It's a tricky balance to strike. I don't want EU to fall behind further in the AI race, and I do want them to be more competitive in the tech landscape. At the moment, EU really isn't competitive in tech (and neither in tech salaries) and it leads to a certain amount of 'brain drain' as people move abroad.
So while I do understand the need for regulations, they shouldn't regulate themselves into irrelevance. I don't think there's an easy solution to this.
I don't think its about regulation, its the mindset. Since some time there's this trend of indie European developers with some who managed to make themselves a name like Peter Levels and be hosted on big podcasters and these people keep calling their projects "startups" and making about as much as a high street kebab shop(in this community they like to boost about their revenues). Levels is famous enough to be interviewed by Lex Friedman and in this 4 hours talk they mention how an American company just took his idea and copied his ways and made 30 million dollars by making an iOS app of it and Levels talks as if it never crossed his mind to be the person who did it and make serious money.
Also he constantly complains about regulations etc but some striking things come out of it from time to time. For example he complains that its hard to get access to the EU's supercomputer and compares this to US where you can just buy tens of thousands of GPUs from Nvidia and not go through the EUs bureaucracy and never occurs to him that you can do the same in EU and the the EU funded supercomputer is just an extra.
Its just so weird, the mentality is very different. Maybe it works when you are working on a niche and it is a good way of making a living or even getting rich but that's not how you build empires.
The regulations are just a meme at this point, no one seems to know what regulation stopped them from doing the thing they will do. IMHO the reality is that you can just built the thing in USA and access EU markets from there and there's no need for replication in EU, therefore EU has plenty of startups but very few scale ups and unicorns and that's not going to change unless EU closes its markets to USA.
Levels is all hype, no depth. It’s absurd that he frames himself as somehow “disadvantaged” by the EU’s HPC access rules, when those systems are explicitly reserved for scientific research, not for cranking out AI avatars or the latest “AI-generated game” cash-grab. Complaining that you can’t use taxpayer-funded supercomputers for your next hype cycle isn’t a sign of innovation - it’s Levels' so often displayed self-entitlement and pseudo-intellectualism.
Sure but he became the poster child of a certain trend. Besides, you can see the mentality all over the place.
Contrary to what the social media makes you believe, EU isn't run on tickets income for old building - the place is packed with high tech niche businesses but they don't seem to be interested much in scaling.
Even the Ruby on Rails guy, David Heinemeier Hansson, never went for dominating an industry, becoming a platform with investor money and become an Unicorn. They just keep making money. It's really cool, he loves his life and He's probably much happier than Zuck or Musk but with that approach you end up staying a niche instead of a behemoth like the American companies. In USA the instinct seems to be how to make this global and take all the money. The European approach is good for society IMHO, no enshitification once you circle the market however when your market is open to people who are willing to do the put a lot of money first, kill the competition be a monopoly or duopoly and then screw everyone and and make filthy level of money then you become one of those killed.
> Even the Ruby on Rails guy, David Heinemeier Hansson, never went for dominating an industry, becoming a platform with investor money and become an Unicorn
If something in europe has potential to dominate then it's eventually being bought by US capital, see Skype, Nokia. If someone is throwing at you 10+ digit check then it's hard to resist and even if you want to resist good luck with persuading your early investors about not taking the money.
EU doesn't have petro-dollar and as good money printer as US. EU doesn't also have citizens & big funds that ape savings into local stocks, another reason most companies IPO in US.
>> Until very recently the EU stated that being carbon neutral by 2050 was of overriding importance[1].
I'm ok with that. Not every continent/country/economic bloc has to have the same goals. Competing with the US or China in the 'AI race' is a race you're probably going to lose anyway. And it's going to make fuck all difference to the vast majority of the population anyway. Healthcare, education, life/work balance. All much more important and don't require competing in the 'AI race'. The EU has made some missteps with its tech regs but it's worth it to be able to download or delete my data from any service and that's something Americans are also benefiting from as most companies didn't bother geo-locking it.
You could argue economic success has a knock on effect on everything else in a country and it does to some extent. But, while many European countries have their problems socially and politically over the last decade none of them have come anywhere close to the train wreck that is US.
> Not every continent/country/economic bloc has to have the same goals.
One potential outcome of that would appear to be a mostly deindustrialised Europe with low carbon emissions and no growth, and the rest of the world politely trying not to laugh?
> And it's going to make fuck all difference to the vast majority of the population anyway
"In 2024, the eight highest emitting economies - China, USA, India, EU, Russia, Indonesia, Brazil and Japan - collectively contributed to 66.2% of global GHG emissions. Only the European Union and Japan decreased their emissions compared to the previous year (-1.8% and -2.8% respectively), while all others either kept them rather stable (China: +0.8%; USA: +0.4%; Brazil +0.2%) or increased them (India: +3.9%; Russia: +2.4%, Indonesia: +5% - the highest relative increase).
In absolute terms, India has the largest increase with 164.8 Mt CO2eq more emissions released in 2024 compared to 2023."
Europe not being dependent on foreign oil is a worthy goal as well, it's not the US whcih could supply it's oil use domestically.
A lot of green infrastructure is also expensive upfront, but cheaper over the full lifespan. It's the kind of investment I like to see goverment making.
I think taking care of the environment rather than burning through resources needlessly will improve life for us. But if you're looking for a more specific example, moving to renewable energy and getting off Russian gas and oil would be beneficial in many ways for Europe and at a most basic level would hopefully eventually lead to lower and more predictable energy prices for consumers.
Greenpeace was founded to oppose nuclear energy, because it would lead to nuclear war (that was their position at least), which illustrates that, even now, nuclear power is considered not-green.
Keeping the planet habitable, or making line go up? Truly a difficult choice...
More seriously: what is the benefit for the citizens of Europe to chase trends? AI is shaping up to be a bubble. Even if "market remains irrational longer than you stay solvent", what is the purpose? Clean air, clean water, all that has value. Line going up, what does it give me?
>More seriously: what is the benefit for the citizens of Europe to chase trends?
If you sit out the trend, somebody else will have more money (or bigger army, or just an army that can actually shoot at things and people) and you will not be able to choose what trends to chase.
Exactly. Also, whatever those AI leaders invent, two months later the whole world has it.
I mean when GPT 3.5 came out it seemed amazing, but requiring a 8x Nvidia N100 or whatever guaranteed that id never have it at home. A year or so later llama 3.1 accomplished similar results on pc at home. It's a race but the winners are only slightly ahead and wasting a lot of money doing it.
"China plans to keep building coal-fired power plants through 2027 in regions where they are needed to meet peak power demand or stabilise the grid, according to government guidelines"
Another factor in being competitive in artificial intelligence is the price of electricity, which is four times higher in the EU than in the US. Changing this would require a break with the “green industrial complex”, which is close to untouchable (to many EU politicians).
I think there are plenty of ways to provide cheaper green power in Europe, if it is permitted.
In general, I don't understand the need to colocate data centers with the companies programming them - I'm sure there are many jurisdictions other than the US or EU that could spin up cheaper power.
