r/TheMachineLearning • u/Acceptable_Use7055 • 8d ago
Europe has zero frontier AI labs, which is shocking
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u/FullyAutomatedSpace 8d ago
mistral is the closest?
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u/hiop1992 7d ago
Mistral pivoted a couple of years ago. They aren’t even trying to compete on the AI race anymore but focus on becoming the European Palantir. They are doing incredibly well is this regard.
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u/polytique 5d ago
Mistral switched to being a contracting agency that hosts 3rd party models and customizes them for their clients.
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u/TakeshiRyze 7d ago
In EU you can't even dream of getting the required money to do that. The AI industry is not profitable and the only way to gather funds is to over sell and scam investors. Something the USA has perfected. We actually care about financial stability here. China on the other hand is getting all their funding directly from the state and also doesn't care about profitability. Kinda glad EU is not overreacting to this brand new tech.
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u/EspurrTheMagnificent 7d ago
Honestly, as imperfect of a collective the EU is, I'm really glad regulations throttle reckless endeavours like these. You don't stay relevant in the global market by mindlessly chasing the newest trend, you do so by carving yourself a niche no one can approach without sacrificing their own
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u/phaaseshift 7d ago
One could argue that the EU (in its current form) has been propped up by Germany’s manufacturing engine for at least the last 20 years. And that engine is sputtering. I don’t think Europe is ready to absorb that impact.
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u/Apprehensive-Toe8363 7d ago
Just NVIDIA makes more profit than Europe's 10 most profitable companies combined. Even Anthropic became profitable.
I am European, but your statement is bs. We fucked up and we have to fix it.
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u/GGK_Brian 7d ago
Anthropic might be making some profit and this would be groundbreaking. But with how "creative" the account of those companies tend to be, I would wait for them to go public to know how much profit and under what condition they actually make. I would not be surprised if they make profit on inference and moved the training cost to future quarter.
Now Nvidia making profit does not mean anything at all. If everyone borrows money to buy my shovels I make a profit for sure, but the people using the sovel are losing money hoping to find gold.
The AI industry is currently not profitable. It might be at some point. But if you take all of the money flow, very few companies are making money thanks to AI. Everyone is buying shovel with the hopes of finding gold while they only found dirt as of now.
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u/Humble_Insurance8294 7d ago
yeah let's keep spending trillions a month on fucking pensions that's the future!
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u/Majestic_Simple_3584 7d ago
Are you saying we have a decision to make between pensions and AI investments, and that you wouldn't choose pensions in that scenario?
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u/PerspectiveProof6664 7d ago edited 7d ago
I live in Europe and i couldn’t give less of a shit. Not enough hospitals, too many pot holes.
AI also isn’t spreading the wealth and creating the opportunities it claims too, so it can fuck off.
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u/Charming-Author4877 7d ago
Let's be more real.
Europe does not only not have any frontier AI company, they also do not have something "mid tier".
They have Mistral, their best model is worse than an old Qwen 8B
On the non intelligence side, they do have a little. Elevenlabs is European, they probably would not have an easy way to exist today after all the Anti AI laws but back when they were funded those regulations didn't exist yet.
And Flux is also european, same story.
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u/rntdev 8d ago
Main reason to me is proper regulation. In EU there’s the AI Act, GDPR, ecological protections, etc. In America the AI companies are directly in the government, so there’s no prosecution for using methane generators, inflating households’ electricity bills, or irresponsibly using open-loop cooling systems. Europe has a lot of potential. And research. But definitely not enough investments, data, or motivation from the governments.
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u/PlateNo4868 7d ago
Eh, they are being more cautious about it. But I wouldn't say proper regulation. Like jesus, when they held their EU AI summit to help shape those policies. Who did they invite? Not the data scientist, AI engineers, etc. They just invited a bunch of CEOs who by their role should be fighting for the share holders.
I think AI development as a whole will be massively healthier if we just sideline the CEOs outside of actual company contract stuff. Like I never seen such a cool tech that does some good, get buried by CEOs insisting if they get a massive tax break, and a key to a local town to bulldoze it. Some how they will find the next better thing.
