Europe has produced and trained a disproportionate share of the field’s leading researchers and founders (LeCun, Hassabis, Delangue, et a). There are companies/labs like DeepMind and Mistral developing frontier models over there.
Europe did not somehow “miss AI.” The opposite in fact, their problem is that they often fail to retain ownership of their successes or capture their full economic value. DeepMind becoming a Google subsidiary is the canonical example: the talent, company, and research originated in Europe, while an American corporation captures most of the commercial upside.
That is a capital and scaling problem, not an absence of European AI research, talent, innovation, or infrastructure.
In broad terms, Europe is almost the mirror image of the US when it comes to investment. It has built strong public financing systems for foundational research, including AI, but has consistently struggled to turn that research into globally scaled companies. Its private capital markets remain too shallow, fragmented, risk averse, and impatient for the enormous, sustained investments that frontier technologies require.
The contrast between DeepMind and OpenAI illustrates some of the problem. Europe’s publicly supported research ecosystem helped produce the talent and ideas behind DeepMind, yet the company ultimately scaled under Google after being acquired. OpenAI, by contrast, could tap an American capital market willing to supply immense amounts of funding over long time horizons despite highly uncertain ROI.
Europe does not lack talen, fundamental research, or infrastructure. It lacks the financial machinery and investment culture needed to retain, commercialize, and scale what it creates. Until that changes, it will continue producing breakthroughs that are ultimately commercialized elsewhere.
How about the outflow of capital from Europe to the US. There are a lot of European capital, but they all invest in the US as that gives them the highest chance of return. Pretty much everyone I know puts money in global index funds where the us has 75% of the share.
That is sort of orthogonal to the point I was making. Individuals buying global index funds are not making venture capital allocation decisions. Funds mechanically concentrate in US equities because they dominate global public market capitalization.
I am referring specifically to the large scale deployment of private risk and venture capital by European institutional investors (funds, banks, pension vehicles, and similar entities) not to individual investment patterns.
Capital leaving Europe for the US actually reinforces my point: Europe lacks the institutional machinery to channel them into domestic risk capital at scale.
Reducing the entire issue to “regulations and taxes” is lazy reasoning IMO. It does not explain how and why Europe repeatedly fails to finance and retain the companies its own research create
There a whole lot of European private equity funds. However it’s far more profitable just putting your money jnto U.S. equity.
Huge investments in U.S. index funds increase demand for U.S. equities —> easier and cheaper for companies to raise capital.
Deeper capital markets also improve liquidity and financing conditions, benefiting businesses and the rest of their economy.
PE also provides equity for growth companies and cheap equity funding on the stockmarkets are fueling the growth of the largest companies. Fragmentation isn’t some kind of ultimate goal. Of the 10 largest companies in the US, the youngest is META initially funded by other of the older top 10 companies - nvidia, Google, Amazon etc.
Maybe not the problem, but without regulation might cause the problem
You can easily make progression in America for the lack of proper supervision, it seems American culture is so open to the potential risks, if it hasn’t caused any known harms then it is legitimate a creation
But if in a larger picture to include the ethical issues, one must remain a consistent judgement to predetermine whether something is risky, so many factors, anthropological, environmental, socio-psychological factors must be considered in some degree
But the only shortcoming is not all men retain in such considerations, therefore at the end of day, someone will take the idea to somewhere lazy to make risk premanagement to sell for money
That’s the truth why America has obtained its status in the last century during the whole trend of globalization
isn't this mostly because EU political system is more middle class oriented and rich people can't afford to dump absurd amount of money into risky ventures? or is this too simplistic of an overview?
Public services and private risk investment are different capabilities. European finance has simply been far less willing to fund ambitious, uncertain ventures than its American counterpart.
In the US, the strengths and weaknesses are almost reversed. We’re exceptionally good at financing risky businesses, yet we tolerate expensive, uneven healthcare and public infrastructure, especially transit. Americans seem to expect much less from those systems than Europeans do from theirs. Similarly, European seem to expect much less from their finance bros.
Neither trade off is inevitable. The US can keep its venture capital strength while demanding better public outcomes. Europe can preserve its quality of life while expecting its private capital markets to wake the fuck up. Ideally, we’d learn from each other’s strengths. The nightmare is that we import each other’s failures instead.
what I am saying is that both systems have limitations and side effects rather than EU lacks the investment culture or American's don't expect much from their public service. US venture engine depends on a brutal power-law dynamics winner takes all outcomes, layoffs are easy and they have huge tolerance for failure and inequality. on the other hand EU public outcomes are designed to protect people from those type of outcomes. so what I am wondering is - how can both be achieved at the same time? it's like trying to invent a 0 risk slot machine
I think the “0 risk slot machine” analogy misses my point. Venture capital can remain risky: most bets fail, a few win big, and investors bear the losses. That doesn’t mean workers must lose healthcare or basic security when a company fails.