Who's going to pay your pension. Hopefully you have 10 kids. They all want free money, no work, more perks. But who pays for it... maybe "the state". We're pricing ourselves out of the market and guys like the one above clap. Crazy world.
completely false that 60-70% of americans live paycheck to paycheck. you cannot take self-reported survey data like that seriously, the median net worth in the US is something like $200k - there are plenty of people with hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank claiming to live paycheck to paycheck here.
given that we are already seeing serious strain for some european pension systems, i don’t think this is a very strong comparison
While everybody is fixated on fertility rate, the actual thing important for pensions is the pyramid. And the demographics pyramid of the EU (West of it least) looks pretty ok (not great, not terrible) from 20 y.o upwards. It's not sustainable forever and it rubs the fascists the wrong way for obvious reasons, but it's not even half that bad that the 1.20 number makes you imagine.
It's also very much possible this is a transitive thing and not the new settled norm.
Incels in their 20s already scream they feel mistreated and don't want to hold the social construct. Let's fix the pyramid by importing more people on boats. Maybe they'll work for us.
Have you expected otherwise? What does the commoner gain from having there PII in the hands of large surveillance companies? In my expectation people that are not oblivious to that issue and don't have stake in such a company would be for such a regulation.
The comparison is spot on -- if you smoke sigs and pay somebody who doesn't,
you will still get cancer and the other person can get it too if you breath it out into their face.
Until there is no commercial carbon capture, it's all scam and accounting tricks. Sure, paying somebody else to decarbonise instead of yourself works in decarbonisign somebody else, but the emissions should drop across the board all the way to zero.
> The comparison is spot on -- if you smoke sigs and pay somebody who doesn't, you will still get cancer and the other person can get it too if you breath it out into their face.
Right - carbon emissions aren't internalized in the same way as cigarettes.
But what is 'tech'? When we say the EU isn't competitive in 'tech', what technology capacity do they lack?
I think 'tech' as a category doesnt make much sense any more. It's like saying 'road-based business'. Most companies are 'tech' companies.
Ignoring the technical element, what are US megacorps that account for all the GDP growth of the last while?
Mostly ad market monopolies, then mostly massive-scale IP theft, etc.
I think the EU is 'behind' the US only in it's inability to be well-positioned to build massive rent-seeking megacorps. I dont see where-else this gap is supposed to be.
What, on 'tech' should the EU be doing differently? Just allowing megacorps to add 30% to every transaction?
If this US tech bubble bursts, it's not clear that the EU won't be better positioned to pick up the pieces.
Giving money to random tech schmoocks and seeing the valuation of their thing gettign to 1B, then lobbying for laws to make it monopoly. This kind of thing.
That and selling icecream flavor preferences of 1B people to guess who is more susceptible to brainwashing, so you friends can get reelected.
All very nice technology, including the one which destroys entire solar system to make a sacrifice big enough to summon Cthulhu.
> Mostly ad market monopolies, then mostly massive-scale IP theft, etc.
Good point. I think that the EU has an opportunity to really grow here by focusing on intellectual property enforcement, patents, copyright, and generally more strict enforcement on making sure returns for ideas go to the first person to think of them. The EU already has a pretty strong governance lead and should double down on where its strengths lie.
Define "innovation", it's such an overused umbrella term that it's lost any meaning, usually when I read it in comments like yours I simply have no idea what you mean by it.
It's not a race anyway. The Americans always make things into one. But it's mainly their obsession with being "number one". Being number two or three is just fine. We will catch up.
What I'm more worried about is that they'll drag us down into another financial crash like in 2007 when the AI bubble bursts and investors get pissed that they've spent trillions on hot air.
I don't mean to be a dick but I'm getting a bit tired of all this constant survival of the fittest mentality and the idea that they have the best country in the world when in fact it is pretty awful if you're not rich (especially when in poor health). There's a lot of things we do a lot better in Europe and I'm glad to live here. Especially the last year. I don't want Europe to become more like the US.
I like the EU, but what's annoying about things like this, or the Chat Control law that keeps getting pushed, is that civil society and privacy advocacy groups always need to stay vigilant and keep mobilizing people. It's an attrition game.
I wonder what harm companies are even claiming. But honestly makes perfect sense that Germany's current conservative government is in favor of it. Giant GDP boosts are always just one deregulation away, hm?
> Giant GDP boosts are always just one deregulation away, hm?
Honestly, reducing the complexity of incorporating and paying taxes in Germany would quickly improve the dire situation of startups here. It's so bad right now that a tax advisor straight up told me to move to a less business-hostile country.
Totally agree!! But you never see anything remotely close to proposals like that from the people claiming they want less bureaucracy.
When they say less bureaucracy / deregulation, they just talk about tax cuts, less consumer protections and at worst artificially boosting large companies that are not innovating.
What is desperately needed is making the system less cumbersome and convoluted
They should just copy Polish laws. They are far from perfect, and yet they provided Poland with almost 30 years of stable, few percent growth, regardless of global and European economic struggles. When you plot the chart of Polish GDP even such a significant event as entering EU doesn't even register in the shape of the growth.
It recently had a bit of tax law upheaval, but things settled down since then. As for other issues it's politically stable, by which I mean consistently politically crappy.
True but Poland did come from a really really deep hole under the thumb of the Soviets. They were very thoroughly screwed over. I guess this is why Poland is the most anti russian country in the EU now (and rightly so)
Just saying that growth is pretty easy starting off from zero.
> reducing the complexity of incorporating and paying taxes in Germany would quickly improve
I believe german citizens are actually against it. I may be wrong, but this is my personal observations. Source: I have tried to incorporate in Germany and I have incorporated in Poland.
You yourself may want to look at some stats regarding the size of the European Union to put that in perspective but I’ll do the math for you it’s 0.01% of people meaning that they were in fact correct… 99.99% of people have no interest in moving to freedom land.
Also keep in mind that these uncited figures you’ve magically produced conveniently cut-off before you started implementing a policy of kidnapping people off the streets without any right to a trial and shipping them off to 3rd world torture prisons.
This story you’ve made up about Europeans secretly craving to live in the US is one you’ve completely made up in your mind (or through that bullshit propaganda of “American exceptionalism” that the country is so in love with) and isn’t supported by any real world data.
Almost everyone in Europe thinks it’s a worse place to live, work, get sick in, get an education in or to die in. Again, all supported by hard data.
"I don't think anyone" - means zero, not "almost no one" - you yourself should probably study English some more.
And... let's put it this way - there are far fewer than 80,000 people who drive the growth of either the US or EU economy in non-linear ways. If 80,000 of the "wrong" (most positively impactful) people move from the EU to US, that's a big deal.
I'm pretty sure that I didn't implement any such policies. Did you implement the Third Reich's policies, sir?
There are apparently also stories that I've made up. Interesting. How's that mind-reading technology coming along?
Really only finding a way to match almost every negative US stereotype possible here. I feel like I lost brain cells just reading it. This is that famous education system in action.
I genuinely laughed when I read this. Like you had set up an argument in your mind where if even one person moved from the EU to the US you were going to be right and the best part is I don’t think you’re joking like you actually believed this. Back in the real world though everyone understands that 99.9% means everyone.
But sure, do go on telling people to “learn English better” while you proudly continue on through life with a first grade reading comprehension and math skills.
Typical. Make an argument. Be proven wrong. Lash out at the terrible US education system (which, of course, has most of the best universities in the world and to which many foreign people spend collectively billions of dollars to attend.) Goodbye.
P.S which one is it? The best in the world or terrible? You didn’t seem to be able to hold a coherent thought for a full sentence. Between this and an inability to understand the advanced statistical concept of percentages I can’t help but think that things aren’t going particularly well for you at the moment.