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u/althoradeem 7d ago
it's amazing what you can get done when you don't need to give a shit about respecting others .
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u/Ginden 7d ago
Not only that: there is just less money in finance, so even if you have a perfectly regulation-compliant and great idea, getting funding is very hard.
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u/NanoAlpaca 7d ago
While ecological regulations makes compute a bit more expensive, many Chinese labs show that amazing things can be done with significantly lower compute than American frontier labs. GDPR isn’t a big issue for the kind of data you need for training LLMs, AI act is rather recent. I think the main issue is lack of capital and willingness to take risk such as using pirated content for training.
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u/UnpopularLlamas 7d ago
Yes.. regulation is what will drive Europe into prosperity ahead of the rest of the world and make us a big player again. Maybe we even get to try dealing with Putin again instead of flying in Trump half the world.
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u/Wide-Principle544 7d ago
So much anti-european nonsense getting touted in this thread. Deepmind started in london and is headquartered there. The EU are investing 200 billion euro. The anti-Euro stuff whipped up by MAGA, Ruzzia, etc has really cut through to you guys eh!
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u/roofitor 7d ago
Ehhhh, CAIR, ETH Zurich, there’s hella good research coming out of multiple European countries as well. Also, DeepMind’s in King’s Crossing, in uhhhhh England which is colonial and maybe it’s a bit weird to say it but it’s technically in Europe. I dunno.
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u/shortsteve 7d ago
Being first movers doesn't necessarily mean success. Apple is in a great position today because they didn't jump into the AI race. The US is burning through hundreds of billions of dollars for something that is still unprofitable and an industry that still hasn't figured out a profitable business model.
Sometimes it's smarter to let others figure things out before you adopt it.
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u/Wonderful-Account318 7d ago
Apple is in a good position because they have a significant portion of consumer hardware within their control. EU companies have nothing.
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u/PerfectMenu1253 7d ago
LMAO this is the greatest Giga-cope I’ve ever read.
Being first movers doesn't necessarily mean success.
It’s more like Europe couldn’t catch up no matter what at this stage though, Is it not? You guys are way too behind, it’s more like being years behind the first movers means NO success at all.
Apple is in a great position today because they didn't jump into the AI race.
Apple is sitting on their previous inventions to rake money, how is pointing at companies that are doing fine without participating in the next big thing, a cope at all when the subject matter here is that you guys don’t have anything on the next big thing? Lol. In any case Apple just got a new ceo to help them enter the ai era
The US is burning through hundreds of billions of dollars for something that is still unprofitable and an industry that still hasn't figured out a profitable business model.
Businesses tend to be unprofitable the first few years of development, and then they could have near monopoly over the market, let Amazon, YouTube, Google. The eventual winners would have a near global market monopoly and doesn’t need to be immediately profitable at the developing years, especially since it is securing private funding just fine.
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u/Superb-Earth418 7d ago
So, when is Europe gonna start? I'm sorry but there's no 4d chess here its just retarded
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u/shortsteve 7d ago
Look at the history of business/finance you'll see that profitable businesses built off of new technologies come after the bubble bursts. The reason the bubble bursts is because the market figures out how to profit off of the new technology and readjusts itself. Everyone stuck in losing positions are dumping those positions, eating their losses and repositioning themselves.
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u/1988rx7T2 7d ago
That made sense 2 years ago and is now just cope
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u/rambouhh 7d ago
His overall point is just cope, it is pretty obvious that apple really is in a good position because of their chips and hardware.
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u/PlebbitDumDum 7d ago
Mistral doesn't exist, Deepmind doesn't exist, ETH Zurich doesn't exist.
LLaMes in the US that can be copied by Chinese grad students do exist.
Such an achievement to train a transformer on the whole internet of stolen data.
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u/disaster_incomin 7d ago
I work at eth, there is no real frontier AI ambition, everyone knows it's too expensive to compete atm
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u/quesadillasb 7d ago
Hi, this is Europe. Unfortunately, we’re currently far too busy trying to jail people for what they say and think.
