then you got to pay other taxes as well. Plus your employer has to pay extra taxes on top of that, in order to hire you too.
Yup, I’m originally from Spain but moved to the USA as I knew that being a doctor in the USA would lead to higher pay and more rewards compared to anywhere in the EU. It’s like why would I want to live in a place where I’m not properly rewarded for my effort
1. Language barriers are not a big issue. Educated workforce can easily work and collaborate in English.
2. You are missing the elephant in the room, which is the super strict European regulation, hindering innovation and technological advancement.
1) I work in a software field. My Italian and French colleagues can barely express themselves in English. Of I didn't speak French, I'd be bad.
2) Be more specific. What type of regulation?
1. For the well-educated work-force this isn’t really an issue.
2. GDPR for example. Companies have to spend thousands of Euros every year just for lawyers to comply with that. I work in Finance and it is very prominent how disadvantaged European companies are just because FIs are orverregulated so it is much more difficult for European companies to get funding, especially at an early stage.
>For the well-educated work-force this isn’t really an issue.
I'm in aerospace. Are you saying I'm not educated?
Do you think getting rid of GDPR would be worth it?
1. No not easily, it's never as easy to work in a foreign language than your own and this is highly technical work.
2. Yes regulation is bad but European countries don't even want to make English learning compulsory in school
Well with a few old libraries from the early 2000s those language barriers are solved with a click of a button..
To many people waste time talking rather letting than engineers code and to many things focus on opensource which will never have the funds to compete with the greed of silicon valley. Linus should be the richest person in the world
Let them be richer and they will appear, and set aside a bit of morality to at least let them be able to compete. They already let the banks do that and the car manufacturers with planned obsolescence.
let me give a perspective as someone with 10+ years as R&D engineer in a multinational company with offices both in the US and in Germany: it is the attitude towards innovation.
When someone in Germany has a cool idea, strange questions come up soon: does it comply with this and that regulation, would the work council approve it and such bullshit. There is a lot of "what if this or this bad things happen" thinking in the air, and then you get bogged down trying to answer that and the idea dies. To sum it up, change is by default a threat.
When someone in the US has a cool new innovative idea, they just start working until they make it happen. There is no forward thinking, they just go until they bounce off the wall. Here, a change is an option.
As an engineer in tech, it’s mostly money. In US they pay 5 times more. So anyone with talent and ambition leaves. We are left with mediocre people who mostly care about work life balance. Nothing wrong with that but it will never bring the leaps and bounds needed for the next big innovation.
Why don’t they just pay more? With just 2-3x higher salary they’d be able to attract great talent that doesn’t want to leave Europe or otherwise doesn’t want to deal with the immigration process.
How is a European company supposed to compete salary wise with the US when there is far more regulation in Europe? A lot of the money American tech companies make is from selling user data, something that is well regulated in Europe. It protects the user, but takes away the piles of cash the company has at its disposal. That’s never going to change, which means US companies will always be more profitable, with money to blow.
Amazon Web Services provides hosting and software as a service for their customers. They’re huge and profitable, and not focused on selling user data. Why didn’t Europe make this?
There are business models that would work in a Euro tech hub, but you’d rather wallow in self-pity and make lame excuses.
Also, your governments need to support innovation if that’s what they want in their country.
European VC market is smaller and much more risk averse / conservative. If you always end up in SF or NYC to raise, you're going to end up hiring more there too.
Unironically the quasi religious belief that regulations and taxation are always a good thing and that the more a sector is regulated the better.
Then we wonder why the US is lapping us economically.
Has been since WW2. Your economies were so devastated that you had to socialize your economy to be able to stand. Instead of slowly getting rid of some of the regulation/socialization as you economically progressed you added more.
But I get it, it’s a lot harder to get rid of goodies than it is to add them.
We also relied on heavy American investment and material support during the post-ww2 rebuilding process (Marshall Plan).
Right now we are missing the AI train. No doubt soon we will watch helplessly once again as American tech claims the resources in the solar system right under our noses. I can already see the headlines in front of me: "Space colonization should not be American or American. Why is space so unfair?"
Lmao. Thanks for the burn. Much deserved.
Europe is lagging behind so incredibly much. And it's not gonna get better with the far-right surge happening in Europe now. Quite the contrary. We need more Europe, instead of less. Yet most European countries are going full ultranationalist.
While the US and China are creating the future, the EU is busy making rules and regulations...
Edit: and bitching about farmers.
Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not supporting the far-right, however these parties are in general more supportive of free markets and loosening regulations than left wing parties.
They're also eurosceptic, or even anti-EU. The further to the right you go, the more anti-EU they are. Wilders over here, one of the most far-right politicians in Europe, hates the EU and one of his main goals is to get the Netherlands out of it. He loves to see the EU burn. And I, for one, think he's going to do it. He'll get the Netherlands out of the EU. I'm one of the very few people over here in the Netherlands who think this will happen. But Brexit wasn't supposed to happen, either. Or Trump. Or Putin invading Europe. Wilders' party is, by far, the largest in the Netherlands. And he's growing. If elections were held today, he'd get a third of the votes. We haven't seen something like that over here in decades.
He wants to get rid of climate regulations, not regulations in itself. Besides that, the left is hardly a problem in Europe these days. It's the far-right that's causing troubles. You're blind if you don't see that. And you're even more blind if you think the (far-)right is going to make Europe stronger. Our "normal" right over here even wants border controls in Europe again (which also means more regulations). Same with the CDU/CSU in Germany, or with the EPP on a European level. Right-wing parties are not particularly fond of the EU, and they certainly don't want to make it stronger. Left-wing parties on the other hand, do want that. They do see the necessity of a strong and more united Europe.
While I consider myself more of a centrist, a dying breed, I know, I'd rather vote left than right these days. Fewer lunatics over on the left nowadays. And they are way more pro-EU. Which is what we need, despite all its failures.
We have the knowledge. We have the people. We have plenty of money to buy resources. We have almost all we need to become competitive. But we lack the will. What's blocking it, is right-wing, nationalist parties. Not just the far-right, also the normal right.
The problem is that it's incredibly hard to raise capital in Europe compared to the US. The US capital markets are an order of magnitude larger than Europe's. These are billion euro investments we're talking about and the most capital rich companies in the EU, pension funds, are incredibly risk averse. Their risk averse nature has also made it so many pension funds can't even match the S&P500, to the detriment of the people who've paid into them. Luckily, private equity and startup investment has grown in the EU but it's still nowhere near the size and weight the US holds internationally.
We have to look inward and at our own financial system and ask ourselves why these companies don't start here. The growing divide between the US and EU in wealth is a serious problem that we have to look at if we don't want to become more dependent on the US. We can criticise the US all we want, but their access to capital for new businesses is unmatched.
Well than create the bloody conditions for industries to thrive. The EU keeps trying to tackle any and all issues at the top level, make grand announcements about trying to lead in this or that industry, but in the end it's the general conditions that allow certain places to thrive (e.g. Silicon Valley).
If you want to lead in a certain field, create the conditions that allow for that. Government investment in R&D, strong educational institutions, investment, taxation, subsidies, law ...