I see the opposite. A lot of US people trying to move here now that it's becoming unliveable there for eg trans people. I'm kinda in an lgbt bubble but still. I myself have informed my employer I will no longer even travel to the US for work. Visiting a country means subjecting yourself to its laws and I won't do that. Same with eg middle east. I'm kinda non-binary so trying to get an X passport now so I have an easier time refusing (as I wouldn't be accepted entry anyway)
Also for colleagues in India, scoring a job in America through our company was always the big ideal. That also is no more because nobody wants to be a second class citizen.
Literally so, because the European """Parliament""" is the only institution with this name that I'm aware of that does not have the power to introduce laws. Which means it doesn't have the power to repeal them.
In other words, the Commission can propose laws as many times as they want, and if they pass even once, the Parliament has no power to repeal it.
> civil society and privacy advocacy groups always need to stay vigilant and keep mobilizing people. It's an attrition game.
I'm not sure why you are singling out the EU Chat Control, when all the US "tech" sector have been playing this attrition game for 40+ years already...
It is indeed an attrition game, and the dominance of the adtech surveillance capitalism is the proof that we are already on the loosing side.
Maybe because that one everyone is used to, and this one is new? We get used to the status quo, but anything new is scary.
In this case, chat control is indeed scary, but the existing ad tech mass surveilance does not get much attention.
"Draft changes would create new exceptions for AI companies that would allow them to legally process special categories of data (like a person’s religious or political beliefs, ethnicity or health data) to train and operate their tech."
Fully anonymized health data I can somehow understand, but what kind of AI needs to be trained with "a person's religious or political beliefs [or] ethnicity", anonymized or not?
Ethnicity can correlate with certain genetic or health predispositions - for instance, the U.S. has long recognized that some conditions (like sickle-cell anemia or hypertension) appear more frequently in Black populations. If AI systems were forbidden from even considering such demographic factors, diagnostic accuracy could suffer.
These categories of data are already somewhat special under the GDPR. I think we've committed enough genocide that now they're enshrined into protected data types.
Why do you doubt that is exactly what is happening? The EU governments are demanding to view all communications by it's citizens AND has given itself the right to use all sorts of AI technology (like facial recognition) on private data (like faces for example). Privacy protection, even for your medical records, only exists against private companies. Which means that the people you want privacy from, your medical insurance, which is part of the government nearly everywhere in Europe, both has access and can do with the data whatever it wants under EU legislation.
Does anyone seriously expect EU legislation will protect people from the obvious: training AI on chat messages and then using violence (ie. police action) just based on online messages?
Biggest problem is you need two types economy at once.
You need the big paradigm shifts that come from an innovation economy; for that, capital must flow easily, risk-taking (both companies and individuals) be rewarded not punished, and a stable job is kind of a bad thing (people get too comfortable)..
Meanwhile in more mature sectors, job security (so people can have mortgages and families) and market stability should be fostered and corporate overreach & power be checked.
Advanced economies are a mix of sectors which need almost opposite policy.
No one can call software and AI mature, they are still innovating. We do not even know how they will look in give years. Premature regulation kills this innovation. Harms of AI are not the same as harms from traffic accidents.
How about also reviewing the copyright laws in favour of the public? The AI actors consume everything for profit and nobody cares. But if an ordinary Joe does this for personal amusement, he should face consequences.
This whole thing is obviously biased, because of money.
I was there during the 2010s and here is what happened:
- I have been at a lot of public debates/consultations in Brussels on the GDPR as early as 2012. I have seen first EU people there screaming at US/BigTech lobby groups trying to influence the debate in their favor.
- When we started to understand what the regulation would look like everybody started to panic about what it would cost to comply in the public and private sector. Everybody started to appoint a Chief Data Office or Chief Data Protection Officer. Consultancy firms were hired everywhere.
- At the same time "The Cloud" was starting to creep up in those organizations, first as what we were calling "shadow IT". But the decisions maker didn't wanted to hear about "The Cloud" or loosing control of their infrastructure.
- After usually a year of study on the GDPR issue the decision makers were told that:
1/ Our infrastructure and software stack will need deep work to comply and it is gonna cost a fortune.
2/ The business is asking for agility and is already using the cloud.
3/ Look Google, AWS and Azure have a "GDPR compliant" certificate from EY (the same firm who is usually hired for compliance study and work).
- So I have seen dozens and dozens of organizations deciding their migration to the cloud between 2016 and 2019. Then of course COVID and homeworking came and it accelerated everything.
So GDPR pushed everybody to hyperscalers ironically, because Big Tech is playing chess and know how decisions are made and how to work the system.
Also I have never seen a big company centering or even using a Hertzner, OVH or Scaleway.
What is probably going on is Big Tech went back to the Commission and explained the new legislation they have to pass.
And my guess is it is not gonna help any EU based AI company stay competitive or get any significant market share.
The EU will give them pennies to compete with OpenAI and Google and tell them that Europeans are smarter than Americans so David should be able to beat Goliath.
Also the EU AI models have to be trained on renewable energy or whatever.
Washington is rotten but Brussels is about the same (or worst).
This new package is about "removing regulation", specifically GDPR.
Which let's be honest has not achieved its intended target. Google/Apple/etc can easily afford to break GDPR and get caught up in fines while as a small business owner it was a huge and complicated liability.
ofc politico will frame this as a negative, it seems their only mission is to make moloch grow.
It's really stupid that people imagine that the GDPR would hold back European AI.
Seeing as the Americans firms have in fact rolled out their systems, it's unlikely to be a legal problem withe GDPR. Maybe copyright is a problem.That would have been a solved problem if that regulation requiring people to list their training data had been applied fully.
This won't make any difference for AI and will reduce EU cohesion, as a belief in privacy is a shared European value.
go outside and you will see people share almost nothing in common. It's ridiculous to pretend all people in europe agree on this matter, but nobody outside europe doing it.
But we do in fact have this as a shared value. I'm sure there are people outside it whole like it too, sort of like how there are people outside Sweden who like freedom-to-roam, but when you actually have something it becomes part of your expectations and your culture; and I think this belief in limits on internet surveillance, tracking, etc. has in fact become such a thing.
When you don't have something most people accept not having it and it becomes normal not to have it, and I think that's the case with privacy in the US and outside the EU in general.
I see the same type of comments when it comes to any post on EU tech. What I've found throughout my career is that:
1) Maybe we (EU citizens) are just way less interested in hustle culture compared to other regions. We can keep complaining about regulation and the difficulty of incorporating, but these feel like excuses. Estonia and Portugal come to mind as places where incorporating is practical but not a game-changer. Let's face it: we're just not as interested in launching stuff? We have cushy jobs, with lots of benefits, and launching a business is less required to lead a good life (i.e. we have less inequality ti push against).
2) I've started a company in Belgium of all places. Having worked in Germany for a long time: hey German buddies, it's not the difficulty of starting a business. It's much better over there. Also: deregulating the labor market more would place the majority of us at the mercy of companies a la USA. No, thanks.
3) We're not behind on tech because of the GDPR. Many things in this omnibus are just plain stupid. We should stimulate deeper tech, fundamental research, supporting all the open-source developers we have, and perhaps invest in European structural alternatives. Promote AI? Give me a break.
