I think what's actually needed are two things: an EU training infrastructure that allows training of 10T+ models, and an EU inference infrastructure that is sufficient that it's possible to do RL on them.
This effectively reduces the problem to a specialized supercomputing context. I think the chips are coming. I think Euclyd will be able to do the inference chip and I think the training chip won't be harder. It's just a matter of accepting the need to order a huge number of them, being willing to think a little bit like the kind of people who operate corners. So we can be there next year, I think.
We probably need some solution for the data, but I think it's a better idea to start EU firms.
To stay near the frontier of AI without being subject to the discretion of foreign countries the EU has to stay near the frontier of R&D themselves. Even if they can get around ITAR now and self-host, they would be stuck with having to repeatedly negotiate permission to use each new advance.
If they do relax regulation (especially on energy generation) sufficiently to unleash the continent's big brained boffins and entrepreneurs on AI, they could quickly develop their own advances that would give them real leverage.
What is it that makes gas power plants so much more attractive than renewable energy? From what I heard, it's a bit easier to build them very fast and they reliably produce energy on demand (as long as gas is available of course). But I imaging one could replicate this using solar/wind and storage units.
I could imagine that the challenge is that that having enough solar panels for a few gigawatts of consumption is hard to do on-site, so one needs to connect the data center to the grid, which, in turn, complicates matters and transformators are scarce right now.
Is this about right? I do hope that we find a way to do this more sustainably. AI doesn't solve climate change in the next few years, so clean energy isn't irrelevant.
Or they can just wait for disease and famine, along with Israel and Russia, to destroy America from the inside. Or just get their fusion projects working.
> If they do relax regulation (especially on energy generation) sufficiently to unleash the continent's big brained boffins and entrepreneurs on AI
Capital. Capital, capital, capital.
The EU is still not a single unified economy and capital markets remains semi-sovereign.
Every Euro that goes out of (eg.) a Dutch taxpayer's pocket into an (eg.) German domiciled competitor gets pushed back against by national competitors as well as by the government.
You see this with French and German rivalry against Scaleway+OVHCloud versus Hetzner (edited because of early morning brain snafus) to Dassault versus Airbus.
But the issue is, a single unified capital market that overrides national sovereignty also leaves vast swathes of European voters at risk of unemployment via capital flight. You saw this with East Germany's shift towards the AfD following industry's shift to Poland.
It won't. Once you actually visit Bruxelles or talk with ex-policymakers you realize they don't actually care to give up sovereign control to the EU.
It's still viewed as a prestige post, and European industries and states will continue to work with partners outside of Europe if it means surviving.
Additonally, capital consolidation within the EU also means subnational capital flight which means layoffs. For example, look at how East Germany shifted hard to AfD after Germany Inc left for Poland. Therefore, when push comes to shove, it becomes politically untenable.
surely the weights for the model & the equipment to run them make it logistically challenging enough to deter that… also I’m sure models have leaked in their APIs before but those would be pretty easy and quick to catch/fix.
To be honest, as much as people complain about EU regulations and bureaucracy, at least they are highly predictable. Every relevant piece of regulation, like the GDPR and the AI Act, was probably more than five years in the making and then added another year or two to take effect.
If I were a frontier lab with a billion-dollar investment under my belt, I wouldn't want to operate in a regulatory environment with the same prediction horizon as the weather.
The AI Act Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 was introduced as a proposal on January 6th, 2021, so it took a bit over three years for that specific piece of legislation until it had the final vote in May 2024.
They don't go on random personalist whims (so far!), but they also tend to be much less specific in a way that can frustrate US businesses. The GDPR definition of "personal data" is just a couple of lines long; the California definition of "personal information" lists out twelve categories, one of which is "sensitive personal information" with eight more categories.
There's a fundamentally different definition of how laws are supposed to work. EU law isn't a list of checkboxes that you can technically check while going counter to the spirit, it is a philosophical direction, the details of following it are up to you. The spirit matters, not the letter.
> When interpreting EU law, the CJEU pays particular attention to the aim and purpose of EU law (teleological interpretation), rather than focusing exclusively on the wording of the provisions (linguistic interpretation). This is explained by numerous factors, in particular the open-ended and policy-oriented rules of the EU Treaties, as well as by EU legal multilingualism. Under the latter principle, all EU law is equally authentic in all language versions. Hence, the Court cannot rely on the wording of a single version, as a national court can, in order to give an interpretation of the legal provision under consideration. Therefore, in order to decode the meaning of a legal rule, the Court analyses it especially in the light of its purpose (teleological interpretation) as well as its context (systemic interpretation).
Right! Thanks for the link, I remembered reading that quote but couldn't find it. European regulators don't need hyper-specific definitions, because to them it's entirely normal to tell a company that they must do X or can't do Y even though the rules as written seem to authorize their current course of action Z.
All regulatory systems have some informal edge cases, of course. But Americans expect law to in general work more like a list of checkboxes and rely less on divining the regulator's intent. Indeed, that's one of the reasons why the regulatory environment under Trump is so frustrating to many of us; in the American view, there's supposed to be a strict distinction between what the law is and what the people at suchandsuch agency think the law is supposed to be or meant to achieve.