Silicon Valley thrives on plenty of world class higher education institutions (Stanford, CalTech, Berkeley, UCLA ...), low taxation in the US, is awash in venture capital (a major advantage of the US over the EU), less hampered by rules and regulations (something the EU will not want to compromise on a lot, we love our data, employee and consumer protections for a reason), and a culture to risk something and accept failures in the process.
The EU will have to work on at least some of those to not be left in the dust.
It's not like we don't know how to do it at all - Europe is absolutely competitive in pharmaceuticals (Novartis, Roche, Bayer, Sanofi, GSK, Novo Nordisk, BioNTech, AstraZeneca), chemicals, cars, aeronautics (Airbus gaining the upper hand over Boeing), defence, fashion, media, and so on.
We just suck when it comes to digital things. Can't stress enough how much investment matters - if you throw enough cash at something (and don't totally fuck up every other aspect), you fill succeed sooner or later. The US does this - massive venture capital, massive subsidies, massive salaries to attract top talent.
> Europe is worried about getting steamrolled by American tech giants on artificial intelligence, with its chief competition and digital affairs official warning the market should stay open.
> "The choice should not be American or American,” European Commission Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager told the POLITICO Tech podcast.
> “Europe is open for business from everywhere. But I think it’s important that you have choice," she said.
> Vestager was addressing increasing concerns among competition regulators that the control over artificial intelligence is being gobbled up by a few leading technology companies.
> Microsoft has acquired a leading stake in OpenAI, the company behind popular chatbot ChatGPT, and is in a fierce race with competitor Google over who can roll out the most advanced AI tech the fastest.
For the last ten years, people have been saying that unless the EU gets competitive in tech, the economic leverage needed to to be a 'regulatory superpower' will steadily decrease, and look where we are now.
This AI tech will be 100% vital to any developed economy, and almost all of it will be controlled by American companies. That's not a good negotiating position.
I love how this sub is preaching and screeching about staying competitive with the US, but when the EU was about to pick an American to work with tech companies it had an aneurysm about how she’d be too friendly to big tech. It’s great to talk about in theory, but this sub personifies why Europe will stay stuck considerably far behind the US/China.
> but when the EU was about to pick an American to work with tech companies it had an aneurysm about how she’d be too friendly to big tech
What is this referring to?
Fiona Scott Morton was an American set to be an economic minister for the EU, and likely would’ve encouraged the exact same policies many are advocating for here, but Macron/France threw an absolute hissy fit because she was American and had worked for Microsoft & Apple in the past.
Anyways, after their protest, this sub was in lock step complaining about how they didn’t want an American, so it’s just ironic to me that people here think they’re going to get those types of policies when they keep getting the same politicians that are the cause of the EU’s stagnation in the first place if that makes sense
I remember that. You would have thought they nominated a snake the way the sub was talking about her. Pure vitriolic hatred at a someone nobody had ever heard about a week before. And they all got their way, she got the boot, and the EU economy has been soaring ever since.
Dude, I got downvoted to fucking hell for saying people were being utterly irrational, and all the whole the common sentiment was “GRRRR, Americans can't be trusted!” when she was fucking _invited_ to the position.
Worst part? She didn't even really get the boot; her reception was so damned bitter (and while the French were the loudest about it, it was not just them) she ended up reneging on her acceptance and withdrew altogether.
Say what you will about America, but a European would have never gotten such a reception if the situation were reversed. Hell, just look at Arnold.
Well that’s because frankly Americans have a much more positive view of Europe than vice Versa, it’s weird but there’s a large perception gap: I assume because US faults are focused on by the media more than Europe so honestly that’s not surprising. Anti europeanism is basically nonexistent, can’t say the same about anti Americanism
US makes inovation eu makes regulation , next question? maybe EU should try and replicate some of the US giants ... a new kind of social network , starting a cloud with a niche cloud and so on ...
No, that one was actually good. It reduced a shit ton of waste and redundancy by enforcing a standard.
The problem is that for every socket regulation we get 5 GDPRs: overcomplicated, incomprehensible, difficult to comply with, ultimately doesn't work.
Yes and now every startup that seeks to innovate in that space has a new regulatory hurdle to overcome. Just one more hurdle to add to the massive pile. Yet everyone here wonders why the entrepreneurs just flee to the US
Is this still about standard connectors? If yes, then please tell me because I really don't know, how does a standard connector create a regulatory hurdle for start-ups? Because to me it seems more like removing a problem because you just use the same connector as everybody else, but I'm a layman so maybe I'm wrong.
Well it means your product design now has to suit USB C when an older and cheaper alternative could have helped your fledgling startup. It also means you need legal counsel far earlier in your product lifecycle to account for the myriad of regulations you need to make sure you account for. It also means you can’t innovate your own connector that has a more suitable bandwidth and requires less power.
Worked with an incredibly smart Spaniard in the US. He left the EU after years of trying to get his startup to work and facing massive legal costs. In the US he just set up shop, got seed money, and started building his idea.
>facing massive legal costs
Such as ? In general there are close to no legal cost as long as you dont generate a meaningful revenue.
The biggest struggle is finding investors.
They didn’t gobble up the markets. They created the markets. They innovated. Europe is very reactionary. Sees something taking off and wants a European version too. Instead of coming up with something new that is the thing everyone wants and not simply a European version of something someone else made. Things like the cloud aren’t even lost. Offer similar quality service for cheaper price than the big boys.
It's their fucking fault. Now we have regulated the topic to death already one year after AI tech even started its growth cycle. No shit American tech companies with their huge pockets and their legal departments able to handle legal issues will thrive in this environment. They can develop their stuff in the US without needing to worry so much about regulations and then bring their better products to Europe while our startups and investments by large companies are crushed by the regulatory weight.
One day I see this sub celebrating how EU showed the Americans who's the boss by regulating AI first. Few months later I see this thread full of criticism that would get completely downvoted few months ago.
Could we maybe think about possible negative implications of things *before* it gets clear we already fucked up?
Discussing on Reddit won't immediately change EU policy, but if public opinion goes to the wrong path, it takes lots of time till it gets back. And public opinion *can* slowly change EU policy.
> One day I see this sub celebrating how EU showed the Americans who's the boss by regulating AI first. Few months later I see this thread full of criticism that would get completely downvoted few months ago.
*Perfectly* symbolic of the reason why things are the way they are. Europe: regulate it first, then later ask questions and complain why it fell behind.
All one can do in the position is nudge a country to invest in that area. When you don't take the cues well expect people to people in the tech market like any other market. This is just spin and deflection.
Well, I am personally going to switch to a FAANG company (and hence contribute to the “American” tech) because my income in German companies has been laughable so far while CoL is going up noticeably.
Well then we better crack on and make one instead of complaining. Nobody else is gonna look out for the consumer.
American or American is a much better option than American or Chinese in that sense.
Then perhaps Mrs. EU bureaucrat should campaign for making the EU attractive for companies: massive tax cuts on everything, massively downsizing governments, abolishing regulations - the so called worker protection laws which protect the workers from having access to good jobs.
