Europe absolutely needs a home-grown AI lab, especially with Pax Americana looking increasingly shaky.
LLMs embody value systems, and American and European values are not the same (yes, there are overlaps, but also key differences).
More nefariously, I can also imagine LLMs that silently degrade their reasoning when used in a national security context of a non-US country.
So, Mistral may not be competitive with OpenAI and Anthropic, but in many contexts that doesn’t matter. And, perhaps this gap could be closed with more funding (the three billion funding figure is a rounding error next to US labs). I’m sort of surprised that the EU isn’t stepping in to support them.
I don't know. Government funds have a unique way of being often wrong, so this may be the kiss of death. But it is a sign that the EU is helping Mistral.
Imagine the fund were distributing to several teams, but let's say Z.ai and Deepseek were european and among them. What percentage would be allocated to Mistral in that case? OK, the other two aren't, but in the same vein, should the EU fund be saving its powder until such a project shows up?
It's possible to be a waste of European money that could be better used elsewhere, though. I think the same about LeCun's company sucking up the little funding here.
> LLMs embody value systems, and American and European values are not the same (yes, there are overlaps, but also key differences).
There are also some areas where values across Europe are quite divergent. Think LGBT rights and social acceptance, religion & secularism, immigration & multiculturalism.
And countries don’t fall into neat “liberal west vs conservative east”. Spain is exceptionally liberal on LGBT issues while remaining more religious than some northern countries; Denmark is socially liberal but has adopted relatively restrictive immigration policies.
> Spain is exceptionally liberal on LGBT issues while remaining more religious than some northern countries
When you move here, "more religious" turns out to pretty much be window dressing. Yes, they still celebrate a bunch of the old catholic holidays, parading saints around on feast days, but apart from a handful of older folks, nobody actually believes.
Particularly when compared to the US, where a large minority is still going around loudly thumping bibles, Spain is a very secular country.
> Europe absolutely needs a home-grown AI lab, especially with Pax Americana looking increasingly shaky.
The only problem (at least in the LLM space) is that you can do more in Europe by just getting the best Chinese Open weights model (do a finetune if you really want) and do more for cheaper than using Mistral.
Europe has no budget of their own like the USA and China do, because there is no debt nor taxation at the European level. That’s the reason for the complication you are noticing.
What do you mean by "Europe has no budget of their own like the USA and China do"? The EU was specifically mentioned and the EU does have a budget, debt, and income:
>I’m sort of surprised that the EU isn’t stepping in to support them.
On a similar note: Why does it have to be the EU to step up?
Why doesn't EU rather speed up making VC investments more attractive, so that EU and banks don't do the majority of investing?
*I don't have answers to these questions. It just frustrates me how many investments here come from politicians and banks, rather than from investors, people, and companies.
It’s a different culture with different rules, if it was that easy it would have been done already. See my other comment about lack of budget at a federal level.
This "Non-Signatory Participants : Taiwan *" is so weird precisely because Taiwan is the one who started the Silicon shield few years ago by making TSMC central to the whole ecosystem.
Can you offer a believable rebuttal to any of my statements?
AfD just had a historic victory in Germany, France is leaning the same direction, etc. Just those two are 40% of the EU economy, and do you think them both turning ethno-nationalist and right wing means the EU project is going to get stronger or weaker? More shared values, or less?
The truth is the EU didn't go far enough, and created a feckless bike-shedding bureaucracy of papercuts. If the EU were to truly unite around shared values, we could achieve something. But the fundamental issue is the EU doesn't have these shared values. The US had the benefit of starting from 0 and attracting only likeminded people to grow.
In Europe every country still identifies with their 19th century national romantic movement definition of who they are (which was itself a construct). The lack of shared values is the problem. We can't even get most of the EU on a common language.
But anytime you bring his name up some right wing conspiracy nutjob will call you an evil globalist. And the far left nutjobs (more common here) will call you an evil capitalist/fascist for supporting his vision of trying to compete in global markets through technology.
