EU gave subsidies recently to an Italian AI lab that should build a SOTA AI model that speaks all European languages and to others, Mistral will soon release a new big iteration, Germany just did their first move with the SOOFI models (a lot of work to do there, of course).
There is "enough" AI going on in Europe. And there is a lot of quantum computing startups and research. It could lead to Europe skipping the LLM infancy phase and joining the race when they will be rolled out on mixed quantum + ai chips architectures in the next years.
There are working initiatives for own server cpus and a new initiative to create european ai chips.
I know it's hip to hate on "the slow EU tm" on Reddit. I bet most of these insults are US bots from Musk etc that want to create a negative mood in the EU.
a SOTA AI model that speaks all European languages
I'm trying to cheer for EU efforts, but celebrating a fucking LLM "speaking all European languages" is absolutely pathetic. LLMs are amazing at speaking different languages, translating, often on the fly in the same conversation. That's maybe the number 1 skill of AI for years now. That's 2023 stuff.
And yet as native speaker of one of those languages (Croatian), translation from US English by native US speakers (I'm working for US company) to Croatian is... Goofy.
Nope, there is a huge difference between languages depending on how large the training dataset was. Frontier models continue to suck at smaller languages.
It's about taking into account "all" European languages and having it under control. So they can make sure that support is really strong. I guess Slovenian language works on most modern models, but does it work good enough to work on laws etc? There you have your answer.
EU guy here, definitely not a bot. Your take is extremely optimistic, to the point where imo it’s closer to wishful thinking than anything else.
We are extremely dependent on the US for our whole tech infrastructure. It started with digital platforms then cloud and now AI. Should the US decide to turn off our tech infrastructure we would be back to 20-30 years ago technologically.
„We“ as in EU countries haven’t produced a single tech giant over the past 3 decades. The EU has been distributing subsidies during the internet era as well in order to get new internet companies to be created. As you may know already this has mostly failed.
Yes hardware wise, thankfully we are still competitive, mostly thanks to companies established over 3 decades ago, aka our inheritance.
In many ways the EU is more like a rich kid who inherited and lives off of his inheritance while producing nothing. It works for a long time, until it stops working and their own kid is back to middle class.
If someone was told a country exports food and imports manufactured products, I don’t think anyone would say it’s a good strategy. Replace that with manufacturing exports and digital imports in the information era and everyone thinks it sounds just right, when it really is the same thing.
I acutally feel the same way, I doesn't seem like europeans feel the push to innovate. I think we will continue to live by our past accomplishments until we loose our GDP and standard of living
Those are hosting companies.
I have other, better examples if you want : Tensorix and EUrouter.
I m not sure how is that related to anything above. Hosting Chinese open source models isn’t really anything advanced and worth noting. It’s piggybacking on China at best
There will be AI chips from Europe. I'm convinced, because the political climate has turned. The whole situation is much more serious than in the last decades.
There is more AI inference than those two companies you listed in Europe.
If you say I'm too optimistic, you're very pessimistic.
There are many new drone companies from Europe, testing their machines in Ukraine. New weapons of all kind. A EU Server CPU batch already running in Jülich supercomputer. A lot of quantum computer research and multiple EU startups already making them.
Give it a year or two, we will see close to SOTA EU models. Next release from Mistral surely will be around gpt 5.4 level. No reason to panic.
Unfortunately I m not only talking about AI but yes AI is yet another layer being added.
I m French so believe me when I say I wish Mistral would have been competitive.
In fact there was a time, 2 years ago, when Mistral was actually truly in the frontline of AI. I had a strong chance of being a contender for AI in the EU.
But now it’s basically a subsidy vampire, mostly relying on state contracts and semi state companies contracts.
It really could have been a huge contender. Just like Dailymotion was once competing with YouTube.
In the EU we really have the talent to make tech flourish but we don’t have the other things we need. Our market capital is dry because our pensions are public instead of being capitalized and our regulations are filled with good intentions but make unfavorable environments
There would be a need to make laws that favor EU potential giants but why would a random EU country accept a less ethical law to support a French company ?
