Local DeepSeek, qwen or kimi models are far better privacy-wise, faster, but much more expensive (to get a 2TB GPU RAM cluster). So everybody went with the Claude, OpenAI or CoPilot business contracts, so their secret business data leaves the EU, but will not be used to train the model. Unlike with the cloud Chinese services.
There are "sovereign" clouds like StackIT, OVH, OTC or Scaleway. What they all have in common is that they are lightyears behind hyperscalers in terms of performance, reliability and security. Needless to say, these alternatives can only serve open-source models because they are not capable of training a SOTA equivalent by themselves. The cherry on top is that you have to pay a sovereignty premium for inferior performance.
Sounds like primetime to bring charges against the labs with multibillion dollar fines, to force them to create a domestic lab with SOTA model development for Europeans.
You know, anything but create fertile business conditions.
You know there was a lab that was cutting edge in Europe and it is still there - Deepmind - but the UK let it be sold to the US for a fraction of what it's worth today - $400m. We just allow US companies to asset strip the EU and then people complain about us never having big companies here...
Deepmind would likely be worth at least $200 BILLION today (probably more without the overheads of Google to be honest) or around 500 times the sale price in 2014, not a bad return.
How much of the current valuation is due to Google's resources and support, though?
"Sell company now and it's worth more a decade later" is the entire point; acquisitions are an investment and the investment is supposed to appreciate.
If there was a good EU alternative it may have been used but Mistral was out of the game a long time ago now that does not mean they will close down or will not be profitable so long as they work on regulation and other things like ethics and how good they are for the environment etc some may choose them.
This applies to pretty much everyone who isn't the US/China, no? I guess Russia also has a good amount of home grown web services (Yandex, Wildberries, etc), but not much in the AI space that I'm aware of.
The real surprising part is that Anthropic is also negligible (according to this article) in Germany. It's all OpenAI. But I didn't dare to change the title that much.
One of the reasons self-hosting is not sustainable in Germany is that electricity is prohibitively expensive for non-industrial purposes. If you run a service company and do not own a data center, you pay more for the electricity than the equivalent in token costs overseas or in China.
I think since electricity costs are the most important facet of the margins, and the cheapest electricity source is solar, this means the largest inference providers will run massive photovoltaic parks.
Not sure if anybody wants to combine the CAPEX risk of running a cloud business and the CAPEX risk of building out the massive capacities of solar, plus lease for the land, plus managing electricity backups for cloudy days.
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[ 1.00 ms ] story [ 3.7 ms ] threadWe have long accepted the fact that EU plays no role I guess
There are "sovereign" clouds like StackIT, OVH, OTC or Scaleway. What they all have in common is that they are lightyears behind hyperscalers in terms of performance, reliability and security. Needless to say, these alternatives can only serve open-source models because they are not capable of training a SOTA equivalent by themselves. The cherry on top is that you have to pay a sovereignty premium for inferior performance.
You know, anything but create fertile business conditions.
Deepmind would likely be worth at least $200 BILLION today (probably more without the overheads of Google to be honest) or around 500 times the sale price in 2014, not a bad return.
"Sell company now and it's worth more a decade later" is the entire point; acquisitions are an investment and the investment is supposed to appreciate.
This applies to pretty much everyone who isn't the US/China, no? I guess Russia also has a good amount of home grown web services (Yandex, Wildberries, etc), but not much in the AI space that I'm aware of.
Until we get local AI, which Anthropic and OpenAI are trying their hardest to skuttle, we are in big trouble.