4) I'm a certified GDPR whatever (2 online courses). It's really not that much of a problem. If you know what data you're collecting and why, your Privacy Policy writes itself. Otherwise you use one of the services that does it for you.
5) Do we have a problem with tech salaries more than a generalised issue with rampant inflation? Because I've never had a single colleague or acquaintance move to the US because of a better salary. Not a single one. On the other hand we're in a parenting group that's full of people that came here to start a family due to the benefits we have. Improving things overall would fight any brain drain more than stimulating tech unicorns.
6) Speaking of which… I'd like to find again the study on the economic tissue of countries. It showed that it's SMEs that employ the most people and pay the bulk of the taxes. Good, decent, boring businesses. We could do less with the nonsensical fantasy of the startup unicorn as a paradigm of entrepreneurship. Okay, I'm sore from having my equity stolen at the last gig, but my point stands. Our parents and grandparents just went to business if they had to. Heck, with the current lack of jobs, many of us will do the same. Let's not pretend that we're missing a startup scene. Berlin was a great place for startups and I can't name a single of the places I've worked that is consequential to anything. Maybe Delivery Hero? But not even that one, they barely made a profit at the time.
Honestly, let's stop whining so much and get yet another sector given the neoliberal deregulation treatment. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but posts complaining about EU regulations at this point feel like karma farming.
I think I do, as in I'm pretty sure I've never ever voted for this European Commission thing, neither has any other EU citizen that I know of, and yet they're running the whole show here in Europe. If if walks and quacks like a duck it most certainly is a duck. Granted, they don't have North Korea's interesting military parades, I'll give them that.
Later edit: I think you might me on the wrong understanding path by the so-called "democratic deficit" expression that is often-times used when referring to decision-making inside the EU (and hence to the European Commission, its executive arm), I think "dictatorship" does a much better job of telling things for what they really are.
You've voted for the people who elect the European Commission, though I'm sure you know that, just conveniently decided to leave it out, you're a known troll on Reddit too.
Candidates are not elected by voters but positioned.
Once people have cast their vote, members of the comission are not automatically determined but negotiated across political families, and the bureaucracy.
Time to tear down this ridiculous administrative, bureaucratic, corporative and very expensive leviathan.
> You've voted for the people who elect the European Commission
And they 'magically' approved a short list of US-lobby-backed unelected personas for leadership positions, who are pushing everything ranging from the chat control law to this privacy-killing 'deregulation', while ruining Eu's trade relationships with everyone from China to Africa to boot.
The ability of citizens to vote doesn’t make the country not a dictatorship. There are many examples here, e.g., Russia, multiple middle eastern countries, etc.
Don't underestimate the ability of humans to make a right mess of things in short order. Often, these elaborate systems of government, finance, and/or corporation often falls very slowly and then suddenly all at once.
It's not a given by any means, nor do I wish downfall of the EU or it's member states for the record, but things are rarely as stable or persistent as they seem, especially when subjected to the novel and/or unforseen.
Brexit worked out so well that it basically quelled any dreams of other EU countries exiting after seeing it just creates a lot of headaches and almost no benefit to then just go back to having trade agreements with the EU while not being part of it.
I'm always boggled by the logic of thinking that somehow having big companies going around doing harmful actions to people is "good for the economy" or "keeps us competitive". If having strict AI regulations means AI companies leave Europe, that's good! I wish we could do the same and get them to leave the US. These big AI companies are bad. We shouldn't want them, we shouldn't try to attract them, we shouldn't provide any conciliations or incentives. The sooner and more completely they're eradicated from any jurisdiction, the better. Forcing that kind of toxic waste out of your country should be perceived as a win.
Theft of creative work, brain rot, intrusive enshittifiying of all manner of software, spreading misinformation, perpetuating biases, concentrating wealth, sucking up energy. . . I could go on and on and on. The list of negative effects is endless.
It's a tricky balance to strike. I don't want EU to fall behind further in the AI race, and I do want them to be more competitive in the tech landscape. At the moment, EU really isn't competitive in tech (and neither in tech salaries) and it leads to a certain amount of 'brain drain' as people move abroad.
So while I do understand the need for regulations, they shouldn't regulate themselves into irrelevance. I don't think there's an easy solution to this.
I don't think its about regulation, its the mindset. Since some time there's this trend of indie European developers with some who managed to make themselves a name like Peter Levels and be hosted on big podcasters and these people keep calling their projects "startups" and making about as much as a high street kebab shop(in this community they like to boost about their revenues). Levels is famous enough to be interviewed by Lex Friedman and in this 4 hours talk they mention how an American company just took his idea and copied his ways and made 30 million dollars by making an iOS app of it and Levels talks as if it never crossed his mind to be the person who did it and make serious money.
Also he constantly complains about regulations etc but some striking things come out of it from time to time. For example he complains that its hard to get access to the EU's supercomputer and compares this to US where you can just buy tens of thousands of GPUs from Nvidia and not go through the EUs bureaucracy and never occurs to him that you can do the same in EU and the the EU funded supercomputer is just an extra.
Its just so weird, the mentality is very different. Maybe it works when you are working on a niche and it is a good way of making a living or even getting rich but that's not how you build empires.
The regulations are just a meme at this point, no one seems to know what regulation stopped them from doing the thing they will do. IMHO the reality is that you can just built the thing in USA and access EU markets from there and there's no need for replication in EU, therefore EU has plenty of startups but very few scale ups and unicorns and that's not going to change unless EU closes its markets to USA.
Levels is all hype, no depth. It’s absurd that he frames himself as somehow “disadvantaged” by the EU’s HPC access rules, when those systems are explicitly reserved for scientific research, not for cranking out AI avatars or the latest “AI-generated game” cash-grab. Complaining that you can’t use taxpayer-funded supercomputers for your next hype cycle isn’t a sign of innovation - it’s Levels' so often displayed self-entitlement and pseudo-intellectualism.
Sure but he became the poster child of a certain trend. Besides, you can see the mentality all over the place.
Contrary to what the social media makes you believe, EU isn't run on tickets income for old building - the place is packed with high tech niche businesses but they don't seem to be interested much in scaling.
Even the Ruby on Rails guy, David Heinemeier Hansson, never went for dominating an industry, becoming a platform with investor money and become an Unicorn. They just keep making money. It's really cool, he loves his life and He's probably much happier than Zuck or Musk but with that approach you end up staying a niche instead of a behemoth like the American companies. In USA the instinct seems to be how to make this global and take all the money. The European approach is good for society IMHO, no enshitification once you circle the market however when your market is open to people who are willing to do the put a lot of money first, kill the competition be a monopoly or duopoly and then screw everyone and and make filthy level of money then you become one of those killed.
> Even the Ruby on Rails guy, David Heinemeier Hansson, never went for dominating an industry, becoming a platform with investor money and become an Unicorn
If something in europe has potential to dominate then it's eventually being bought by US capital, see Skype, Nokia. If someone is throwing at you 10+ digit check then it's hard to resist and even if you want to resist good luck with persuading your early investors about not taking the money.
EU doesn't have petro-dollar and as good money printer as US. EU doesn't also have citizens & big funds that ape savings into local stocks, another reason most companies IPO in US.
> I don't want EU to fall behind further in the AI race
Unless something changes, that's going to continue :(
According to Jensen Huang, "the AI race" will be determined primarily by the price of electricity.[0]
Until very recently the EU stated that being carbon neutral by 2050 was of overriding importance[1].