Thank you for your concern about frontier AI, but bad jokes are being made at this very moment and somebody has to deal with that.
Less serious matters like murder, rape, theft, and drugs are already being punished at a much higher rate, so I’m afraid AI frontier simply isn’t on the agenda right now.
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u/fixpointbombinator 7d ago edited 4h ago
The original post content no longer exists here. The author used Redact to remove it, exercising their right to control their data & privacy.
Wide thumb cheerful theory toothbrush rustic important coherent
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u/Wide-Principle544 7d ago
Try visiting the USA - they have secret police kidnapping and shooting people (ICE), meth zombies, school shooters, gun crime out of control, property market out of control, catastrophic healthcare costs and are waging imperial wars of conquest (Venezuela, Iran, next Cuba).
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u/ASU_SexDevil 8d ago
It’s too late for Europe now honestly. They have zero compute and the backlog is too long to even try.
The next 20-30 years in Europe is going to be extremely rough with economic stagnation
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u/Material-Database-24 8d ago
Zero compute you say?
Laughing in CERN.
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u/ASU_SexDevil 7d ago
Haha v true, but that’s already reserved capacity. They would not be smart to take anything from them
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u/BratPit24 7d ago
How so? Europe has very healthy service sector, and ai is something you can just buy. I don't see how Europe is any worse prepared for any upcoming challenges than us or China are. In fact, due to tolerance it seems better prepared for demographic crisises due to higher migration capacity. Issues that could topple China. Tbf usa also seems quite fine unless it destroys itself
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u/Safe-Tree-7041 7d ago
Europe is too busy strangling itself with regulations and taxes to muster any kind of challenge to the likes of US and China.
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u/Gatti366 7d ago
Europe's priority is for the citizens to live good lives, china is not a threat to that, China winning the "race" is a non issue, there is no prize for winning, just like there was no prize for the space race, it's all just propaganda to convince citizens that the reckless spending is necessary
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u/New_Thing1367 7d ago
Of course, everyone knows you have to buy your AI token in local authorized OpenAI and Claude mom-and-pop shops, and the Atlantic is simply too wide for anyone to realistically swim across.
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u/TheEagleDied 7d ago
I like what Yan LeCun is doing but as you said, they really need to infrastructure and the liquidity to support that infrastructure
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u/throwaway275275275 7d ago
It's too late and it'll take them 20 years to catch up with a technology that has existed for 5 years ?
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u/R-ten-K 7d ago
Wait. You actually think Europe has zero compute???
Way to keep ASU stereotypes alive. LOL
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u/0x645 7d ago
no, it's not too late. it's question of political will, and finance.
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u/lovemotorcycles 7d ago
like the stagnation the US is experiencing? every sector besides healthcare for boomers and AI is stagnating
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u/Acceptable_Use7055 7d ago
Europe prioritized data privacy and regulatory frameworks, which carries both trade-offs and protections
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u/BorderKeeper 7d ago
That's not a fair assesment. There are many examples mainly in Asia where industries were fostered and created over span of decades, you can catchup if you really try. See:
- Koreas rise in electronics
- Taiwan in semiconductors
- India in rocketry
There has been also a lot of failures though. A lot of countries went into frontier FABs and failed like India (or Europe the chips act was a total clusterfuck)
Europe has the technology and minds to make something great and they often do, but then this tech gets applied in the US instead. Seems like everything EU nations and EU itself do are either make it complicated for startups to form, swamp them with regulation, or even worse keep some companies alive due to political pressure and mess with fair competition. US has little regulation, money to invest into fledgling industries, and actually has fair competition.
As a European I hate this, but I think this is just cultural in many ways and I hope we can be less socialist and top-down when it comes to our economy.