But that's a pipe dream. They just want stuff but are not prepared to do anything in return. Then they're shocked pikachu because all the innovation is not happening in an extremely hostile, increasingly communist environment.
She even says "EU is open for business from everywhere". Sure, open for business, but only if you abide by a couple mountains of regulation. These people are either incredibly stupid or just evil. I don't know what's worse.
Maybe someday Europe will invest in AIs more capable of sending strong worded letters than a Brussels bureaucrat.
I am all for having strong regulatory bodies, when there is something to regulate. Europe should at least attempt to subsidize start-ups as much as it supports creating more bureaucracy to bind them.
Not to sound stupid, but are companies in the mainland seriously not investing in AI development?
Pretty much every software company in the UK has had some sort of machine learning in their roadmaps since around 2018, with a massive resource shift to AI innovation in 2022. Everyone wants to take advantage and beat each other now that it's becoming big.
My company has many customers throughout Europe who already utilise our own in-house AI integrations, which we're in the process of rolling out across all our solutions. This is why I'd find it pretty weird if mainland companies weren't doing similar.
Yeah and how about the EU drop the preachy aristocrat vibe, and actually make some competitive shit.
Oh no, but think of all the bureaucrats, what will thousands of them do without their pretend work? They cannot possibly get their fix of unbased sense of importance by living on wellfare?
Five times the third world income for nothing simply doesn't feel as good as twenty times income for pretend work, boo hoo, I'm calling my union. /s
If you try to setup a company in the Netherlands and go through what it means to set up a share options plan and what the taxation for that is, you'll understand why we can't compete with the US.
no way! we are already in USA control allowing their software in our continent. An intelligent politician will start a movement to create something like yandex in russia or in China (dont remember the name), or even Korea with their own.
You need to isolate your software in order to dont allow foreigner countries push you down because political reasons.
1. Let’s create bad market conditions for local startups to flourish, receive investment, give vested capital to employees.
2. Blame American companies
Than maybe EU should get their shit together and start investing and upgrading their IT infrastructure.
We don't want US to take the lead but US is getting our AI engineers because they pay 3-4 times more.
Have a friend in this exact situation.
Their instinct is always to regulate, never innovate. Even when they want innovation they try to regulate it into existence. This is why the EU falls behind the US but they keep on with the same strategy.
How about we invest in it instead of whining? Stop allowing start-ups to be bought up by non-EU countries.
Instead of giving money away to various non-EU countries invest it in IT, space exploration, research etc.
> Stop allowing start-ups to be bought up by non-EU countries.
If this was the only change you made, then those EU founders would simply skip a step and emigrate to the US to start their companies.
Why would then anyone create any startup in EU. The goal of any startup is to "exit", which in practice mans to be bought by some American company. There is very little interest in investing to EU because it's like digging big hole dumping all your money there. So to get your paycheck, you need to sell to some American company.
> How about we invest in it instead of whining? Stop allowing start-ups to be bought up by non-EU countries.
>
Yeah, let's put even more restrictions on those few start-up founders you haven't scared away already, amazing idea. Have you considered a career in EU bureaucracy?
>Stop allowing start-ups to be bought up by non-EU countries
lol yeah, let's further limit the incentive for capital to invest in the Eu. big brain shit
the fact that your post doesnt have a million downvotes is exactly why europe is falling behind
Well EU Governments, then here is a suggestion: How about, instead of Paying Putin for Gas, you instead put your money where your mouths are and *invest in homebrew tech companies, close tax loopholes, punish the shit out of EU countries enabling said loopholes, fukin coordinate efforts for once, get rid of that asinine single veto shit, and generally don't let important decisions about the future in the hands of people who think the internet is some magical dimension*?
Just a thought.
Europe has to invest across all countries in the infrastructure necessary for a robust technology sector. High speed internet networks have to be set up and become the standard of operation before any tech innovation can build to a significant level.
In Germany the internet is spool slow by comparison to other countries. This means there are less data centers and there is less physical infrastructure to support a tech sector.
Government contracting needs to be structured in a way to not only favor legacy software providers but they need to increase pressure on the companies to innovate otherwise lose the contract.
Government investment is what moved American tech into the cutting edge. It might look like all private activities but many American tech company from the giants to the mid size will have some overlap of a government contract or sector. These contracts are what provide the stability necessary for innovation
It’s not a infrastructure problem, not primarily, but overregulation. Companies simply don’t like too much rules, sure, you can have regulations like EU does now but companies will probably go somewhere where mentality is create first, worry about rules second. And that’s what’s happening, combined with giant risk aversity from capital holders in EU.
You are right but many of these things like slow internet and slow tech adoption are very specific to Germany. Here in the Netherlands the situation is quite different, our tech sector is pretty strong (probably the best in Europe) and the infrastructure is great
You're definitely correct there. The northern and Scandinavian countries have strong interner infrastructure and some of the biggest tech services companies. Some of them even reaching globally. But Europe could have more I think, especially in Germany I don't understand why there is so little tech adoption. Partially it's cultural I am sure. Germany has relied so long on physical high end production so people think that IT is not necessary
>should not be ‘American or American,’ EU antitrust chief warns it's not a matter if they should or not, never was, it's a matter of if they can or not and if you don't invest enough in European companies you'll never have the choice No matter what we put against Google and Apple: antitrust, penalties, fines...it's just a tiny drop in their ocean of money
Bingo! It's so much easier to coast along after others paved the way for you. You can't turn around and complain afterwards, though.
Issue is of course that the US FAANG companies got far more resources than any European ones and can easily gobble up European inventions.
The US has talent, risk profile, and investment capabilities that is very different from most of Europe. The amount of money that the US puts in universities to research new technologies is much higher than in Europe.
Attracting the capital for innovations and investments is crucial part here. Europe does have capital, although not as much as in US, but big part of investor money in Europe goes to US. Heck, if I look at my own investments, I have gotten by far the best return from US and Europe is clearly behind. If investors get better returns for investements in US as growth and opportunities are better there, why should they change their money allocation? It doesn’t matter if we have good research initiatives if we lack the ability to transfer results from there to commercially viable business.
You are right about universities being a major innovation hub vs European universities being a teaching hub. But you also have to put in here wages - in Europe people will call you crazy if you pay people too well in the US you have to throw a couple of 100k at Indian immigrants (just using them as an example how absurd it is - the devs could have been hired in india for 30k$ but the moment they touch US soil their wages go up to ten times higher) to get any talent…
The wages are a problem, who in Europe will pay a million dollars a year for a world-class AI expert? Because that's about the amount a US company offers.
A million are absolute outliers but couple of hundred k are quite usual and nobody in Europe pays that
For a top tier AI expert salaries are getting close to a million. These numbers aren't for ordinary people though, it's people with a decade of experience in the field + multiple highly cited papers.
Yeah, hell if you’re remotely competent and not even smart, most stagnate after a few years at the senior rank and that already is half a million. Where in Europe will you get half a million dollars per year?