Which is it?
[0] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell... [1] https://climate.ec.europa.eu/eu-action/climate-strategies-ta...
>> Until very recently the EU stated that being carbon neutral by 2050 was of overriding importance[1].
I'm ok with that. Not every continent/country/economic bloc has to have the same goals. Competing with the US or China in the 'AI race' is a race you're probably going to lose anyway. And it's going to make fuck all difference to the vast majority of the population anyway. Healthcare, education, life/work balance. All much more important and don't require competing in the 'AI race'. The EU has made some missteps with its tech regs but it's worth it to be able to download or delete my data from any service and that's something Americans are also benefiting from as most companies didn't bother geo-locking it.
You could argue economic success has a knock on effect on everything else in a country and it does to some extent. But, while many European countries have their problems socially and politically over the last decade none of them have come anywhere close to the train wreck that is US.
> Not every continent/country/economic bloc has to have the same goals.
One potential outcome of that would appear to be a mostly deindustrialised Europe with low carbon emissions and no growth, and the rest of the world politely trying not to laugh?
> And it's going to make fuck all difference to the vast majority of the population anyway
https://joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/jrc-news-and-upda...
"In 2024, the eight highest emitting economies - China, USA, India, EU, Russia, Indonesia, Brazil and Japan - collectively contributed to 66.2% of global GHG emissions. Only the European Union and Japan decreased their emissions compared to the previous year (-1.8% and -2.8% respectively), while all others either kept them rather stable (China: +0.8%; USA: +0.4%; Brazil +0.2%) or increased them (India: +3.9%; Russia: +2.4%, Indonesia: +5% - the highest relative increase).
In absolute terms, India has the largest increase with 164.8 Mt CO2eq more emissions released in 2024 compared to 2023."
>Healthcare, education, life/work balance. All much more important and don't require competing in the 'AI race'.
Neither of which will improve by us being "carbon neutral".
Europe not being dependent on foreign oil is a worthy goal as well, it's not the US whcih could supply it's oil use domestically.
A lot of green infrastructure is also expensive upfront, but cheaper over the full lifespan. It's the kind of investment I like to see goverment making.
> Europe not being dependent on foreign oil is a worthy goal as well
Forget oil, Europe is going to be dependent on foreign everything.
I think taking care of the environment rather than burning through resources needlessly will improve life for us. But if you're looking for a more specific example, moving to renewable energy and getting off Russian gas and oil would be beneficial in many ways for Europe and at a most basic level would hopefully eventually lead to lower and more predictable energy prices for consumers.
Finland, France and other countries can lower the price of electricity just by disconnecting neighbours like Germany from their grid.
Germany can be a leader in Green AI or emission neutral Chatbots.
Nuclear energy is carbon neutral according to the EU definition
Is it not? What is it instead? Carbon negative?
Greenpeace was founded to oppose nuclear energy, because it would lead to nuclear war (that was their position at least), which illustrates that, even now, nuclear power is considered not-green.
Greenpeace is a big part of the problem, especially with most of the European left being aligned with them on nuclear hate.
Being "green" is like being "organic" compared to being carbon-neutral which is something you can just calculate.
Germany turned down all of its nuclear plants and is actively demolishing them. Good luck with that.
Keeping the planet habitable, or making line go up? Truly a difficult choice...
More seriously: what is the benefit for the citizens of Europe to chase trends? AI is shaping up to be a bubble. Even if "market remains irrational longer than you stay solvent", what is the purpose? Clean air, clean water, all that has value. Line going up, what does it give me?
>More seriously: what is the benefit for the citizens of Europe to chase trends?
If you sit out the trend, somebody else will have more money (or bigger army, or just an army that can actually shoot at things and people) and you will not be able to choose what trends to chase.
Exactly. Also, whatever those AI leaders invent, two months later the whole world has it.
I mean when GPT 3.5 came out it seemed amazing, but requiring a 8x Nvidia N100 or whatever guaranteed that id never have it at home. A year or so later llama 3.1 accomplished similar results on pc at home. It's a race but the winners are only slightly ahead and wasting a lot of money doing it.
China's target is 2060.
China doesn't have one side of the political spectrum trying to shutter any talk of renewables, they're just installing them at breakneck speed.
We just need to execute the side of the political spectrum that we don't like. That way society will really get ahead.
> China's target is 2060
"China plans to keep building coal-fired power plants through 2027 in regions where they are needed to meet peak power demand or stabilise the grid, according to government guidelines"
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/china-...
And yet they used less coal in 2024 than they did in 2023.
Maybe it's just an economic downturn. But... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/26/china-breaks-m...
I just don't buy that carbon neutrality necessarily results in expensive electricity.
Another factor in being competitive in artificial intelligence is the price of electricity, which is four times higher in the EU than in the US. Changing this would require a break with the “green industrial complex”, which is close to untouchable (to many EU politicians).
I think there are plenty of ways to provide cheaper green power in Europe, if it is permitted.
In general, I don't understand the need to colocate data centers with the companies programming them - I'm sure there are many jurisdictions other than the US or EU that could spin up cheaper power.
To start, EU data protection laws make it almost impossible to store customer PII overseas or send it to overseas data centers for inference.
And as an EU citizen I like that they do. After all this is what they are for.
interesting. sounds like the EU is getting the growth trajectory its voters desire, then - best of luck!
Oh no, I live more years, work less hours, and breathe cleaner air, but unfortunately line goes up slightly less than in the US of A.
The reason why you live more years and work less hours is because you are not milked out of enough of that sweet GDP juice.
Big if true and not clear if it's good news or bad news.
Who's going to pay your pension. Hopefully you have 10 kids. They all want free money, no work, more perks. But who pays for it... maybe "the state". We're pricing ourselves out of the market and guys like the one above clap. Crazy world.
Who is going to pay the pension for 60-70% of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck with not even US$ 1000 in the bank for emergencies?
Who even cares about that? We're not discussing Americans at all.
completely false that 60-70% of americans live paycheck to paycheck. you cannot take self-reported survey data like that seriously, the median net worth in the US is something like $200k - there are plenty of people with hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank claiming to live paycheck to paycheck here.
given that we are already seeing serious strain for some european pension systems, i don’t think this is a very strong comparison
> the median net worth in the US is something like $200k
Only because it takes into account 401Ks.
While everybody is fixated on fertility rate, the actual thing important for pensions is the pyramid. And the demographics pyramid of the EU (West of it least) looks pretty ok (not great, not terrible) from 20 y.o upwards. It's not sustainable forever and it rubs the fascists the wrong way for obvious reasons, but it's not even half that bad that the 1.20 number makes you imagine.
It's also very much possible this is a transitive thing and not the new settled norm.
Incels in their 20s already scream they feel mistreated and don't want to hold the social construct. Let's fix the pyramid by importing more people on boats. Maybe they'll work for us.
Thanks. It feels refreshing to see fascists hiding behind throwaways again.
You’re absolutely adorable—and it’s obvious you’ve already got it all figured out.
Have you expected otherwise? What does the commoner gain from having there PII in the hands of large surveillance companies? In my expectation people that are not oblivious to that issue and don't have stake in such a company would be for such a regulation.