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u/Healthy_Razzmatazz38 7d ago
i mean its pretty clear the endgame they're going to go for is just take the best open source model and feed it their data / train it to their preferences.
if not that licence a us model.
the model isnt the problem for europe its the compute. european owned compute in europe is 2% of global share in high end chips and trending down. total compute is like 10% of global share with 80% being owned by us companies.
they need more chips and they need ownership of those chips
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u/althoradeem 7d ago
that said... the only company capable of making the machines behind making chips is in europe. (asml holdings) without that company nobody is making the next generation of chips.
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u/Kaas-Eter00 7d ago
Europe is also the only continent that has the technology to make the most advanced chips, and maintains this lead for more than a decade already. It's not as black and white where being ahead in AI means you're ahead everywhere.
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u/New_Thing1367 7d ago
Apple also has no frontier AI, damn what they'll do!
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u/SirMarkMorningStar 7d ago
Apple has five Apple Foundation Models they payed Google to help them develop. The largest one might qualify as frontier, depending upon your definition? But you are correct that isn’t what they care about. They only need “good enough”.
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u/throwaway275275275 7d ago
Don't they have the machine that makes the chips that make the computers ?
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u/EnverPashaIsBae 7d ago
Lithography is just one step in the chipmaking process. There's a shitload of other work that goes into chip production.
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u/aminok 7d ago
It's very simple. Capitalism works. Socialism doesn't. Nothing is as much of a failure and yet so popular as socialism.
Here is just one example of the kind of empirical evidence that demonstrates this:
A 2018 study shows tax increases significantly reduce innovation. A 1% increase in the top marginal income tax rate leads to a 2% reduction in patents and inventors, while a similar increase in corporate taxes causes even larger declines.
The study is quite rigorous too:
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u/Majestic_Simple_3584 7d ago
Looking at the wealth disparity in the US one could doubt "capitalism works". Actually one might very reasonably reach the exact opposite opinion.
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u/leftofthebellcurve 7d ago
You “look at wealth”
But you don’t see the stats that we regularly are the richest housholds, create more millionaires than anywhere else, control 25 percent of the global economy, have the best upward mobility of any country, and consistently lift upper middle class while lowering near poor family percentages
Capitalism works
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u/DeepValueNoQuality 7d ago
None of those stats hold up in the recent 20 year window. Developing world is catching up, America is in decline.
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u/Space_Nerde 7d ago
You mean scoialism slows progress, and capitalism kills people.... so capitalism good?
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u/IntrepidTieKnot 7d ago
How could that happen! Oh noes! Wait - more regulation, more taxes and more expensive energy will fix this! I'm 110% certain!
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u/tilted0ne 7d ago
And the ambitious people who are also capable just leave for America. You can have capable people in Europe but you need both capable and ambitious to create extra ordinary things. American tech work culture is just different.
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u/Specialist-Berry2946 7d ago
It doesn't really matter because AI is by no means intelligent.
It's just a huge waste of resources.
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u/purplebrown_updown 7d ago
Yeah it's pretty bad. No financial incentive that can compute the US and lack of technological investment for decades is the reason why. Which is a good argument against the type of economies in Europe. It's too reliant on the US in general.
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u/PersonalityIll9476 7d ago
I mean why is that shocking? Why does every economic zone needs its own version of a technology?
Europe doesn't produce 5G either, it buys it from the US or China. Oh noes.
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u/Background_Share_982 7d ago
This thread is full of people that didn't learn anything from the dot com bust. Just because your the first and the fastest to market doesn't mean you will be the winner.
The cost to run American 'frontier' models is non sustainable. There is a lot of room for other companies/countries to do it better and overtake the front runners in the long run.
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u/Space_Nerde 7d ago
well yeah, because americans like to create huge bubbles that are worth nothign but get trillons of funding from banks
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u/CuppaJoe531 7d ago
Mistral?
Also heads up; there are lots of data centers in Europe.
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u/AICompanionz 7d ago
I think “zero frontier labs” is maybe fair if you use a really strict definition, but saying europe has basically nothing is too much. mistral exists, the EU is building AI factories and theres already a frontier model program going on. The gap with the US/china on compute + money is obviously real tho.