Interesting thought. But the Trump administration is absolutely vindictive enough that they’d put some kind of import restriction on Anthropic as punishment if they left the US and they won’t want to lose the US market, as much as the current situation works against them.
I couldn't dislike the Trump administration more, but I think even the kindest and least vindictive of countries would not allow a company to relocate overseas to avoid export controls. (I had understood the proposal to be just that Anthropic should set up an EU office.)
I was getting heat for proposing companies do this if they truly care about their mission.
Even if nothing comes of it, it’s a healthy consideration to anyone operating in the US to really think about their goals and what best sets them up for success.
Many other parts of the world do not operate under the same capitalistic mindset that American companies are forced into by pressure of the systems they are beholden to.
I don't think it would resolve anything. Mythos and similar models are under export protections. So even if you get hardware in EU, how are you going to get past the export protections?
Good luck with that after they effectively "appropriated" the pirated IP to teach their models and admitted to it. They'd be drowning in lawsuits. At least what I think would happen, IANAL.
Interesting country lobbying this. So this is either the OPEC effect or some active measures "another country" to sow division (because I don't think the Austrians were smart enough of think that for themselves)
I think what's actually needed are two things: an EU training infrastructure that allows training of 10T+ models, and an EU inference infrastructure that is sufficient that it's possible to do RL on them.
This effectively reduces the problem to a specialized supercomputing context. I think the chips are coming. I think Euclyd will be able to do the inference chip and I think the training chip won't be harder. It's just a matter of accepting the need to order a huge number of them, being willing to think a little bit like the kind of people who operate corners. So we can be there next year, I think.
We probably need some solution for the data, but I think it's a better idea to start EU firms.
To stay near the frontier of AI without being subject to the discretion of foreign countries the EU has to stay near the frontier of R&D themselves. Even if they can get around ITAR now and self-host, they would be stuck with having to repeatedly negotiate permission to use each new advance.
If they do relax regulation (especially on energy generation) sufficiently to unleash the continent's big brained boffins and entrepreneurs on AI, they could quickly develop their own advances that would give them real leverage.
What is it that makes gas power plants so much more attractive than renewable energy? From what I heard, it's a bit easier to build them very fast and they reliably produce energy on demand (as long as gas is available of course). But I imaging one could replicate this using solar/wind and storage units.
I could imagine that the challenge is that that having enough solar panels for a few gigawatts of consumption is hard to do on-site, so one needs to connect the data center to the grid, which, in turn, complicates matters and transformators are scarce right now.
Is this about right? I do hope that we find a way to do this more sustainably. AI doesn't solve climate change in the next few years, so clean energy isn't irrelevant.
As far as I understand, building a large solar farm is still considerably _faster_ than gas turbine plant.
Or they can just wait for disease and famine, along with Israel and Russia, to destroy America from the inside. Or just get their fusion projects working.
> If they do relax regulation (especially on energy generation) sufficiently to unleash the continent's big brained boffins and entrepreneurs on AI
Capital. Capital, capital, capital.
The EU is still not a single unified economy and capital markets remains semi-sovereign.
Every Euro that goes out of (eg.) a Dutch taxpayer's pocket into an (eg.) German domiciled competitor gets pushed back against by national competitors as well as by the government.
You see this with French and German rivalry against Scaleway+OVHCloud versus Hetzner (edited because of early morning brain snafus) to Dassault versus Airbus.
But the issue is, a single unified capital market that overrides national sovereignty also leaves vast swathes of European voters at risk of unemployment via capital flight. You saw this with East Germany's shift towards the AfD following industry's shift to Poland.
Both Scaleway and OVH are French and partly made possible by France's inexpensive energy mix.
> Both Scaleway and OVH are French
Doh, I meant Hetzner
> partly made possible by France's inexpensive energy mix
Not really. Both developed well before the energy crisis when energy wasn't a significant input for DC construction.
The reason both succeeded is because French conglomerates continue to invest within France and only buy French.
It also didn't hurt that Xavier Niel and Klaba were able to leverage their preexisting telecom business and network.
I really hope that will push for completion of the single market. I wouldn’t bet on it, but that’s something we should have done a decade ago
It won't. Once you actually visit Bruxelles or talk with ex-policymakers you realize they don't actually care to give up sovereign control to the EU.
It's still viewed as a prestige post, and European industries and states will continue to work with partners outside of Europe if it means surviving.
Additonally, capital consolidation within the EU also means subnational capital flight which means layoffs. For example, look at how East Germany shifted hard to AfD after Germany Inc left for Poland. Therefore, when push comes to shove, it becomes politically untenable.
What specific regulations are currently blocking AI entrepreneurs?
There may be an advantage to be able to use all available data.
US can simply ban export of AI tools and wieghts like they did with PGP. Austria should start using Mistral or open models.
Dario is an American patriot who wants the US to win. Don't see this happening.
Have OpenAI or Anthropic ever had a model hacked/leaked? Is there any good reads on their cultures of preventing it from happening?
I believe Nvidia chips have a secure way to run your model on other infra.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/solutions/confident...
surely the weights for the model & the equipment to run them make it logistically challenging enough to deter that… also I’m sure models have leaked in their APIs before but those would be pretty easy and quick to catch/fix.