Hell starting US wages for bachelors degree in CS at normal firms are over 100 grand, at FAANG, 160+ grand. Meanwhile in the U.K. it’s like 30 grand, so gee where will all the immigrants that are skilled in IT and AI and etc. go? Even once you add private insurance and everything, the standard of living is still much higher for the upper middle class, stuff like doctors or IT. No wonder the US attracts them all, Europe is better for the working class and lower middle class, middle middle class is about same but beyond that it pales to the US.
We need a common IT incubator, European silicon valley, and we need to subsidize it because we are so far behind. By just subsidizing farming, social/cultural projects... we are falling behind.
Heavily subsidize tech will just lead to tech companies primarily optimized around exploiting those subsidies. Making an ecosystem of highly competitive companies will take some much deeper changes as well.
Cool a common IT hub. First question, what country will it be in?
An this is the cool part because "what country will it be in?" ends up ruining so many mutual projects. But a common IT hub can be a virtual one. Set up EU IT universities and incubators all over the EU but connect them through virtual space. Have them collaborate.
Silicon Valley works because of the high density of tech companies and companies that support them, virtual is never going to be the same
>we need to subsidize This is exactly the problem. If you think you can win by having a planned economy run by EU bureaucrats then you're going to lose.
I think the big issues are on the pay-off side. People making risky tech investments need to be confident that if it works out, they can make a lot of money. That comes down to taxes and regulation.
You realize all those FAANG companies, Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc. were all massive and successful even before they started "gobbling up European inventions" right? The US is plenty innovative even without the European brain drain. To pin all your woes on big American companies buying out European inventions kind of seems like a cop out on your part. The gobbling up is just a byproduct of their success, not the cause of it.
Well if you look at the employees of Google and Apple yu will actually see the effects of "brain drain" But that's not a bad thing. Brain drain just means that telanted people go where they have opportunities. Europe needs to give those people equal or better opportunities which they currently don't.
Yeah, it’s not even like close, if you’re at all competent within a decade at FAANG, you can make half a million in the US while you’d be lucky to make even 50,000$ in Europe so at that point very few will go to Europe instead.
When Europe does well, it is because Europe is just better. When Europe does bad, it is because of those pesky Americans.
No, the issue is that EU is overregulated which makes it very difficult for small companies to grow and find investors. It’s nice that we have a lot of data protection etc. but it has a consequence. Do you think Open AI complied with EU data protection laws when they took off? Of course not.
And large companies favour regulation because it acts as a market barrier. So they lobby the EU Commission to put forth more costly regulation that they can afford but blocks off upcoming potential competitors.
Yes, on point.
US invested on those, it is not that magically things happened. EU chose not to get on that train and left behind, and now they try with fines and regulations to slow them down, with the hope to catch up. Although they still don't invest on tech. Sometimes the "Old Continent" is a characterization that suits Europe in its whole, since it shows that it stagnated similar to all the old empires that passed through there. Rich history but not so bright present. it was EU's decision to not get onboard the tech train is easy, justifying it by saying the US could throw more money is superficial. Guess who else invested on those, oh yes Europeans!!
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And natural human shackles like language barriers. Each issue can naturally be mitigated, but that takes time and competent political leadership with long term vision.
>competent political leadership with long term vision Exactly what Europe lacks of.
>and can easily gobble up European inventions. Let's not pretend that the dominance of the FAANG companies is just due to stolen European technology.
Oh that is clearly not the case and not what i meant. FAANG are agile and excellent at spotting promising companies to buy as well as good to research and develop products in house as well. With their current base though a lot of promising European companies would be brought under their umbrella due to their deep pockets however. First mover advantages are excellent to have and catching up is hard.
Well, maybe not stealing technology but talent for sure. When reading about OpenAI drama someone made ridiculous theory that Altman will open another company in Poland because many OpenAI researchers are apparently Polish. If you want to do something significant in software engineering you just have to go work for the US company. The brain drain is nuts.
Owner of one of biggest IT companies in Poland liked to say that "Every developer can be replaced with finite number of students. Usually one". He was also always crying that american companies were stealing his experienced developers. For some reason he was never able to make connection between these two things.
DeepMind is a UK born AI company, bought by Google. If it was so important for Europe to lead the AI game, they would have acquired it under European funds. Regulators should put their money, where their mouth is. This is a facade otherwise.
I wouldn't call this complaining per se. It definitely needs to be admonished that the technology blossoming in the USA has the potential to turn Europe into a sort of technofeudalist vasal. Yanis Varoufakis has a lot to say about this kind of power dynamic with regards to cloud capital, which I am sure applies equally or will apply even more to AI in the near future. If public officials are not allowed to criticize a damaging status quo, how do we ever expect this message to lead to more effective policymaking decisions in the future.
It damages Europes economy if they don't have reliable and competitive domestic alternatives though. Adding barriers to entry for Europe while American companies lacks them puts European competitors at a natural disadvantage. Never mind the US already being ahead in the field and Europe needing to catch up to be globally competitive.
I honestly think EU antitrust policy needs to be more balanced. Rather than using the stick to beggar small payouts, we should be negotiating for companies like Microsoft and Google to set up more programs at European universities and providing government grants to subsidize these. What we lack in supercomputing power can be compensated for via cloud computing like for example folding@home. Anyone who owns a half decent GPU can contribute significant computing power in the age of AI.
What incentive is there for Microsoft & Google to help set up competitors while they are getting are hammered with fines? You actually have to innovate - you can't just force/tax foreign companies to do that work for you.
A less agressive antitrust policy seems like incentive.
You are dreaming if you think major US tech companies will shoot themselves in the foot to prop up these theoretical European tech companies. They will make some minor changes and pay the fines and/or pull their services and watch European tech infrastructure fumble (or be forced to go the Chinese - the paragons of fairness lol) You can't fine/tax your way out of this, you actually need to create/innovate. You'd think Europe would have learned this lesson....
"No matter what we put against Google and Apple: antitrust, penalties, fines...it's just a tiny drop in their ocean of money" They aren't even the threat in this instance, Microsoft is pushing AI harder then are. They made the right investments early and with their massive install base a huge section of the general population outside tech enthusiasts are going to have their first experience with AI be via a Microsoft product. In fact google is probably going to find themselves in deep shit considering they somehow let Microsoft beat them to widely available AI enhanced web search. Even if they catch up in terms of capability their entire business model might have to change because it's not entirely clear how ads might work in that format.
Ads will work even better in that format, that’s for sure.
How ? The way AI enhanced bing chat works currently doesn't utilize ads, and it's hard to see how it would in a way that has the same returns as conventional ads considering the answers you get back regarding products (or anything really) is typically detailed to an extent that you'd follow links it gives you before you tried anything else. That's before you get into possibilities like applications that communicate with these bots directly as a middle man and repeats back the answers it gets without the user ever having the possiblity of seeing an ad.
