Because these are our societies. We build them.
If this door were to swing both ways, I would not have an issue.
But it never does.
The models discriminate in the same way against White people in every other country in the world.
The parent was talking about people choosing to wear these. Today there might be reluctance to wear them because they're creepy or uncool. But that mirrors the reluctance for cool kids to wear bluetooth earpieces back when they were those chunky Borg-looking things. Then they got shrunk down. They got "high quality, convenient, [and] light".
When these types of glasses are virtually indistinguishable from regular sunglasses, and a critical mass of cool people wear them all the time, the reluctance from the rest of us will melt away.
I build AI for banks. A couple of weeks ago, I had a meeting with a Google team on Legacy Modernization using Agentic AI. Let me phrase it this way. None of them were smart. My team and I were shaking our heads at the low skills of the team. While this might have been true 20 years ago, I am sure there are pockets of smart people somewhere. But Google now employs 200K people worldwide. I am certain that it's hard to keep up the quality.
You can't pass the Google hiring screen and be _dumb_. But I'm 100% willing to believe that they had no knowledge of your domain whatsoever, because the Google hiring screen is also totally generic and doesn't hire for any domain knowledge beyond "general comp sci."
Over the last 20 years, Europe has become irrelevant.
There is not a single European LLM on the same level as US or Chinese models. France's Mistral reached 400M in revenue, but I believe it could have been more relevant if the EU had not slowed everything down with overregulation.
Why does Europe need to dump hundreds of billions of dollars into developing a chatbot that will never be able to pay off its debts? Mistral seems like a much more practical and sustainable approach to LLM development than centering the entire economy around a pyramid scheme predicated on selling the belief that AGI is always three months away.
China's LLM development relative to resources spent is impressive, but it also happened to be predicated on Chinese miners buying into the previous pyramid scheme and having a lot of GPUs on hand already. I don't think the lack of European commitment to the previous pyramid scheme putting it a bit behind in that regard indicates any kind of grand regional failure, so much as an event of pure circumstance that probably has little lasting meaning 5 or 10 years from now.
Conversely, every person calling LLMs "agents" never had any credibility to begin with. Despite my many attempts to coerce an example out of people here, I am still waiting for one (1) singular demonstration of "agentic software" that is capable of replacing production-grade software at scale. Software created by agents that solves a real-world problem and is used by tens of thousands or millions of people. Candidates include an OS, a web browser, an IDE, image editing software akin to Photoshop, a fully-featured Discord/Slack/etc. replacement, a non-trivial video game, music production software, enterprise-grade database software etc., really anything that isn't just another AI tool to produce another AI tool to produce another AI tool culminating in complete psychosis and detachment from anything people do in the real world. If you would like to be the first to provide evidence that these things are more capable than chatbots in concrete terms, by all means, go ahead.
We have been overly reliant on non-European partners we could trust and rely on. That is now gone. So right now is a good opportunity for Europe to focus inward. Imagine having all the social benefits AND tech. We also need to make sure keep malignant actors like the USA & Russia at bay.
One can dream.
Yes, I agree. But it was Europe that has become complacent and lazy. "Doing good" is more important than "doing right". As a result, with energy prices high, dependence on Russia only increased, and car manufacturers (Stellantis, Mercedes -50% revenue) are dying as have shipbuilders before them.
Dependence on Russia is quite sharply down. In Q1 2022 the EU imported 63 billion EUR worth of goods from Russia, in Q3 2025 only 5.7 billion. So down 90%.
In terms of fossil fuels:
- Russia isn't even in the top 6 oil supplies of the EU. The top 6 are USA, Norway, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, Libya and Iraq. They make up ~60% of EU oil imports.
- In raw natural gas: Norway, Algeria, UK and Azerbaijan supply 81% of EU imports.
- In liquefied natural gas: USA, Qatar and Algeria supply 68% of EU imports.