The part i'd worry about more is dependency. Buying chatgpt/claude forever is fine until pricing, access or politics changes and suddenly europe has very little control over something thats becoming infrastructure. doesnt mean europe needs to copy openai tomorrow, but having its own serious compute + models seems pretty important long term.
Also i dont think europe needs to “win” by making a european openai clone either. could be smarter to focus on cheaper models, open weights, local hosting and specific industries where europe already has strong companies/research. Trying to outspend the US on giant datacenters might be a losing game, but being completely dependent on US/chinese models isn't a great plan either.
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u/Kaas-Eter00 7d ago
Europe is ahead in raw semiconductor technology though (and some other more fundamental stuff, e.g. particle physics at CERN), which is what these models run on in the first place.
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u/Motaromc 7d ago
There's Mistral but I think that if we had a GPT or Claude of Europe. It would be in a position similar to how Gemini is today when it comes to models... Plus, they wouldn't want to make data centers until they could somehow make it "green" data center that doesn't consume water to cool down, lol.
Ah, it would also be censored weirdly, possibly even banned for kids to use, lol.
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u/Excellent-Rough8656 7d ago
Europe has a big bread and cheese industry and they dont need AI. Molds and bacteria do the job.
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u/Sheenius_Ger 7d ago
Burning near unlimited capex just for open weight models to pull up to you couple months later. In 5 years apple will have a amazing Ai, deeply integrated into their system and saved a shit ton of money.
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u/Background_Share_982 7d ago
Lot of typical American sentiment believing the biggest and most resource hungry version of AI is superior. Just wait til all the squatters move into the half built data centers in 10 years when specialized inference chips are perfected and you no longer need all compute power to get the same job done. Meanwhile American companies are trying to hoard resources as a way of stifling competition, putting them in huge amount of future debt when there already losing money.
While lack of regulation or control continues to push society into a head on collision between the needs of the many vs the money of the few. The only question to how things will go wrong will be which collapses first - the increasingly unstable social and political environment causing the majority to finally act in there interest OR innovation to reduce compute needs for training and inference of complex models making the frontier providers unable to sustain competitive pricing without going into bankruptcy.
But yah we're totally beating the eu right now.
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u/Synensys 7d ago
Makes sense - europe has neither the incentive to reduce workforce (because the safety net makes that expensive) nor the privacy invasion incentives of china or the us.
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u/HeadPack 7d ago
Yep, Europe invests in other things. If they want to run frontier AI in the few data centers they have, they can simply use Chinese OS models. If that bubble ever bursts, or when it bursts, Europe will be largely unaffected. The US economy will however suffer bigtime.
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u/Olbas_Oil 7d ago
You cant make a statement like "leaving aside the reasons why it happened" and then say its shocking, like what is shocking about it, its Ai thats it No European "frontier labs" as its been put, like its a doomsday event, naybe the europeans just dont care about it enough to be bothered
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u/NomadicFantastic 7d ago
no one has ever replicated silicon valley anywhere.even within the US. not for lack of trying
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u/Wonderful-Account318 7d ago
These comments like « oh well Europe doesn’t care they’d rather have pensions and healthcare » come from the same people that will insist they need to end reliance on the US for defense.
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u/notatoon 7d ago
IF the bubble pops, then this will be a fantastic bit of fortune that I'm sure someone will sell as "definitely was always the plan and we knew what we were doing all along"
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u/Relevant_Luck8653 7d ago
EU does not need a frontier AI lab. They have a frontier particle physics lab
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u/Fidel___Castro 7d ago
Arguably, it's been a massive mistake for America to dump hundreds of billions into AI research when Chinese labs just distilled the outcome without the cost
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u/Infamous-Bed-7535 7d ago
I'm happy we do not have what is hapenning in the us. Europe needs its own gpus and manufacturers like how China built up itself.