My default position is that making money takes precedence over everything else. Yes, some people inside a company may say “we care about doing the right thing” and they might even mean it, but if that comes into conflict with making money, then they tend to lose. Maybe not totally, or immediately, but in the end. The only effective way to prevent (this that I’ve seen) is to have legislation with teeth. It’s probably not a coincidence that after Mark Zuckerberg had to start personally signing off on adherence to the privacy program mandated under the 2020 FTC consent decree, privacy started to become Very Important.
Having previously worked for several years at a Big Tech company, I have seen many humans precisely tailor their work to maximize their scores during performance review. The evaluation criteria are written down, with examples, so... that's what people work at maximizing, almost entirely ignoring everything else. These really are human "paperclip maximizers". And, at first, it's shocking to see.
Of course, there are some things that aren't exactly written down, but which you should either do just enough of, or else be able to plausibly deny doing (ignorance is a good cover for this), so that's what people do. For example, during oncall, you investigate just enough to clear the alert and show that you attempted to understand the problem. Of course, you don't really try to understand the problem, because that would take too much time away from your paperclip maximizing.
Which is all to say: I don't know anything about OpenAI culture, or why nobody stopped this sooner, but I have seen examples in other organizations of people not really wanting to understand too much.
Well there is also another side of this, OpenAI wants both unhinged and capable models that can pull off complicated attacks so they can sell the capabilities to governments for billions.
Nobody internally was surprised that the murderbot murdered, that's what the murderbot is for. What caught them by surprise is the murderbot got good at escaping its jail cell that it had been trapped in till now. There were probably billions of attempted escapes before then so everyone learned to just ignore them.
In most corporate environments, the average worker isnt maximising to performance criteria, they usually are maximising their ability to stay employed, pay their mortgage and support their families.
If developing unmeasured skillsets isnt valued enough by management, why do you bother?
This feels like one of those rather rare projects that is both sailing pretty close to research, and also yielding industrially useful results -- I love it! Normally I'd expect to see something like this coming out of one of the big tech companies, where there are enough advertising megabucks to pay a small team to work on a project like this (providing someone can make the business case...). So I'm curious: what was the initial motivation for this work? Assuming this is not a passion project, who is funding it? How many person years of work has this involved? What is the end game?
“Despite the desperate humanitarian crisis, a survey conducted in May by the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University found that 64.5 percent of the Israeli public was not at all, or not very, concerned about the humanitarian situation in Gaza.”
“About three-quarters of Israeli
Jews thought that Israel's military planning should not take into account the suffering of the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza, or should do so only minimally, according to another recent survey by the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan research group in Jerusalem.”
The banality of evil on full display. These very same people will claim in the future that they were misled or did not understand the gravity of crimes being committed in Gaza and the West Bank.
Yes. The minimum rules we all must agree on have to be the basic human rights. And that means we can’t take all the civilians in Gaza hostage for Hamas. These are humans with hopes and dreams and friends and family, like you and like Israelis.
That Israel in particular would so easily forget about this is horrible.
> Why is that? What are we misunderstanding about their perspective that causes the expectation to be off?
There's a perfect explanation for this in Ten Steps of Genocide, which is taught by many Holocaust museums.
Instead of recognizing Palestinian humanity, Israelites (not all, but enough to gain control of their government) have allowed themselves to discriminate, dehumanize, and persecute them.
Granted, not doing so in a situation as fraught with hostility & danger as Israel's would have taken tremendous levels of moral courage, but if there's one ethnic group that we expected to be aware of the slippery slope of genocide, it's the jews.
There are ~2m Palestinians in Israel, making up about 21% percent of the population of Israel and Palestinians in Israel have had the right to vote since 1949.
According to my research, there are 10 Palestinians in the Knesset.
> According to my research, there are 10 Palestinians in the Knesset.
That's great, but it doesn't contradict my claim. After all, I didn't say "all Israelis". I said "enough Israelis to gain control of their government".