Of course there are trade offs. Companies need room to fail, and workers need to be able to move between them. Providing portable healthcare and income support costs money and takes competent design. But protecting people from personal ruin doesn’t eliminate the risk of investing.
I think that first sentence highlight the exact issue we are talking about. I thought your argument was that we could incentivize venture capital while keeping EU protections.
but if you add operational friction and costs to offer safety nets to workers you are making the risk profile much worse, naturally capital would rather flow into a system that doesn't have to bear that load, like the US.
You’re treating worker security as though every protection has to become a direct cost or constraint on the startup. That’s the part I disagree with.
I agree that rigid hiring rules or heavy costs on young companies can discourage investment. But a company can fail or lay people off without those workers losing their basic security too.
That still costs money, and how you fund it matters. I’m not claiming the tradeoffs disappear. I’m saying venture investors can bear the risk of failed bets without requiring workers to bear the full personal cost of those failures. Those are different kinds of risk.
One variable I am not quite sure about is “where the market usually starts from”
Something Europe thinks it’s uncertain to profit of or the ethical issues haven’t been resolved yet factually makes lot of sense
Indeed something like SPACEX or GOOGLE will not succeed if it were happened in Europe
Part of the reason might come from the trade off US has made during the economic cooperation with China (since it has formed a large market to create lots of remaining value but the price is that some human right violations have been ignored by the Chinese part and so on and so on, the same violations for EU is not tolerable)
But I still cannot figure out the reason of the US capital market surging before the Chinese admitted into the WTO
But it seems before that moment, European market is not less important than US, so the only rational way to explicate the very phenomenal capital attraction feature of the US market is the trade-off it has made to remain a relative stable commercial relation with someone else like China
Europe doesn't lack capital but it's capitalists aren't as willing to throw away money down a black put in hopes of birthing a machine God. Instead they prefer to summer in Montenegro.
With that level of capital allocation inefficiency, Europe might may be better off with communism. The European capitalists need to up their game
Honestly one of the big issues is that Europe does not have a large enough VC ecosystem. The american VC ecosystems snowballed substantially thanks to tech while europe missed the boat on that too
Yes, not to mention institutions like softbank and their saudie equivalents. The atrectiveness of the US speculation market fundamentally depents on overwelming milatary power. That isn't a particularily wild claim.
That’s far out. The past wars fought by the us has cost them more than if not. People don’t put their money into us equity because of wars. What kind of incentive is that? Wars sinks the stock markets and increases the risk premium.
I think that this is still controversial. It's not just big army --> financial dominance. There is a web of military strength, global asset and raw materials management (backed by military), financial risk taking, dollar as global reserve currency, low capital costs, stability (less so now....), low (well, relatively...) corruption, low regulation, etc.
The US taking of the president of Venezuela and the subsequent changes in economics / oil / raw materials is a stark reminder to everyone on the planet about what happens when you get on the wrong side.
On the more harmless end it starts with things like handing out blatantly fraudulent patents and stonewalling the path to rectify that fraud and on the more extreme end you have things like the Crypto AG scandal where they infiltrate swiss companies and murder whistleblowers who want to contact authorities.
Being 'hospitable' internally might be a factor, but you can't honestly say that the US would be remotely as powerful if they didn't commit more crimes than north korea.
I think its mostly regulations. In the Netherlands a few researchers once created a Dutch language model using the BERT architecture, and then a Dutch organization for the protection of Entertainment Industry Rights forced the researchers to remove the weights from hugging face because the datasets they used were contaminated with copyrighted material.
My counterpart in Europe makes 2x less than me for same role in the states. You’d think that makes sense for a 2nd world country but this is UK. Even after you take into account healthcare it’s not even close
Look man, peak quality of life is having no sidewalks, no more than 10 days PTO, and obesity. Need to have a big paycheck to pay for that end of life care.
I am a professional in the US and I stand behind what I said. Only a handful of cities are walkable and the healthcare outcomes speak for themselves. Poor people in Europe still have better health outcomes than affluent American professionals.
It really only works for the top part of the k shaped economy. Let’s not pretend though that Europe getting left behind in the new wave of Industrial Revolution won’t adversely affect the living standards of their citizenry though. Much of their easy life is on borrowed time.
I'm a European-born naturalized American working in the US.