Add to that Dutch and Danish North Sea oil and gas and it's evident the EU is not "dependent" on Russia.
I am old enough to remember variations of this conversation from 20 years ago. If you scratch, you always find ideology underneath: an antipathy for regulation that puts people before money and for sharing the cost of social safety nets. I like living in Europe. It's not perfect (what is), but it's pretty good. Living my life well vs. worrying about my country not buying enough GPUs to keep the markets excited? Choices, choices...
IMHO the EU is the best place to live if you're a rank-and-file worker, and the US is the best place to live if you're ambitious.
EU integration brings some advantages but it also becomes harder to experiment. Ideally you'd have a few member states vying to become the Shenzhen of Europe but that won't happen under EU integration.
That assumes LLMs are relevant and will be around a year from now. Let’s not forget NFTs.
Your comment is also blind to the absurd amount of research and projects which are born here but later move to look for funding.
So the EU is not irrelevant, on the contrary, we’re just mourning the fall of the US and transitioning to an independent future. Who would’ve though, we’d end up needing to build a copy of everything…
I used it as another “there was a strong tech push but ultimately we couldn’t make it work” kind of idea. With NFTs the grift was immediately visible, with LLMs it’s a bit harder, the whole “AI” facade gives people hope - I want to believe and stuff.
Rubio is a mouthpiece for a regime that’s not qualified to discuss Europe, or even his very own US of A. All he meant in his speech is that his government has chosen isolation
If you read these blog posts you would think its hell. But everyone is out shopping, partying, drinking, eating out all the time. Onsens, arcades, karaokes, izakayas. Yes getting those services means someone has to work. It is very much a work hard play hard environment. Better then over here in the UK where every retail shop is being replaced by a charity shop and every restaurant is replaced by a fried chicken shop while high streets collapse and unemployment reaches new highs.
> But everyone is out shopping, partying, drinking, eating out all the time. Onsens, arcades, karaokes, izakayas. Yes getting those services means someone has to work.
Spot on.
I really like Substack as media and I think has been a great complementary in terms of depth; but this article does not have any difference of any slop from mainstream media.
Pick one topic, place some term (like late-stage capitalism, social-democracy, democracy), pick-up 2 or 3 bad poins, and build a narrative, and sprinkle some ~hyperlinks~ references that sustain and voilà: now you have some in-depth analysis with a audience craving for it even when everyone knows that is super simplistic and reductionist, does not converge on what books and history says, and with a politically charged piece.
All those articles you will never see any kind point of positivity being conceived; it sounds always written by some hypercritical, rational, politically charged, and hyper-contemporaneous in a sense that is not space for nuance and understanding that no simple thing per se can explain a very complex phenomena.
For God sake, those guys received 2 nukes 80 years ago and they managed to raise again, and in the meanwhile my country during this time only have 55% of people with sewage.
People were out drinking and dancing during WWII, no? I don't feel like "oh well I see people out drinking and dancing" doesn't rule out that potentially millions nationwide are unable to do that but would like to
China calls it the low-altitude economy, and besides human transportation there is a lot that can be done. Personally, I believe that propeller-driven devices are too dangerous and noisy, but there might be innovations coming out of China that Europe can't
Bird flight doesn't scale significantly. You can deliver very small objects via bird, and perhaps build a bird-like drone that does the same. But you can't build a human-carrying bird.
It's very possible, and in fact most likely, that it can't scale. Insect flight is an even better example - the mechanisms that allow most insects to fly simply don't work past a few grams of weight. So, it is simply impossible to create an insect-like drone that can carry a human.
I expect the exact same is true for birds - the kinds of effects that allow birds to fly with so little energy compared to a propeller-based aircraft are almost certainly not scalable, due to the fundamental properties of air as a gas. As far as I know, bird flight is made possible by complex turbulence effects induced by the microscopic structure of their feathers. It's very unlikely this effect could skale to 100kg of weight.
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