> Changing this would require a break with the “green industrial complex”, which is close to untouchable (to many EU politicians).
I’m sure like with everything “green” they can get around having to use cheaper, dirty energy by buying enough indulgences^w carbon offsets.
Depending on the class of carbon offset, I think the comparison with indulgences is unnecessarily critical when it actually does net fewer emissions.
The comparison is spot on -- if you smoke sigs and pay somebody who doesn't, you will still get cancer and the other person can get it too if you breath it out into their face.
Until there is no commercial carbon capture, it's all scam and accounting tricks. Sure, paying somebody else to decarbonise instead of yourself works in decarbonisign somebody else, but the emissions should drop across the board all the way to zero.
> The comparison is spot on -- if you smoke sigs and pay somebody who doesn't, you will still get cancer and the other person can get it too if you breath it out into their face.
Right - carbon emissions aren't internalized in the same way as cigarettes.
But what is 'tech'? When we say the EU isn't competitive in 'tech', what technology capacity do they lack?
I think 'tech' as a category doesnt make much sense any more. It's like saying 'road-based business'. Most companies are 'tech' companies.
Ignoring the technical element, what are US megacorps that account for all the GDP growth of the last while?
Mostly ad market monopolies, then mostly massive-scale IP theft, etc.
I think the EU is 'behind' the US only in it's inability to be well-positioned to build massive rent-seeking megacorps. I dont see where-else this gap is supposed to be.
What, on 'tech' should the EU be doing differently? Just allowing megacorps to add 30% to every transaction?
If this US tech bubble bursts, it's not clear that the EU won't be better positioned to pick up the pieces.
> what technology capacity do they lack?
Giving money to random tech schmoocks and seeing the valuation of their thing gettign to 1B, then lobbying for laws to make it monopoly. This kind of thing.
That and selling icecream flavor preferences of 1B people to guess who is more susceptible to brainwashing, so you friends can get reelected.
All very nice technology, including the one which destroys entire solar system to make a sacrifice big enough to summon Cthulhu.
> Mostly ad market monopolies, then mostly massive-scale IP theft, etc.
Good point. I think that the EU has an opportunity to really grow here by focusing on intellectual property enforcement, patents, copyright, and generally more strict enforcement on making sure returns for ideas go to the first person to think of them. The EU already has a pretty strong governance lead and should double down on where its strengths lie.
Definitely! Preventing as much innovation as possible is always good for an economy.
Sorry, I think I saw a similar comment recently - did you pay royalties?
Define "innovation", it's such an overused umbrella term that it's lost any meaning, usually when I read it in comments like yours I simply have no idea what you mean by it.
>I don't want EU to fall behind further in the AI race
Buddy, EU didn’t even sign up for the race
It's not a race anyway. The Americans always make things into one. But it's mainly their obsession with being "number one". Being number two or three is just fine. We will catch up.
What I'm more worried about is that they'll drag us down into another financial crash like in 2007 when the AI bubble bursts and investors get pissed that they've spent trillions on hot air.
I don't mean to be a dick but I'm getting a bit tired of all this constant survival of the fittest mentality and the idea that they have the best country in the world when in fact it is pretty awful if you're not rich (especially when in poor health). There's a lot of things we do a lot better in Europe and I'm glad to live here. Especially the last year. I don't want Europe to become more like the US.
> I don't want Europe to become more like the US.
Well, we will see. Seems to be happening anyway. Best of luck
I just hope that Europe won't have to pay for your fuckup like we did last time with your real estate bubble.
Well there is Mistral.
I like the EU, but what's annoying about things like this, or the Chat Control law that keeps getting pushed, is that civil society and privacy advocacy groups always need to stay vigilant and keep mobilizing people. It's an attrition game.
I wonder what harm companies are even claiming. But honestly makes perfect sense that Germany's current conservative government is in favor of it. Giant GDP boosts are always just one deregulation away, hm?
> Giant GDP boosts are always just one deregulation away, hm?
Honestly, reducing the complexity of incorporating and paying taxes in Germany would quickly improve the dire situation of startups here. It's so bad right now that a tax advisor straight up told me to move to a less business-hostile country.
Totally agree!! But you never see anything remotely close to proposals like that from the people claiming they want less bureaucracy.
When they say less bureaucracy / deregulation, they just talk about tax cuts, less consumer protections and at worst artificially boosting large companies that are not innovating.
What is desperately needed is making the system less cumbersome and convoluted
They should just copy Polish laws. They are far from perfect, and yet they provided Poland with almost 30 years of stable, few percent growth, regardless of global and European economic struggles. When you plot the chart of Polish GDP even such a significant event as entering EU doesn't even register in the shape of the growth.
True, I was considering going back to Poland for business... if only Poland was more politically stable.
It recently had a bit of tax law upheaval, but things settled down since then. As for other issues it's politically stable, by which I mean consistently politically crappy.
True but Poland did come from a really really deep hole under the thumb of the Soviets. They were very thoroughly screwed over. I guess this is why Poland is the most anti russian country in the EU now (and rightly so)
Just saying that growth is pretty easy starting off from zero.
Usually people quit when they have to go to a notary the first time, impressive that you held out.
> reducing the complexity of incorporating and paying taxes in Germany would quickly improve
I believe german citizens are actually against it. I may be wrong, but this is my personal observations. Source: I have tried to incorporate in Germany and I have incorporated in Poland.
Does the complexity even cost more than 500 eurobucks a year?
What do you mean abroad? I don't think anyone is considering moving to the USA. But maybe you mean a different country?
I think you replied to the wrong thread ^^;
I think it was meant to be https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45880024.
Year Europeans Obtaining U.S. Lawful Permanent Resident Status
2014 83,270
2015 85,800
2016 93,570
2017 84,340
2018 80,020
2019 87,600
2020 68,990
2021 61,520
2022 75,610
2023 80,280
Yup, definitely looks like no Europeans have ever considered moving to the US...
76,221 Americana moved to the EU in 2022.
So in fact there was a net migration out of the US and to the EU.
Yep - I saw those numbers too. But they're irrelevant to the OP's comment that no one is moving to the US.
You yourself may want to look at some stats regarding the size of the European Union to put that in perspective but I’ll do the math for you it’s 0.01% of people meaning that they were in fact correct… 99.99% of people have no interest in moving to freedom land.
Also keep in mind that these uncited figures you’ve magically produced conveniently cut-off before you started implementing a policy of kidnapping people off the streets without any right to a trial and shipping them off to 3rd world torture prisons.
This story you’ve made up about Europeans secretly craving to live in the US is one you’ve completely made up in your mind (or through that bullshit propaganda of “American exceptionalism” that the country is so in love with) and isn’t supported by any real world data.
Almost everyone in Europe thinks it’s a worse place to live, work, get sick in, get an education in or to die in. Again, all supported by hard data.
"I don't think anyone" - means zero, not "almost no one" - you yourself should probably study English some more.
And... let's put it this way - there are far fewer than 80,000 people who drive the growth of either the US or EU economy in non-linear ways. If 80,000 of the "wrong" (most positively impactful) people move from the EU to US, that's a big deal.
I'm pretty sure that I didn't implement any such policies. Did you implement the Third Reich's policies, sir?
There are apparently also stories that I've made up. Interesting. How's that mind-reading technology coming along?
Really only finding a way to match almost every negative US stereotype possible here. I feel like I lost brain cells just reading it. This is that famous education system in action.