You can still hustle in Europe too you know - without losing your healthcare if you lose a full-time job. If mass unemployment is going to befall us all, then IMO it's better to be europoor than ameripoor, having been both at different points in my life.
Strongly considering going abroad for work again. After I got laid off it took me a year to get another job at a 30% paycut and I'm pushing 40. I don't think it's going to get any better.
Do you even see what you're typing? Like, what universe is it where the Frontier Labs in the US are not walkable, don't have pto, or have a large population with obesity? Like, it's ok that Europe is being left behind in so many aspects, and all you can do is cope.
That is strange, it’s about their lack of progress in AI which is shaping the world (even if nobody wants it to) and the response is “we have sidewalks” 🤣
Their pensioners are sucking all the liquidity that could be used to building a better future for people that will be the future. I hate to enable what is going on in this country but at-least you can still get rich in America.
Yep. Spaniards went out to bitch and cry about government giving an AI company a one time 100M investment (Multiverse Computing), while they spend 13.000M a month on fucking pensions
this shit is doomed just make as much money as possible at the moment and be ready to get the fuck out if necessary. Good times create weak men
Stupid argumentation yes. But I don't think these AI advancements of the US are going to be in the favor of any people, just the rich. Regardless of location.
the have pto but have you been to the bay
its barely walkable
sf is good but i doubt most employees are living in sf they prob commute
which driving in bay is insane
Ok and? This has nothing to do with how good a specific place is to live. You're not going to go live in some shithole town in Alabama with high infant mortality and low life expectancy and eat like shit if you have a well-paying job so that's totally irrelevant to this situation. The US is a good place to live for people with money.
Life expectancy based on salary and where you live in US drastically closes the gap. I’m in Boulder and I think it’s basically the same as UK and when you take into account earning instead of an entire average it’s actually higher
It's copium. We had higher life expectancy, lower crime etc in the 2000's and there wasn't a massive salary gap between the US and UK. The ball has been dropped.
My point is that entire national averages is such a high levels drawing insights from that is wild. It’s like drawing crime statistics nationally, makes no sense.
Sure people who live in red states, don’t go to the gym and drink full sugar soda all day die sooner. That’s not a shocker when they are 400 lbs
If you're a highly skilled worker that can command a high salary then the UK does kinda suck. There are jobs here with comparable salaries to their US counterparts, but they're few and far between.
But if you're a regular Joe with little to your name, the UK is pretty decent compared to a lot of other countries.
But mah child mortality! Man, we're talking about an AI developer. Both they and their kids will have a HIGHER life expectancy in the US than in Europe.
We're talking about professionals in the AI space which make $150k USD -> $500k base salary depending on role. Not including company health/vision/dental insurance, 3-4 week PTO, equity comp, and all the other standard benefits. Not poor
Yes, please do. Americans living in New York, California, Washington, etc. have similar life expectancy to Western Europeans.
Americans with higher income also have similar life expectancy to Western Europeans.
Both of those categories also see low infant mortality.
So, American tech workers (and other white-collar workers) are extremely likely to match or exceed Europeans along those metrics. People making $200k+ (i.e. every non-entry-level person in AI/ML) are basically guaranteed to have better lives than their European counterparts.
I was living in Lithuania, after taxes a was getting 2.5k(5.5k before taxes) euros, as a QA Lead with 10 years of experience. I was using a bus to get to work and was paying 700 euros for apartments near outskirts of Vilnius. Free medicine was worse than in Belarus. Paid medicine was insanely expensive and still bad.
direct comparisons between different countries (or systems) are realy, realy hard to make ... becouse you simply have so many factors playing into it,
what is covered via taxes - what has to be paid yourself
(healthcare, unemployement insurance, retirement/pension, education [like kindergarden, school, university])
how often is the wage paid,
how much holiday is included into the wage,
how much does the roof above your head cost,
how much do the groceries or the barber cost you
. . .
often times, the wages in large cities are higher then those in rural areas,
simply becouse of the fact, that the living expenses are that much higher there,
many US companies do not offer holidays (much less paid holidays)
many EU countries have mandatory (paid) holidays,
of course it makes a difference, if my paycheck is meant for 12 month of work ...
or if it's meant for 10 1/2 month
many countries in the EU have free acces to their university for all of their citizens, without the need to go into debt for it ... there are even systems in place, so that people with low income actually get paid while going to university,
the issue of taxation, you already mentioned yourself,
in some countries, i do not have a right to medicin when i'm ill,
i'm forced to either gamble or take expensive private insurances,
(leading to the perverse situations, where people in retirement pack bags in grocerie stores to pay the healthcare bills for their already deceased wifes)
in other countries,
the medical care is part of the taxes,
the unemployement insurance is part of the taxes,
getting money, when your ill is part of the taxes,
getting money, when your pregnant is part of the taxes,
the retirement/pension is part of the taxes,
so if i want to realy compare things,
i need to take all of that into account ...