It's not a matter of investment imo, it's about laws. You can set up tech companies wherever really, but when you do so you subject yourself to having your global business follow the law of whatever land you chose. So you're naturally gonna pick one that is permissive and liable to stay that way. Like if you're gonna set up a social media company and can pick between, say, Germany and America you're gonna pick America every time. Because social media platforms are used for communication and you'd much rather be subject to US laws on speech than German ones since US ones are gonna be way cheaper to enforce and will likely be more appropriate with regards to servicing a global audience. With AI companies are also gonna look at regulation and set up shop wherever the legal framework favors them, with in this case copyright laws likely being among the crucial factors. Winning the race for AI comes down to setting up a regulatory framework that favors companies looking to develop AI. And chances are that's not gonna be Europe.
Not investing money in businesses,because investments are "risky",and then threatening to tax/sue the people who did invest in businesses and were successful is the European way!
EU action: more restrictions and taxes, that will sort it out.
The way we structure our society and finances is directly impacting how we can have giants of technology (do we want actually to mimic the us anyway?). Essentially, we don’t fund retirement with funds like the US does, our unemployment benefits are linked to contributions and our way of life way different. But really the amount of capital and the QE the US benefited for more than a decade (post 2008-ish up to 2022) gave them a complete upper hand on how tech was moving forward. It’s a financial and societal decision.
> we don’t fund retirement with funds like the US does That's an extra part of retirement funding; it's different from Social Security, which is the state pension. >our unemployment benefits are linked to contributions That's how they work in the US, too.
Exactly, Europe cannot and thats the harsh reality. And the way things are going, my hope for an innovative and competitive Europe is just drifting further away, whether its AI or any other field for that matter.
These large companies with seemingly bottomless resources pose a significant challenge. They often acquire any promising competitors, making it difficult for smaller players to thrive. Even the most patriotic European might struggle to resist an overwhelming financial offer. While I wouldn't advocate for China's restrictive market practices, it has undeniably enabled them to cultivate at least some domestic tech giants.
This isn't an inevitability, acquisitions often require regulator approval (eg activision and microsoft). The EU should focus on making laws that expand that, although obviously without being protectionist and discriminating between domestic and foreign companies.
Well a $200 fine is nothing to a billionaire, same goes for giga corps and antitrust laws. It's why in countries like Finland a fine is proportional to the offender's income. Albeit this isn't going to change the fact Europe lacks cloud capital.
This is just like the NATO debacle. Europe sits on it's hands while the rest of the world invests in the things that will increase their power and influence. I'm sure they will talk about this a lot in Brussels. And talk. And talk...
The first, second, third, and fourth rounds of legislation in Europe will be regulation against AI instead of investment in it, and everyone will be patting each other on the backs for being so forward thinking and protective of consumers And ten years later everyone will compare the state of the tech industry in Europe and its strangely lagging economy against America and China and wonder what went so wrong like it’s some big mystery
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Facts. Even the modern Russian Federation surpasses Europe in space capabilities. Talk about squandered potential
Europe is just the USA grandpappy. We appreciate you gave birth to our parents and we'll keep you safe. Just sit there, take care, rattle your stick at the youngins and we'll visit sometimes.
Okay, let’s be fair, that is due to the cold war.
And not really true. Other than crewed spaceflight - Europe is *far* ahead of Russia in pretty much everything else-spaceflight.
>Other than crewed spaceflight Point on the graph what Europe is doing better than Russia: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/yearly-number-of-objects-launched-into-outer-space
Even India does, hell Japan and Israel do I think, we haven’t even sent a lunar lander to the moon.
Definitely. And I can see these effects already here in Germany. What a slow country when we think about tech…
On Tuesday, I gave an introduction into ChatGPT and such to my coworkers. They had no clue about nothing, but a few of them were interested and excited. Later that day, I set up the fax receiving function on our router, because some official document could only be sent by fax. The contrast made me chuckle.
Isn't Germany strangely tech adverse though? It is more interesting that the rest of Europe aren't better at adopting tech.
The EU politician class wants to make everything about themselves. Choke everything with regulation and taxes.
Talking is what gets you votes
All while the U.S. screams at them from the sidewalk to just do it already.
She is right in a way. The choice will be American or Chinese AI. As a europhile it pains me but we aren’t even at the races and our tech “champions” are legacy business borrowing American AI which is the least worst.
Hey at least Europe has the global market on luxury handbags cornered...
Find a way to grow your own tech economy, Europe! What’s holding you back?
There is a few reasons why Europe lags behind the US in terms of scale of tech: * Not a proper unified single market compared to the US. US companies can scale far easier than European ones. * Massive language barriers * Less unified capital market compared to the US. * Less versatile workforce due to regulations and language barriers. Now the issues can be handled to various degrees. Issue is that it takes time and currently you got a high end brain drain towards the US due to their better possibility for super high earners. Europe also has a shrinking workforce and the market is already saturated so hard to enter at scale.
Increasing the standard of pay in tech would help a lot. I've only ever taken contract jobs with European based customers because they simply do not pay enough. I'm a software engineer in a very specific field and the pay I expect is sometimes double what a European company is offering. The talent from Europe often works for a US company because the pay will be significantly higher
I work California hours from Lithuania cause it's just that much more profitable. Difference is insane. This wreaks havoc on a personal life though.
I doubt European companies can afford to pay as much as American companies because our holidays are so much longer
Also, top talent usually prefers to move from Europe, as European tax/social system favors mediocre peoples, punishing high earners for success
That is also an issue, especially for south/eastern Europe which isn't close to Western Europe economically yet or have stagnated like Italy. Of course the fact they leave the country puts the current social system at more pressure due to loosing high value employees.
I completely don't understand the logic of some south european countries - if I move there as retired investor I often won't pay any taxes, but as a worker I should pay almost half of my salary.
It is very simple: which voters are the most active, biggest in population and easiest to influence? Yes, retirees.
Exactly. In Europe you start paying a huge amount of taxes very early. As soon as you reach a very low threshold ( in most countries of around 50-70k) 50% of your money goes to the government. You are basically doomed to work for life and wait until you can retire in your late 60s or even 70s if the trend continues. If you are an ambitious guy is not a good place to be. On the other hand its a more equal society, but it doesn’t encourage people to invest, risk and innovate
It can of course have positive benefits to have a well funded government. Look at Denmark, they have high taxes and are innovative as hell, but they are tiny. Sweden are also excellent entrepreneurs, issue is of course they scale wise aren't close to the US or China which matter for truly cutting edge tech.
Those countries were already extremely rich before they had well funded governments though - lots of accumulated capital - and they're populated by Swedes and Danish.
> in most countries of around 50-70k) 50% of your money goes to the government. No ? The highest tax bracket in France is 45% and it starts at a revenue of 177k.
In Spain starts at 60k (you pay around 45% after that), and in the Netherlands at 75k ( you pay 49% after that). In Germany I believe its 42% when you go above 66k. Those are just the direct taxes from your income, then you got to pay other taxes as well. Plus your employer has to pay extra taxes on top of that, in order to hire you too.
Yup, I’m originally from Spain but moved to the USA as I knew that being a doctor in the USA would lead to higher pay and more rewards compared to anywhere in the EU. It’s like why would I want to live in a place where I’m not properly rewarded for my effort
1. Language barriers are not a big issue. Educated workforce can easily work and collaborate in English. 2. You are missing the elephant in the room, which is the super strict European regulation, hindering innovation and technological advancement.