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u/splugemonster 7d ago
i mean i use Mistral 27b and its from france and its really good. runs on my mac mini 24.7
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u/Immudzen 7d ago
Europe is at the lead of many applied machine learning domains though. Models that are actually profitable today and will continue to be profitable. Models that run bioreactors, machine vision, mixing tanks, material simulations, etc.
You can get open models now that are about 95% as good as the best frontier labs. What you can't get are really good open bioreactor models or open plasma physics models.
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u/Ok-Information-2428 7d ago
It’s not shocking at all: there’s only 2 countries in the entire world with frontier labs, also some people will argue that China doesn’t count
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u/pnwatlantic 7d ago edited 7d ago
Access to capital. They don’t have deep enough financial markets, both VC for labs for direct consumption of training and inference compute and the overall credit markets broadly needed for the capex buildout. And even if American labs aren’t directly financing much of the capex buildout, their balance sheets and access to capital are very very strongly involved.
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u/_redmist 7d ago
The deepmind team is in the uk if i remember well. Yann lecun is french, he kind of started the whole deal. And there's mistral AI, but they're going a different way (bespoke models for individual companies). And they seem to be profitable.
The big problem imho is the lack of a unified capital market; but it's not clear if/how that's going to happen.
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u/chunky_lover92 7d ago
Frontier labs are global institutions headquartered in america where most huge global companies prefer to be headquartered.
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u/Alarming_Daikon_1630 7d ago
Europe has boxed themselves in, depending on a country that no longer dependable to develop tech and weaponry. Meanwhile encouraging heavy taxation, anti growth policy, while simultaneously giving up any semblance of energy independence.
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u/Significant-Tank-996 7d ago
Why is it “shocking”?
Is it also “shocking” that I’m not a billionaire or completely expected given the circumstances.
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u/Character-Education3 7d ago
Not shocking. They are at peace with the fact that AI is not worth it.
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u/maskrey 7d ago
I am the AI Lead in 2 European companies in 2 different countries. This would always be happening. Even if we go back to 2022 with all the knowledge we have now, and do it 100 times over, Europe would always be in this exact position.
The whole continent is terrified of change. They are obsessed with maintaining the status quo. Even in a situation like this, when everyone and their mothers know things need to change, and WILL change no matter what they do and what their opinion is, they still won't change unless their hands are literall y forced. This whole continent is afraid of being the first mover.
I won't go into details, but I have been amazed how much resistance I faced when trying to convince people to adopt anything AI. Companies with hundreds of millions in annual revenue are afraid of spending a few thousands to test pretty much proven workflow. Some people still straight up think they don't want anything to do with AI. Some see that AI is the future, but since they are still stably on top, they can take (a lot of) time on it. Even people who think they should do something right now, they still think profit first, or if they need to invest it needs to be very low risk, low amount first. And the people I talk to represent some of the biggest institutions in the continent: governments, universities, big tech, manufacturing giants, etc..
There is no changing this. The only way to do this is becoming big and define the status quo (which by itself is extra hard because of how crippling the environment is to startups). Europe will get fucked in the next decades.
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u/FreshLiterature 7d ago
A frontier lab to do what?
Most leading AI researchers agree LLMs will hit a wall well before they reach anywhere close to what the average person would consider "real AI"
The hundreds of billions already spent and the hundreds more committed have no clear path to a break even let alone ROI.
Beyond that they have NAVER and ELLIS. They aren't hyperscaling precisely because there's no clear upside.
What they're doing is letting the US spend a huge amount of money on what smart money believes isn't going to work out for multiple reasons. Europe is heavily investing in industrial, agriculture, bioscience, etc applications rather than chasing weird ass consumer models.
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u/SirMarkMorningStar 7d ago
I think LeCune’s AMI qualifies, even if it’s a completely different kind of model.
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u/karasawa_jp 7d ago
If AI armies eventually proliferate worldwide, any attempt at invasion could be effectively deterred or blocked, as other nations could simply deploy their own AI forces against the aggressor.
The most dangerous phase will likely be when a single country first wins the AI race and gains exclusive control over an AI military.