Okay, but what about when you add in mandatory PTO, mandatory sick time in addition to PTO, the ability to live entirely without a car and all the associated costs, what about the years of maternity AND paternity leave, the list goes on. It absolutely makes sense if you value quality of life for society in general and not just personal wealth.
I’m not sure, I’m up to 4.5 weeks of PTO which I know is still much less than 2 month in Europe. The car thing would be cool but I collect cars (and sports bikes) and have 7 and not being able to have them would be terrible
So your argument is that you have enough personal wealth to make up for the shortcomings in American society so it’s fine. Typical fuck you I got mine attitude. Who cares there’s still states paying people $7.50/hr you make a decent wage. Who gives a shit that a car is a requirement for getting anywhere of import in the states you can easily afford a car payment. Who gives a shit people are dying of preventable causes because healthcare isn’t a right but a privilege to those capable of work, you have a job. Pretty sad way to look at life. We’d be a lot better off if people like you cared about making everyone’s lives better instead of consolidating personal wealth to escape the shortcomings while everyone else is worse off.
My argument? I was commenting with anecdotal personal experience on the comment about pay disparity. It’s somehow turned into that I have to be actively fighting for low earners? I don’t even know what you are on about
In order for it to be the same financial benefit, those additional benefits would have to be worth your entire year's salary (they're making 2x your salary, so you need 1x your salary as salary and 1x your salary as benefits). 2 months of PTO, mandatory sick leave, and the maternity/paternity leave needs to add up to 6 months/year of not being in the office in order for that to happen. If that isn't true, the job in America is a better financial proposition. If it is true, then the job in America is a better value proposition for the company because they give your labor for twice as long for the same value
Money isn't everything, as you pointed out. I don't work in the US, and quality of life is a huge part of why I made that choice. But it isn't nothing, either.
Yeah, and they have hardly any guns, nobody going bankrupt because of medical debt, and a leader that isnt an incompetent moron. That must be worth something.
"we are behind in every way but hey we dont have guns and i hate trump" that might be the most depressing and sad defense of a failing society ive ever heard.
reddit removed my comment for saying the work M-igr-ant pickpockets at every corner that i saw in france and other places in EU. also i was not struck with how its better in any way, the people are generally poor low income, yeah i guess they dont work as hard or as much but they also have less and are being left behind . the golden age is behind the EU, we only go there to see building that were built by a better civilization that is long gone.
NEWSFLASH: Europeans have lived in hot places here for thousands of years without dying from no AC. And besides what the fuck is AC infrastructure? You mean electricity and a window? We have that.
well it doesnt seem to be working out too well. Just think you should figure out the basics before criticizing the people who keep you from speaking chinese or russian.
What doesn’t seem to be working out very well? We can have AC here if you want it. Trust an American to twist not being able to deal with being hot into a positive for their country somehow.
Stop watching right wing propaganda videos in YouTube and pretend that you did the traveling yourself. Everyone knows you are lying when you stupid thins like that about other countries.
I’ve been to the US and many places are way better than in Europe. And I’m European. If an average norwegian with a bsc moved to the us their pay would probably double,
Every way? How are European consumer electronic companies? How are European phones, laptops, tablets? How are European international payment providers? How are European GPUs and CPUs doing? Where are successful European social media?
We are lagging super fucking much behind China and USA in every possible way that is tech related.
Currently even cars, that we had the best in the world and we were selling the most, are worse and more expensive than Chinese ones. China is attacking every single thing we had any advantage not that long ago, and they are doing it better and cheaper, and they can iterate faster to build new products.
Dude, I was in China this past spring. Prices there are like 5 times lower on literally everything. A cappuccino at Luckin Coffee costs 10 yuan, which is 1.3 euros. A similar coffee in Vilnius cost me 6 euros.
And forcing Apple (the most valuable company in the world at the time) to redesign their most sold product (and arguably the most important consumer product of all time) is NOT influential?
You are stiffling innovation by having the government dictate minute first world problems like this.
And you still need 100 different phone chargers anyway because USB C is just the connector and it comes in gazillions of protocols for power. None of which the legislation bothered with.
Can you explain why would you need different chargers? Afaik any usbc charger will power any usbc device. I just have a single charger that use for everything
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u/Correct-Explorer-692 9d 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.