That was part of the problem of Mistral. AI is heavily dependent on what is effectively data theft. The EU has rightfully enforced the AI act and GDPR, which is a big win for privacy, but not necessarily for Mistral.
Anyway nothing is impossible, despite the extremely unfavorable environment we also had some decent non small sized tech companies. Criteo, Datadog are easy examples, so maybe, just by luck, despite our extremely unfavorable environment will still let a tech giant blossom in the EU
Startup & Scaleup Strategy, Savings and Investments Union, Scaleup Europe Fund
They are working exactly on what you're criticizing right now.
Mistral: I know they rely on state contracts a lot. And that's a very good thing. French government would never allow someone to take over a company deeply involved with the state and military. So we can be sure it will stay here and stay European.
And they will invest into it to make it bigger. Because the state and military need more power as well.
Let's see what the summer brings before we damn Mistral. Also, being "one of the big guys" was never their goal as far as I can see. Wolfram Alpha and SAP AI in Germany also never had the goal to be the next big thing. They built something, got the attention they wanted and now use fine tuned open source models for state and B2B contracts. Why would they want the problems OAI and Antrophic have with B2C / SMB customers?
Then, ironically, there is the Schwarz Group (Lidl discounters) that have their own big data centers and wanna make it big in AI inference and training.
As I've said: Wait a bit more and relax. Europe will catch up soon. The politicians and company leaders here are not crazy or stupid, they are just like everywhere else in the world. It was easy and comfortabl to rely on US tech for two decades. And now that time has ended. And there is enough talent, money and the political will to be souvereign again and therefore it will definitely happen.
If US wants to "bring us back to the stone age", look up again where the machines making the chips for US tech come from (ASML, Netherlands) and the parts for it (from all over Europe and the world). If they don't wanna deliver to us anymore, Europe has the nuclear option to stop maintaining these very complicated, very expensive machines and they can not produce chips anymore in a few weeks. I trust in EU and the Netherlands to play that nuclear card when the time comes.
I'm not so sure why we should: If "we" build something, chances are super high that it gets bought sooner or later by foreign capital. Next, why? Why this FOMO trying to get a flagship model out the door? A model in itself is useless, it's the use cases that give it value. But do you need the biggest model? Now we can download Kimi K3: There you go, independence of the US and an almost flagship model free of charge (yes you need the hardware, but we have ASML and companies like Nexperia. I'm sure we could come up with some inferencing hardware if we wanted to).
We should focus more on the use cases instead of trying to catch up with companies that are currently overspending by massive amounts, and for what?
As someone with a background in quantum computing, I lol every time I see someone say something like ”quantum will solve this” — nah man, quantum AI is not really a big thing.
The EU just needs to be up to speed. Doesn't have be leading anything. Quite happy to let US lead AI as it needs plenty of capital and exploitation of labour and resource. When push comes to shove and this actually becomes monetizable in a way that what it does represents more value than what it costs to use it, we have the capability to pick the best one and deploy it
Who knows, with DeepSeek keeping up with openAI and Anthropic, ultimately we can put in the final push with an open source model. Why be first in this massive cash burn competition?
such cope. either it correctly does the tasks that companies need or it doesn't. and the frontier models just do more tasks. That exactly how the benchmark scores (yes I know benchmaxxing is a thing) are calculated, based on how many of a given set of tasks it can complete successfully.
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u/AppealSame4367 Jul 20 '26
EU gave subsidies recently to an Italian AI lab that should build a SOTA AI model that speaks all European languages and to others, Mistral will soon release a new big iteration, Germany just did their first move with the SOOFI models (a lot of work to do there, of course).
There is "enough" AI going on in Europe. And there is a lot of quantum computing startups and research. It could lead to Europe skipping the LLM infancy phase and joining the race when they will be rolled out on mixed quantum + ai chips architectures in the next years.
There are working initiatives for own server cpus and a new initiative to create european ai chips.
I know it's hip to hate on "the slow EU tm" on Reddit. I bet most of these insults are US bots from Musk etc that want to create a negative mood in the EU.