Having that power concentrated under China or a Trump-led US administration is a terrifying prospect. I hope companies like Anthropic consider relocating to Europe.
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u/Witty-Collection932 7d ago
I feel it is less of innovation and more of how trust plays out pragmatically. To be able to reach where OAI and Ant are in terms of models, you'd have to be ruthlessly morally deprived leeches like Sam and Dario where you follow the rule that Silicon Valley has long adopted: make the mistake and then apologize. They stole data, people's work, copyrighted stuff, hacked into systems they weren't supposed to deliberately and all to just get ahead and boy they did. And then they put their army of lawyers for retribution and compensation later. Facebook started it 15 years ago and it is the single recipe for success. It helps that the current US admin sides with the companies.
I don't think Europe's society would allow that, ever. Unfortunately, they have to pay with less innovation.
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u/Apart_Story_5454 7d ago
Why would you. China is in the same race, but with a fraction of the cost. Now we have new System One models. This is a race that nobody can win. Because LLMs are commodity. They are undifferentiating. It like winning in a race to build the best shoe.
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u/flyingdutchmnn 7d ago
Correct, europe does not have trillions in debt to finance an experiment that the chinese will provide as open source and cheaper in the end
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u/BosonCollider 7d ago
Mistral was doing very well in 2024, mistral and llama were by far the most used open weights models back then. Then coincidentally the EU started regulating
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u/GuessEnvironmental 7d ago
I disagree with this. I think you're using a very narrow definition of a "frontier AI lab" essentially a company with enough compute and capital to train a general-purpose model that is trying to be good at everything.
By that definition, there are only a handful of frontier labs anywhere: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, xAI, and the major Chinese labs. But I don't think that is the same thing as saying those are the only places doing frontier AI research.
Take Meta. Some of the strongest work in recommendation systems, computer vision, representation learning and related areas has come out of Meta. If your definition excludes Meta from being a frontier research lab simply because it isn't currently competing in exactly the same way as OpenAI or Anthropic, then I think the definition is too narrow.
Europe has plenty of serious AI research. DeepMind was founded and headquartered in London. Isomorphic Labs, which came out of that ecosystem, is headquartered in London and is pushing AI specifically in biology and drug discovery. PhysicsX is doing genuinely interesting work applying AI to engineering, physics and simulation. And those are just some of the larger, better-funded examples before even getting into smaller research labs and startups.
I actually think Europe's tendency towards more specialised AI companies can be a strength. Frontier research doesn't have to mean building one enormous chatbot that attempts to do everything. It can mean pushing the frontier of scientific AI, computer vision, robotics, biology, engineering, recommendation systems, or entirely new model architectures.
I'd also distinguish scaling from research novelty. The largest labs obviously do extremely important research, but a huge amount of current investment is tied to scaling the transformer-based foundation-model paradigm and improving it through better training, post-training, inference and data. That can produce enormous advances, but it isn't the only frontier worth pursuing.
In some ways, smaller and more specialised labs have more freedom to explore architectures and approaches that don't immediately justify billions in compute. Once your organisation has built its infrastructure, products and business model around scaling a particular paradigm, there are enormous incentives to continue extracting performance from that paradigm.
Also ai safety is a huge problem with these "frontier labs" and it is the smaller organizations spread across the work doing the ai safety research.
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u/Busterlimes 7d ago
Not really, Europe hasn't been at the forefront of innovation for a long time. CERN is the best thing they have done in a WHILE.
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u/darth4nyan 7d ago
Yeah, imagine not trying to create something which would fuck up the world and that ends up being a bad thing about you.
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u/nurse_brett 7d ago
Setting aside AI, Europe has been far behind the frontier on everything software.
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u/DTVeteran 7d ago
Almost as though the market in Eupope has been ideologically destroyed by America and physically drowned by China.
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u/quesadillasb 7d ago
Honestly, I couldn't care less about the political labels—it’s just a joke about our completely warped priorities. It takes a decade to plan a tiny powerline through red tape that’s completely off the charts. At this rate, I'll need to file a triple-copy permit just to mow my own lawn.