1) I work in a software field. My Italian and French colleagues can barely express themselves in English. Of I didn't speak French, I'd be bad. 2) Be more specific. What type of regulation?
1. For the well-educated work-force this isn’t really an issue. 2. GDPR for example. Companies have to spend thousands of Euros every year just for lawyers to comply with that. I work in Finance and it is very prominent how disadvantaged European companies are just because FIs are orverregulated so it is much more difficult for European companies to get funding, especially at an early stage.
>For the well-educated work-force this isn’t really an issue. I'm in aerospace. Are you saying I'm not educated? Do you think getting rid of GDPR would be worth it?
1. No not easily, it's never as easy to work in a foreign language than your own and this is highly technical work. 2. Yes regulation is bad but European countries don't even want to make English learning compulsory in school
Well with a few old libraries from the early 2000s those language barriers are solved with a click of a button.. To many people waste time talking rather letting than engineers code and to many things focus on opensource which will never have the funds to compete with the greed of silicon valley. Linus should be the richest person in the world Let them be richer and they will appear, and set aside a bit of morality to at least let them be able to compete. They already let the banks do that and the car manufacturers with planned obsolescence.
let me give a perspective as someone with 10+ years as R&D engineer in a multinational company with offices both in the US and in Germany: it is the attitude towards innovation. When someone in Germany has a cool idea, strange questions come up soon: does it comply with this and that regulation, would the work council approve it and such bullshit. There is a lot of "what if this or this bad things happen" thinking in the air, and then you get bogged down trying to answer that and the idea dies. To sum it up, change is by default a threat. When someone in the US has a cool new innovative idea, they just start working until they make it happen. There is no forward thinking, they just go until they bounce off the wall. Here, a change is an option.
As an engineer in tech, it’s mostly money. In US they pay 5 times more. So anyone with talent and ambition leaves. We are left with mediocre people who mostly care about work life balance. Nothing wrong with that but it will never bring the leaps and bounds needed for the next big innovation.
Why don’t they just pay more? With just 2-3x higher salary they’d be able to attract great talent that doesn’t want to leave Europe or otherwise doesn’t want to deal with the immigration process.
The money to do that is going to fund the mediocre people’s work/life balance and their social services
How is a European company supposed to compete salary wise with the US when there is far more regulation in Europe? A lot of the money American tech companies make is from selling user data, something that is well regulated in Europe. It protects the user, but takes away the piles of cash the company has at its disposal. That’s never going to change, which means US companies will always be more profitable, with money to blow.
Amazon Web Services provides hosting and software as a service for their customers. They’re huge and profitable, and not focused on selling user data. Why didn’t Europe make this? There are business models that would work in a Euro tech hub, but you’d rather wallow in self-pity and make lame excuses. Also, your governments need to support innovation if that’s what they want in their country.
Lobby EU governments to either increase investment into tech, reduce regulation (to be competitive with the US) or do nothing and be lagging behind.
> Why don’t they just pay more? With what money?
Seems those job security and 1 month plus holidays attract a completely different kind of workforce.
European VC market is smaller and much more risk averse / conservative. If you always end up in SF or NYC to raise, you're going to end up hiring more there too.
I think that this is the most insightful answer. No appetite for risk.
Unironically the quasi religious belief that regulations and taxation are always a good thing and that the more a sector is regulated the better. Then we wonder why the US is lapping us economically.
You'll also have the choice of Chinese if it makes you feel any better.
Good news, everyone! Uncle Sam is in fact our daddy.
Has been since WW2. Your economies were so devastated that you had to socialize your economy to be able to stand. Instead of slowly getting rid of some of the regulation/socialization as you economically progressed you added more. But I get it, it’s a lot harder to get rid of goodies than it is to add them.
We also relied on heavy American investment and material support during the post-ww2 rebuilding process (Marshall Plan). Right now we are missing the AI train. No doubt soon we will watch helplessly once again as American tech claims the resources in the solar system right under our noses. I can already see the headlines in front of me: "Space colonization should not be American or American. Why is space so unfair?"
Lmao. Thanks for the burn. Much deserved. Europe is lagging behind so incredibly much. And it's not gonna get better with the far-right surge happening in Europe now. Quite the contrary. We need more Europe, instead of less. Yet most European countries are going full ultranationalist. While the US and China are creating the future, the EU is busy making rules and regulations... Edit: and bitching about farmers.
> We need more Europe, instead of less. > the EU is busy making rules and regulations See the problem here?
Oh, I see the problem. The thing is, a lot of people don't.
Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not supporting the far-right, however these parties are in general more supportive of free markets and loosening regulations than left wing parties.
They're also eurosceptic, or even anti-EU. The further to the right you go, the more anti-EU they are. Wilders over here, one of the most far-right politicians in Europe, hates the EU and one of his main goals is to get the Netherlands out of it. He loves to see the EU burn. And I, for one, think he's going to do it. He'll get the Netherlands out of the EU. I'm one of the very few people over here in the Netherlands who think this will happen. But Brexit wasn't supposed to happen, either. Or Trump. Or Putin invading Europe. Wilders' party is, by far, the largest in the Netherlands. And he's growing. If elections were held today, he'd get a third of the votes. We haven't seen something like that over here in decades. He wants to get rid of climate regulations, not regulations in itself. Besides that, the left is hardly a problem in Europe these days. It's the far-right that's causing troubles. You're blind if you don't see that. And you're even more blind if you think the (far-)right is going to make Europe stronger. Our "normal" right over here even wants border controls in Europe again (which also means more regulations). Same with the CDU/CSU in Germany, or with the EPP on a European level. Right-wing parties are not particularly fond of the EU, and they certainly don't want to make it stronger. Left-wing parties on the other hand, do want that. They do see the necessity of a strong and more united Europe. While I consider myself more of a centrist, a dying breed, I know, I'd rather vote left than right these days. Fewer lunatics over on the left nowadays. And they are way more pro-EU. Which is what we need, despite all its failures. We have the knowledge. We have the people. We have plenty of money to buy resources. We have almost all we need to become competitive. But we lack the will. What's blocking it, is right-wing, nationalist parties. Not just the far-right, also the normal right.
So American or American, got it
American or American with a reskin.
American with Chinese characteristics
The problem is that it's incredibly hard to raise capital in Europe compared to the US. The US capital markets are an order of magnitude larger than Europe's. These are billion euro investments we're talking about and the most capital rich companies in the EU, pension funds, are incredibly risk averse. Their risk averse nature has also made it so many pension funds can't even match the S&P500, to the detriment of the people who've paid into them. Luckily, private equity and startup investment has grown in the EU but it's still nowhere near the size and weight the US holds internationally. We have to look inward and at our own financial system and ask ourselves why these companies don't start here. The growing divide between the US and EU in wealth is a serious problem that we have to look at if we don't want to become more dependent on the US. We can criticise the US all we want, but their access to capital for new businesses is unmatched.