I genuinely laughed when I read this. Like you had set up an argument in your mind where if even one person moved from the EU to the US you were going to be right and the best part is I don’t think you’re joking like you actually believed this. Back in the real world though everyone understands that 99.9% means everyone.
But sure, do go on telling people to “learn English better” while you proudly continue on through life with a first grade reading comprehension and math skills.
Typical. Make an argument. Be proven wrong. Lash out at the terrible US education system (which, of course, has most of the best universities in the world and to which many foreign people spend collectively billions of dollars to attend.) Goodbye.
MALA: Make America Literate Again.
P.S which one is it? The best in the world or terrible? You didn’t seem to be able to hold a coherent thought for a full sentence. Between this and an inability to understand the advanced statistical concept of percentages I can’t help but think that things aren’t going particularly well for you at the moment.
I actually see a large stream of people moving to the US. Europe is doomed.
I see the opposite. A lot of US people trying to move here now that it's becoming unliveable there for eg trans people. I'm kinda in an lgbt bubble but still. I myself have informed my employer I will no longer even travel to the US for work. Visiting a country means subjecting yourself to its laws and I won't do that. Same with eg middle east. I'm kinda non-binary so trying to get an X passport now so I have an easier time refusing (as I wouldn't be accepted entry anyway)
Also for colleagues in India, scoring a job in America through our company was always the big ideal. That also is no more because nobody wants to be a second class citizen.
> civil society and privacy advocacy groups always need to stay vigilant and keep mobilizing people. It's an attrition game.
In a game of cat and mouse, the cat only has to win once.
Literally so, because the European """Parliament""" is the only institution with this name that I'm aware of that does not have the power to introduce laws. Which means it doesn't have the power to repeal them.
In other words, the Commission can propose laws as many times as they want, and if they pass even once, the Parliament has no power to repeal it.
Parliament can rewrite the wording of the law in the committees any way they want, including by making them state the opposite.
The tricky part is getting commission and the council also sign off on that.
> civil society and privacy advocacy groups always need to stay vigilant and keep mobilizing people. It's an attrition game.
I'm not sure why you are singling out the EU Chat Control, when all the US "tech" sector have been playing this attrition game for 40+ years already...
It is indeed an attrition game, and the dominance of the adtech surveillance capitalism is the proof that we are already on the loosing side.
Maybe because that one everyone is used to, and this one is new? We get used to the status quo, but anything new is scary. In this case, chat control is indeed scary, but the existing ad tech mass surveilance does not get much attention.
"Draft changes would create new exceptions for AI companies that would allow them to legally process special categories of data (like a person’s religious or political beliefs, ethnicity or health data) to train and operate their tech."
Fully anonymized health data I can somehow understand, but what kind of AI needs to be trained with "a person's religious or political beliefs [or] ethnicity", anonymized or not?
>but what kind of AI needs to be trained with "a person's religious or political beliefs [or] ethnicity", anonymized or not?
It's a category thing. There is personal data and then there is sensitive personal data, which is the enumerated list you quoted.
Snarky non-answer reply is of course -- the kind of ШІ that makes autistic roman salutes and accelerates from 0 to 1933.
Ethnicity can correlate with certain genetic or health predispositions - for instance, the U.S. has long recognized that some conditions (like sickle-cell anemia or hypertension) appear more frequently in Black populations. If AI systems were forbidden from even considering such demographic factors, diagnostic accuracy could suffer.
These categories of data are already somewhat special under the GDPR. I think we've committed enough genocide that now they're enshrined into protected data types.
> but what kind of AI needs to be trained with "a person's religious or political beliefs [or] ethnicity"
Propaganda AI. The EU openly declared that it will create a ministry of truth. Officially called 'fighting disinformation' of course.
Original title: Brussels knifes privacy to feed the AI boom
Why do you doubt that is exactly what is happening? The EU governments are demanding to view all communications by it's citizens AND has given itself the right to use all sorts of AI technology (like facial recognition) on private data (like faces for example). Privacy protection, even for your medical records, only exists against private companies. Which means that the people you want privacy from, your medical insurance, which is part of the government nearly everywhere in Europe, both has access and can do with the data whatever it wants under EU legislation.
Does anyone seriously expect EU legislation will protect people from the obvious: training AI on chat messages and then using violence (ie. police action) just based on online messages?
Oh right.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/policing-speech-online-germany-...
> Why do you doubt that is exactly what is happening?
I don't. I was just letting people know the title here was different than the source.
Biggest problem is you need two types economy at once.
You need the big paradigm shifts that come from an innovation economy; for that, capital must flow easily, risk-taking (both companies and individuals) be rewarded not punished, and a stable job is kind of a bad thing (people get too comfortable)..
Meanwhile in more mature sectors, job security (so people can have mortgages and families) and market stability should be fostered and corporate overreach & power be checked.
Advanced economies are a mix of sectors which need almost opposite policy.
No one can call software and AI mature, they are still innovating. We do not even know how they will look in give years. Premature regulation kills this innovation. Harms of AI are not the same as harms from traffic accidents.
That’s true - but social media is a different kettle of fish.
The problem is it all gets lumped under “technology”.
Unemployment insurance and redistribution is a much better solution than keeping people in jobs that have been obviated decades ago.
@dang: The headline currently is
Brussels knifes privacy to feed the AI boom
That's inflammatory, but the current OP is inaccurate.
The current title is FTA, check out paragraph 2. Chosen by the OP or mods not to be inflammatory.
Hopefully it's the end of GDPR and privacy laws that absolutely no one requested.
Like nobody requested that encrypted chats stop being encrypted or that X becomes a censorship target of EU comissars
More like the continuation with more complex regulation and exceptions.
Eh wait I requested them and I'm still very much in favour of them. Having the right to privacy is a big one.
With chat control yes, that was totally evil. But I consider GDPR and DSA/DMA forces of good.
The idea that there's no mandate for these things is not true.
How about also reviewing the copyright laws in favour of the public? The AI actors consume everything for profit and nobody cares. But if an ordinary Joe does this for personal amusement, he should face consequences.
This whole thing is obviously biased, because of money.
I was there during the 2010s and here is what happened:
- I have been at a lot of public debates/consultations in Brussels on the GDPR as early as 2012. I have seen first EU people there screaming at US/BigTech lobby groups trying to influence the debate in their favor.
- When we started to understand what the regulation would look like everybody started to panic about what it would cost to comply in the public and private sector. Everybody started to appoint a Chief Data Office or Chief Data Protection Officer. Consultancy firms were hired everywhere.
- At the same time "The Cloud" was starting to creep up in those organizations, first as what we were calling "shadow IT". But the decisions maker didn't wanted to hear about "The Cloud" or loosing control of their infrastructure.
- After usually a year of study on the GDPR issue the decision makers were told that:
- So I have seen dozens and dozens of organizations deciding their migration to the cloud between 2016 and 2019. Then of course COVID and homeworking came and it accelerated everything.So GDPR pushed everybody to hyperscalers ironically, because Big Tech is playing chess and know how decisions are made and how to work the system.
Also I have never seen a big company centering or even using a Hertzner, OVH or Scaleway.
What is probably going on is Big Tech went back to the Commission and explained the new legislation they have to pass.
And my guess is it is not gonna help any EU based AI company stay competitive or get any significant market share.