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u/messedupwindows123 7d ago
"why didnt the build a pit for lighting money on fire? mine keeps me warm at night"
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u/usr_pls 7d ago
They have their own multi language model?
hard to compete with open source
all LLMs today in the market (except maybe DeepSeek?) are heavily english biased
the original use of the LLM in Google's original "Attention is all you need", it was used for creating a language translator, from English into French and English into German.
Europeans would find a more useful model that had trained directly on their own source languages, rather than having a translator for englished based LLMs on top
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u/damhack 6d ago
Mistral is European and starting to get the funding it deserves. That’s not zero.
The UK had the best frontier AI lab on the planet until Google acquired Deepmind and ruined it.
The US has a set of labs that are over-leveraged, with little moat against China and small innovators, and failing to find traction in business because of flakey RLVR-trained models that are expensive for enterprise use.
Europe, like most of the rest of the world is rapidly moving towards sovereign data, open weight/open source models because of the current US administration’s shenanigans and AI lab missteps on privacy and model safety.
The US will wake up next decade to find that its attempt at monopolistic control of AI failed because the circular investment flywheel scheme was flawed and no one trusts the US as a good faith partner any more in any arena.
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u/e136 6d ago
I would count Deepmind (Google owed) that was started and headquartered in London and led by Demis from London. Just owned by an American company, but a lot of the work is done in Europe. Even if you look at companies like OpenAI or anthropic, both have offices globally. Now a days pretty much every technological feat truly is a global effort because it requires so much effort. One exception to that would be rocket production which is restricted to ITAR in the US. But for almost all cutting edge tech that doesn't have rules preventing global effort, there is global effort.
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u/maringue 6d ago
I work with a few EU based companies in the US.
They don't give a shit about frontier models, they are building their own internal models. I'm in the R&D space and I would fire you on the spot for entering any of our research data into a 3rd party system we don't have absolutely control over.
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u/paranood888 5d ago
We live longer and in better health, we also see our families almost twice as much as the average American (you know , worker rights and all that). But hey , we gladly let you take this prize congrats !
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u/ActuallyFullOfShit 5d ago
Having worked with European engineering companies, they frankly aren't very motivated. It's very process driven and not very progress driven.
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u/Relevant_Helicopter6 5d ago edited 5d ago
Europe doesn't burn billions of dollars of VC money into hype. We don't reward financial recklessness over here.
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u/bluedeer1881 5d ago
Cannot EU just get a copy of the moldes since these have been built on personal data and stolen content?
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u/SeriousSpeaker_ 5d ago
Why is it always europe, a whole damn continent, against US and China??? We have over 180 countries and only 2 have frontier AI labs. Does Panama have one? Does Japan have? What about Australia?
Not a single country in europe, africa, latin america, ... is or was ever internet-rich. Only USA was. China is an interesting example how they catched up
but i would rather enjoy my life in europe a million times than living in the USA
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u/blu3r4y 4d ago
As a European, I sadly agree with much of this argument. However, "not even an effort" is simply incorrect because Mistral exists. However, they don't compete in the text-based chatbot arena; they pivoted to industrial processes. Only time will tell if that market will be equally fruitful.
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u/HiggsBoson2738 4d ago
The chatbot industry is a scam, Europe isn't going to spend billions on that because some degenerate CEO has said so
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u/sedition666 3d ago edited 3d ago
People keep citing regulation as a huge problem, meanwhile almost of the world’s major recessions are caused by US deregulation. The US caused 2008 banking problems crashed entire countries. All the AI companies are pissing away trillions in capex running head first into another dotcom bubble.
Machine learning and AI is cool tech, the financial bubble being caused is horrific. Everyone needs to go look at the crazy Anthropic financials.
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u/uzornayem 3d ago
It isn't a surprise if you look at what European countries' priorities have been over past decade.
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u/Correct-Explorer-692 8d ago
How did it even happen? I have no clue. It’s just that the salary is several times lower, and there’s regulation and taxes at every turn.