To be honest, as much as people complain about EU regulations and bureaucracy, at least they are highly predictable. Every relevant piece of regulation, like the GDPR and the AI Act, was probably more than five years in the making and then added another year or two to take effect.
If I were a frontier lab with a billion-dollar investment under my belt, I wouldn't want to operate in a regulatory environment with the same prediction horizon as the weather.
5 years in the making AI act?
The AI Act Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 was introduced as a proposal on January 6th, 2021, so it took a bit over three years for that specific piece of legislation until it had the final vote in May 2024.
They don't go on random personalist whims (so far!), but they also tend to be much less specific in a way that can frustrate US businesses. The GDPR definition of "personal data" is just a couple of lines long; the California definition of "personal information" lists out twelve categories, one of which is "sensitive personal information" with eight more categories.
There's a fundamentally different definition of how laws are supposed to work. EU law isn't a list of checkboxes that you can technically check while going counter to the spirit, it is a philosophical direction, the details of following it are up to you. The spirit matters, not the letter.
> When interpreting EU law, the CJEU pays particular attention to the aim and purpose of EU law (teleological interpretation), rather than focusing exclusively on the wording of the provisions (linguistic interpretation). This is explained by numerous factors, in particular the open-ended and policy-oriented rules of the EU Treaties, as well as by EU legal multilingualism. Under the latter principle, all EU law is equally authentic in all language versions. Hence, the Court cannot rely on the wording of a single version, as a national court can, in order to give an interpretation of the legal provision under consideration. Therefore, in order to decode the meaning of a legal rule, the Court analyses it especially in the light of its purpose (teleological interpretation) as well as its context (systemic interpretation).
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2017/5993...
Unfortunately individual courts in some EU countries don’t care about the spirit but are fixated on the letter.
Right! Thanks for the link, I remembered reading that quote but couldn't find it. European regulators don't need hyper-specific definitions, because to them it's entirely normal to tell a company that they must do X or can't do Y even though the rules as written seem to authorize their current course of action Z.
All regulatory systems have some informal edge cases, of course. But Americans expect law to in general work more like a list of checkboxes and rely less on divining the regulator's intent. Indeed, that's one of the reasons why the regulatory environment under Trump is so frustrating to many of us; in the American view, there's supposed to be a strict distinction between what the law is and what the people at suchandsuch agency think the law is supposed to be or meant to achieve.
The EU has pretty good documentation for the various regulations. For example for GDPR they do provide checklists:
- https://www.edpb.europa.eu/sme/be-compliant/respect-individu...
- https://www.edpb.europa.eu/sme/be-compliant/secure-personal-...
And guidance: https://www.edpb.europa.eu/system/files/2026-04/edpb-summary...
Anthropic already have offices across the world, including Europe, but unless they moved their registered address would be subject to the curbs.
If Anthropic quit the USA, Trump administration would likely make an example of them.
Wouldn't be pretty.
Anthropic engineering is in London and the US. The other offices in Europe are sales oriented
Zurich is also Engineering (any many staff in Zurich and London will be from other countries temporarily working there).
Non-paywalled alternative: https://www.reuters.com/business/austria-lobbies-eu-host-ant...
Actually I am been asked to pay for Reuters
Edited : this looks like it is in paywalled https://uk.news.yahoo.com/austria-lobbies-eu-host-anthropic-...
Interesting thought. But the Trump administration is absolutely vindictive enough that they’d put some kind of import restriction on Anthropic as punishment if they left the US and they won’t want to lose the US market, as much as the current situation works against them.
I couldn't dislike the Trump administration more, but I think even the kindest and least vindictive of countries would not allow a company to relocate overseas to avoid export controls. (I had understood the proposal to be just that Anthropic should set up an EU office.)
> Anthropic should set up an EU office
I read that from it too, but not sure how it would help as that doesn't stop export controls.
I was getting heat for proposing companies do this if they truly care about their mission.
Even if nothing comes of it, it’s a healthy consideration to anyone operating in the US to really think about their goals and what best sets them up for success.
Many other parts of the world do not operate under the same capitalistic mindset that American companies are forced into by pressure of the systems they are beholden to.
I don't think it would resolve anything. Mythos and similar models are under export protections. So even if you get hardware in EU, how are you going to get past the export protections?
Once you're no longer in the US, you're no longer bound by their laws.
But anthropic is. Hosting the model outside the US doesn’t do anything.
I think the idea is to host the whole company, physically.
Good luck with that after they effectively "appropriated" the pirated IP to teach their models and admitted to it. They'd be drowning in lawsuits. At least what I think would happen, IANAL.
Typical corruption in Austria, coming from the ÖVP.
Alexander Pröll is like Sebastian Kurz here. The ÖVP always wants to have financial interests leak into politics.
Interesting country lobbying this. So this is either the OPEC effect or some active measures "another country" to sow division (because I don't think the Austrians were smart enough of think that for themselves)
> I don't think the Austrians were smart enough of think that for themselves
Leave your fascist remarks out of here
Ignorant, yes, but not fascist.