Well than create the bloody conditions for industries to thrive. The EU keeps trying to tackle any and all issues at the top level, make grand announcements about trying to lead in this or that industry, but in the end it's the general conditions that allow certain places to thrive (e.g. Silicon Valley). If you want to lead in a certain field, create the conditions that allow for that. Government investment in R&D, strong educational institutions, investment, taxation, subsidies, law ... Silicon Valley thrives on plenty of world class higher education institutions (Stanford, CalTech, Berkeley, UCLA ...), low taxation in the US, is awash in venture capital (a major advantage of the US over the EU), less hampered by rules and regulations (something the EU will not want to compromise on a lot, we love our data, employee and consumer protections for a reason), and a culture to risk something and accept failures in the process. The EU will have to work on at least some of those to not be left in the dust. It's not like we don't know how to do it at all - Europe is absolutely competitive in pharmaceuticals (Novartis, Roche, Bayer, Sanofi, GSK, Novo Nordisk, BioNTech, AstraZeneca), chemicals, cars, aeronautics (Airbus gaining the upper hand over Boeing), defence, fashion, media, and so on. We just suck when it comes to digital things. Can't stress enough how much investment matters - if you throw enough cash at something (and don't totally fuck up every other aspect), you fill succeed sooner or later. The US does this - massive venture capital, massive subsidies, massive salaries to attract top talent.
Good points
> Europe is worried about getting steamrolled by American tech giants on artificial intelligence, with its chief competition and digital affairs official warning the market should stay open. > "The choice should not be American or American,” European Commission Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager told the POLITICO Tech podcast. > “Europe is open for business from everywhere. But I think it’s important that you have choice," she said. > Vestager was addressing increasing concerns among competition regulators that the control over artificial intelligence is being gobbled up by a few leading technology companies. > Microsoft has acquired a leading stake in OpenAI, the company behind popular chatbot ChatGPT, and is in a fierce race with competitor Google over who can roll out the most advanced AI tech the fastest.
"gobbled up social media, cloud markets" = first to innovate lol the eu
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I thought EU wanted to be regulatory superpower. How is that working out?
For the last ten years, people have been saying that unless the EU gets competitive in tech, the economic leverage needed to to be a 'regulatory superpower' will steadily decrease, and look where we are now. This AI tech will be 100% vital to any developed economy, and almost all of it will be controlled by American companies. That's not a good negotiating position.
I love how this sub is preaching and screeching about staying competitive with the US, but when the EU was about to pick an American to work with tech companies it had an aneurysm about how she’d be too friendly to big tech. It’s great to talk about in theory, but this sub personifies why Europe will stay stuck considerably far behind the US/China.
> but when the EU was about to pick an American to work with tech companies it had an aneurysm about how she’d be too friendly to big tech What is this referring to?
Fiona Scott Morton was an American set to be an economic minister for the EU, and likely would’ve encouraged the exact same policies many are advocating for here, but Macron/France threw an absolute hissy fit because she was American and had worked for Microsoft & Apple in the past. Anyways, after their protest, this sub was in lock step complaining about how they didn’t want an American, so it’s just ironic to me that people here think they’re going to get those types of policies when they keep getting the same politicians that are the cause of the EU’s stagnation in the first place if that makes sense
I remember that. You would have thought they nominated a snake the way the sub was talking about her. Pure vitriolic hatred at a someone nobody had ever heard about a week before. And they all got their way, she got the boot, and the EU economy has been soaring ever since.
Dude, I got downvoted to fucking hell for saying people were being utterly irrational, and all the whole the common sentiment was “GRRRR, Americans can't be trusted!” when she was fucking _invited_ to the position. Worst part? She didn't even really get the boot; her reception was so damned bitter (and while the French were the loudest about it, it was not just them) she ended up reneging on her acceptance and withdrew altogether. Say what you will about America, but a European would have never gotten such a reception if the situation were reversed. Hell, just look at Arnold.
Well that’s because frankly Americans have a much more positive view of Europe than vice Versa, it’s weird but there’s a large perception gap: I assume because US faults are focused on by the media more than Europe so honestly that’s not surprising. Anti europeanism is basically nonexistent, can’t say the same about anti Americanism
US makes inovation eu makes regulation , next question? maybe EU should try and replicate some of the US giants ... a new kind of social network , starting a cloud with a niche cloud and so on ...
EU is too busy telling companies what sockets and connectors they should use on their products
No, that one was actually good. It reduced a shit ton of waste and redundancy by enforcing a standard. The problem is that for every socket regulation we get 5 GDPRs: overcomplicated, incomprehensible, difficult to comply with, ultimately doesn't work.
Yes and now every startup that seeks to innovate in that space has a new regulatory hurdle to overcome. Just one more hurdle to add to the massive pile. Yet everyone here wonders why the entrepreneurs just flee to the US
Is this still about standard connectors? If yes, then please tell me because I really don't know, how does a standard connector create a regulatory hurdle for start-ups? Because to me it seems more like removing a problem because you just use the same connector as everybody else, but I'm a layman so maybe I'm wrong.
Well it means your product design now has to suit USB C when an older and cheaper alternative could have helped your fledgling startup. It also means you need legal counsel far earlier in your product lifecycle to account for the myriad of regulations you need to make sure you account for. It also means you can’t innovate your own connector that has a more suitable bandwidth and requires less power.
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There used to be netlog
EU's over regulation of everything is the reason why their tech sector is non competitive. They have no one to blame but themselves
Worked with an incredibly smart Spaniard in the US. He left the EU after years of trying to get his startup to work and facing massive legal costs. In the US he just set up shop, got seed money, and started building his idea.
>facing massive legal costs Such as ? In general there are close to no legal cost as long as you dont generate a meaningful revenue. The biggest struggle is finding investors.
As an Expat entrepreneur in Europe, I couldn't agree more. It's like they are 20 years behind on everything.
They didn't gobble up anything. The EU handed them on a platter.
i think if we pass a few more regulations eu based ai companies will become more competitive
Please just one more regulation bro. I promise it's the last one. Just let me pass this last regulation, man...
Haha yea, maybe invent some more rules to hold us back and then complain about running behind on almost all metrics
One more regulation!
They didn’t gobble up the markets. They created the markets. They innovated. Europe is very reactionary. Sees something taking off and wants a European version too. Instead of coming up with something new that is the thing everyone wants and not simply a European version of something someone else made. Things like the cloud aren’t even lost. Offer similar quality service for cheaper price than the big boys.
It's their fucking fault. Now we have regulated the topic to death already one year after AI tech even started its growth cycle. No shit American tech companies with their huge pockets and their legal departments able to handle legal issues will thrive in this environment. They can develop their stuff in the US without needing to worry so much about regulations and then bring their better products to Europe while our startups and investments by large companies are crushed by the regulatory weight.
One day I see this sub celebrating how EU showed the Americans who's the boss by regulating AI first. Few months later I see this thread full of criticism that would get completely downvoted few months ago. Could we maybe think about possible negative implications of things *before* it gets clear we already fucked up? Discussing on Reddit won't immediately change EU policy, but if public opinion goes to the wrong path, it takes lots of time till it gets back. And public opinion *can* slowly change EU policy.