The EU will give them pennies to compete with OpenAI and Google and tell them that Europeans are smarter than Americans so David should be able to beat Goliath. Also the EU AI models have to be trained on renewable energy or whatever.
Washington is rotten but Brussels is about the same (or worst).
This new package is about "removing regulation", specifically GDPR.
Which let's be honest has not achieved its intended target. Google/Apple/etc can easily afford to break GDPR and get caught up in fines while as a small business owner it was a huge and complicated liability.
ofc politico will frame this as a negative, it seems their only mission is to make moloch grow.
It's not an accident. It's a very effective regulatory capture.
It's really stupid that people imagine that the GDPR would hold back European AI.
Seeing as the Americans firms have in fact rolled out their systems, it's unlikely to be a legal problem withe GDPR. Maybe copyright is a problem.That would have been a solved problem if that regulation requiring people to list their training data had been applied fully.
This won't make any difference for AI and will reduce EU cohesion, as a belief in privacy is a shared European value.
Shared European value is a ridiculous concept
go outside and you will see people share almost nothing in common. It's ridiculous to pretend all people in europe agree on this matter, but nobody outside europe doing it.
But we do in fact have this as a shared value. I'm sure there are people outside it whole like it too, sort of like how there are people outside Sweden who like freedom-to-roam, but when you actually have something it becomes part of your expectations and your culture; and I think this belief in limits on internet surveillance, tracking, etc. has in fact become such a thing.
When you don't have something most people accept not having it and it becomes normal not to have it, and I think that's the case with privacy in the US and outside the EU in general.
I see the same type of comments when it comes to any post on EU tech. What I've found throughout my career is that:
1) Maybe we (EU citizens) are just way less interested in hustle culture compared to other regions. We can keep complaining about regulation and the difficulty of incorporating, but these feel like excuses. Estonia and Portugal come to mind as places where incorporating is practical but not a game-changer. Let's face it: we're just not as interested in launching stuff? We have cushy jobs, with lots of benefits, and launching a business is less required to lead a good life (i.e. we have less inequality ti push against).
2) I've started a company in Belgium of all places. Having worked in Germany for a long time: hey German buddies, it's not the difficulty of starting a business. It's much better over there. Also: deregulating the labor market more would place the majority of us at the mercy of companies a la USA. No, thanks.
3) We're not behind on tech because of the GDPR. Many things in this omnibus are just plain stupid. We should stimulate deeper tech, fundamental research, supporting all the open-source developers we have, and perhaps invest in European structural alternatives. Promote AI? Give me a break.
4) I'm a certified GDPR whatever (2 online courses). It's really not that much of a problem. If you know what data you're collecting and why, your Privacy Policy writes itself. Otherwise you use one of the services that does it for you.
5) Do we have a problem with tech salaries more than a generalised issue with rampant inflation? Because I've never had a single colleague or acquaintance move to the US because of a better salary. Not a single one. On the other hand we're in a parenting group that's full of people that came here to start a family due to the benefits we have. Improving things overall would fight any brain drain more than stimulating tech unicorns.
6) Speaking of which… I'd like to find again the study on the economic tissue of countries. It showed that it's SMEs that employ the most people and pay the bulk of the taxes. Good, decent, boring businesses. We could do less with the nonsensical fantasy of the startup unicorn as a paradigm of entrepreneurship. Okay, I'm sore from having my equity stolen at the last gig, but my point stands. Our parents and grandparents just went to business if they had to. Heck, with the current lack of jobs, many of us will do the same. Let's not pretend that we're missing a startup scene. Berlin was a great place for startups and I can't name a single of the places I've worked that is consequential to anything. Maybe Delivery Hero? But not even that one, they barely made a profit at the time.
Honestly, let's stop whining so much and get yet another sector given the neoliberal deregulation treatment. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but posts complaining about EU regulations at this point feel like karma farming.
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You don't seem to understand what "dictatorship" actually means.
I think I do, as in I'm pretty sure I've never ever voted for this European Commission thing, neither has any other EU citizen that I know of, and yet they're running the whole show here in Europe. If if walks and quacks like a duck it most certainly is a duck. Granted, they don't have North Korea's interesting military parades, I'll give them that.
Later edit: I think you might me on the wrong understanding path by the so-called "democratic deficit" expression that is often-times used when referring to decision-making inside the EU (and hence to the European Commission, its executive arm), I think "dictatorship" does a much better job of telling things for what they really are.
You've voted for the people who elect the European Commission, though I'm sure you know that, just conveniently decided to leave it out, you're a known troll on Reddit too.
EU elections are notoriously anti democratic
Candidates are not elected by voters but positioned.
Once people have cast their vote, members of the comission are not automatically determined but negotiated across political families, and the bureaucracy.
Time to tear down this ridiculous administrative, bureaucratic, corporative and very expensive leviathan.
> You've voted for the people who elect the European Commission
And they 'magically' approved a short list of US-lobby-backed unelected personas for leadership positions, who are pushing everything ranging from the chat control law to this privacy-killing 'deregulation', while ruining Eu's trade relationships with everyone from China to Africa to boot.
The ability of citizens to vote doesn’t make the country not a dictatorship. There are many examples here, e.g., Russia, multiple middle eastern countries, etc.
Are you trying to argue that elections aren't free and fair in EU countries? Or are we splitting hairs?
Your claim (as I understood it) is that if an elected person elected someone else (to be the rule), then there is not dictatorship in place.
In my opinion, elections are not the only condition to have a functional democracy. So, having elections is not enough.
As terrible as the EU is, the only possible alternative is a return to a pre-1945 Europe, with constant wars and other fun stuff.
Unfortunately the downfall of the EU will not be easy or quick.
Don't underestimate the ability of humans to make a right mess of things in short order. Often, these elaborate systems of government, finance, and/or corporation often falls very slowly and then suddenly all at once.
It's not a given by any means, nor do I wish downfall of the EU or it's member states for the record, but things are rarely as stable or persistent as they seem, especially when subjected to the novel and/or unforseen.
I agree it won't be easy. About quick, they were saying the same thing about the Soviets up until 1989.
Germany's right-wing AfD is on a trajectory to become the largest party. One of their goals: a Dexit.
An EU without the main net payer will disintegrate within months.
Brexit worked out so well that it basically quelled any dreams of other EU countries exiting after seeing it just creates a lot of headaches and almost no benefit to then just go back to having trade agreements with the EU while not being part of it.
This is true until there is more countries that leave.
At some point Rome fell.
There is very little benefit in EU trade agreements if there is no more EU.
I'm always boggled by the logic of thinking that somehow having big companies going around doing harmful actions to people is "good for the economy" or "keeps us competitive". If having strict AI regulations means AI companies leave Europe, that's good! I wish we could do the same and get them to leave the US. These big AI companies are bad. We shouldn't want them, we shouldn't try to attract them, we shouldn't provide any conciliations or incentives. The sooner and more completely they're eradicated from any jurisdiction, the better. Forcing that kind of toxic waste out of your country should be perceived as a win.
What harmful actions?
Tech layoffs and electricity price increases are pretty harmful even if legal and non-violent.
Theft of creative work, brain rot, intrusive enshittifiying of all manner of software, spreading misinformation, perpetuating biases, concentrating wealth, sucking up energy. . . I could go on and on and on. The list of negative effects is endless.