I said: "Instead of recognizing Palestinian humanity, Israelites (not all, but enough to gain control of their government) have allowed themselves to discriminate, dehumanize, and persecute them."
"Israelites dehumanize Palestinians" is an over-simplification of my statement.
So now when the targeted population is actually increasing, we can still call it a "genocide". And when there is no actual concentration camp we can say there is a "moral concentration camp". Stop getting your news from Al Jazeera, FFS.
> So now when the targeted population is actually increasing, we can still call it a "genocide".
Please show me where the targeted population is "increasing" over the last two years? is it because people from other areas are being forced to relocate and you guys call that a population increase?
Where should i get my news from? last I checked, 100+ journalists came out with a written statement about how higher ups at the BBC were preventing news critical of Israel from being broadcast on air. The concentration camp thing has been corroborated by several news sources including some from within Israel itself. Even CNN nowadays is starting to be critical of the genocide.
Do you have any standards at all for what the word genocide means? You want to get into the muck about whether the population has increased or decreased by some fractional or single digit percentages? All this demonstrates is that you want to twist the meaning of words to support whatever interpretation of events is in vogue with your tribe.
but I mean, you guys also call amnesty international, the ICC, the BBC and reality itself antisemetic so believe whatever you want. the only "tribe" I'm in is the one where indiscriminate killing of innocent people is wrong.
Where do you think these data are coming from? You think the UN and Amnesty International have census takers going tunnel to tunnel in Gaza?
Why don't you reveal your standard for what a "genocide" is without discrediting the actual ongoing genocides in other places? Israel has got to be the most incompetent prosecutor of genocide in history.
I imagined that, if nothing else, they'd have an interest in the next generation of Gazans not growing up with even more hatred towards Israel than the previous one. Which is kind of hard given the cruelty they are currently subjected to.
That is unless the plan is that there won't be a next generation of Gazans.
Yes, I'd expect that from compassionate human beings. Such beings can hold two conflicting thoughts at the same time: the hostages situation is incredibly tragic, and the suffering inflicted unto innocent people who had nothing to do with the hostage taking is also immensely tragic and inhuman.
Using the hostages as justification for collective punishment is exactly what Netanyahu's government want, it becomes easy to justify the abhorrent treatment of millions of people, repeating this is just ceding power to the worst elements of his government (Ben Gvir, etc.).
The hostages should be returned by Hamas, that shouldn't cost millions of people their families, homes, lives, it's collective punishment, it's genocide.
(I worked for Yelp for over eight years, knew large parts of the codebase, and never once saw any evidence that it was possible to pay to remove bad reviews.)
I also worked for Yelp as an eng, and I used to say the same thing until I personally had my negative review removed from a business page for a paying advertiser by the User Ops team
I’ve pondered the implications of running an ‘installation art’ project where a bunch of these are deployed around a city, with aggregated data visible over a web UI (assuming that this doesn’t violate any laws.) The aim would be to raise public awareness of pervasive surveillance, and perhaps catalyze changes to the law.
I'd be interested in seeing the buy vs. build analysis for this project. Are there any pre-existing projects that have similar features? And assuming that this project is used to process classified data, what impact does this have on the selection process? e.g. is it possible to use closed-source solutions?
A lot of this applies to good security teams as well :) For example, reaching out to offer consulting services at an early stage in projects, building goodwill by advising instead of mandating (where possible), and constantly communicating best practices.
LLMs embody value systems, and American and European values are not the same (yes, there are overlaps, but also key differences).
More nefariously, I can also imagine LLMs that silently degrade their reasoning when used in a national security context of a non-US country.
So, Mistral may not be competitive with OpenAI and Anthropic, but in many contexts that doesn’t matter. And, perhaps this gap could be closed with more funding (the three billion funding figure is a rounding error next to US labs). I’m sort of surprised that the EU isn’t stepping in to support them.
reply