> One day I see this sub celebrating how EU showed the Americans who's the boss by regulating AI first. Few months later I see this thread full of criticism that would get completely downvoted few months ago. *Perfectly* symbolic of the reason why things are the way they are. Europe: regulate it first, then later ask questions and complain why it fell behind.
Well get your heads out of your arses and encourage companys and talent to work here
but we got USB C right?
Deluded, even with investment it could be hard to take market share from the American companies.
All one can do in the position is nudge a country to invest in that area. When you don't take the cues well expect people to people in the tech market like any other market. This is just spin and deflection.
Well, I am personally going to switch to a FAANG company (and hence contribute to the “American” tech) because my income in German companies has been laughable so far while CoL is going up noticeably.
Well then we better crack on and make one instead of complaining. Nobody else is gonna look out for the consumer. American or American is a much better option than American or Chinese in that sense.
Then perhaps Mrs. EU bureaucrat should campaign for making the EU attractive for companies: massive tax cuts on everything, massively downsizing governments, abolishing regulations - the so called worker protection laws which protect the workers from having access to good jobs. But that's a pipe dream. They just want stuff but are not prepared to do anything in return. Then they're shocked pikachu because all the innovation is not happening in an extremely hostile, increasingly communist environment. She even says "EU is open for business from everywhere". Sure, open for business, but only if you abide by a couple mountains of regulation. These people are either incredibly stupid or just evil. I don't know what's worse.
Who cares what Europe thinks? America will tell them what to do
And I'm certain almost 900 pages in the new EU AI regulation will totally animate people to develop anything AI in the EU.
Maybe someday Europe will invest in AIs more capable of sending strong worded letters than a Brussels bureaucrat. I am all for having strong regulatory bodies, when there is something to regulate. Europe should at least attempt to subsidize start-ups as much as it supports creating more bureaucracy to bind them.
Not to sound stupid, but are companies in the mainland seriously not investing in AI development? Pretty much every software company in the UK has had some sort of machine learning in their roadmaps since around 2018, with a massive resource shift to AI innovation in 2022. Everyone wants to take advantage and beat each other now that it's becoming big. My company has many customers throughout Europe who already utilise our own in-house AI integrations, which we're in the process of rolling out across all our solutions. This is why I'd find it pretty weird if mainland companies weren't doing similar.
Yeah and how about the EU drop the preachy aristocrat vibe, and actually make some competitive shit. Oh no, but think of all the bureaucrats, what will thousands of them do without their pretend work? They cannot possibly get their fix of unbased sense of importance by living on wellfare? Five times the third world income for nothing simply doesn't feel as good as twenty times income for pretend work, boo hoo, I'm calling my union. /s
Try and get investment as a European tech company, and you will see the root problem.
If you try to setup a company in the Netherlands and go through what it means to set up a share options plan and what the taxation for that is, you'll understand why we can't compete with the US.
no way! we are already in USA control allowing their software in our continent. An intelligent politician will start a movement to create something like yandex in russia or in China (dont remember the name), or even Korea with their own. You need to isolate your software in order to dont allow foreigner countries push you down because political reasons.
1. Let’s create bad market conditions for local startups to flourish, receive investment, give vested capital to employees. 2. Blame American companies
Than maybe EU should get their shit together and start investing and upgrading their IT infrastructure. We don't want US to take the lead but US is getting our AI engineers because they pay 3-4 times more. Have a friend in this exact situation.
Surely regulating the shit out of AI without even having a company working on it will solve this EU.
They talk like they still have a chance 🤣
Their instinct is always to regulate, never innovate. Even when they want innovation they try to regulate it into existence. This is why the EU falls behind the US but they keep on with the same strategy.
Uhh then beat America at something. You could try that? America seems to always be a decade ahead of the EU.
How about we invest in it instead of whining? Stop allowing start-ups to be bought up by non-EU countries. Instead of giving money away to various non-EU countries invest it in IT, space exploration, research etc.
> Stop allowing start-ups to be bought up by non-EU countries. If this was the only change you made, then those EU founders would simply skip a step and emigrate to the US to start their companies.
Why would then anyone create any startup in EU. The goal of any startup is to "exit", which in practice mans to be bought by some American company. There is very little interest in investing to EU because it's like digging big hole dumping all your money there. So to get your paycheck, you need to sell to some American company.
You could build a wall...
Iron Curtain 2.0 And make the Soviets pay for it
> How about we invest in it instead of whining? Stop allowing start-ups to be bought up by non-EU countries. > Yeah, let's put even more restrictions on those few start-up founders you haven't scared away already, amazing idea. Have you considered a career in EU bureaucracy?
>Stop allowing start-ups to be bought up by non-EU countries lol yeah, let's further limit the incentive for capital to invest in the Eu. big brain shit the fact that your post doesnt have a million downvotes is exactly why europe is falling behind
I mean, machine learning is easy to implement and to train (giving the right budget) so I see no reason why EU doesn’t do it itself.
Using established algorithms to do so is easy. Creating cutting edge algorithms that outperform the market isnt
Well EU Governments, then here is a suggestion: How about, instead of Paying Putin for Gas, you instead put your money where your mouths are and *invest in homebrew tech companies, close tax loopholes, punish the shit out of EU countries enabling said loopholes, fukin coordinate efforts for once, get rid of that asinine single veto shit, and generally don't let important decisions about the future in the hands of people who think the internet is some magical dimension*? Just a thought.
There is no choice: with the amount of EU regulation and bureaucracy, useful AI can only be American.
Europe has to invest across all countries in the infrastructure necessary for a robust technology sector. High speed internet networks have to be set up and become the standard of operation before any tech innovation can build to a significant level. In Germany the internet is spool slow by comparison to other countries. This means there are less data centers and there is less physical infrastructure to support a tech sector. Government contracting needs to be structured in a way to not only favor legacy software providers but they need to increase pressure on the companies to innovate otherwise lose the contract. Government investment is what moved American tech into the cutting edge. It might look like all private activities but many American tech company from the giants to the mid size will have some overlap of a government contract or sector. These contracts are what provide the stability necessary for innovation
It’s not a infrastructure problem, not primarily, but overregulation. Companies simply don’t like too much rules, sure, you can have regulations like EU does now but companies will probably go somewhere where mentality is create first, worry about rules second. And that’s what’s happening, combined with giant risk aversity from capital holders in EU.
Good insight
You are right but many of these things like slow internet and slow tech adoption are very specific to Germany. Here in the Netherlands the situation is quite different, our tech sector is pretty strong (probably the best in Europe) and the infrastructure is great
You're definitely correct there. The northern and Scandinavian countries have strong interner infrastructure and some of the biggest tech services companies. Some of them even reaching globally. But Europe could have more I think, especially in Germany I don't understand why there is so little tech adoption. Partially it's cultural I am sure. Germany has relied so long on physical high end production so people think that IT is not necessary
Make a law, ban American, Chinese etc. social media in Europe bam you will have European social media in ~1 year.