This whole thing is obviously biased, because of money.
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.
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 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.
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.
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...
"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-...
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 renewables necessarily result in expensive energy.
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?
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.
Buddy, EU didn’t even sign up for the race
I’m sure like with everything “green” they can get around having to use cheaper, dirty energy by buying enough indulgences^w carbon offsets.
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.
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.
It's also very much possible this is a transitive thing and not the new settled norm.
Big if true and not clear if it's good news or bad news.
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.
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.
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 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?
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...
In a game of cat and mouse, the cat only has to win once.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Like nobody requested that encrypted chats stop being encrypted or that X becomes a censorship target of EU comissars
An EU without the main net payer will disintegrate within months.
At some point Rome fell.
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.
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 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.
The problem is it all gets lumped under “technology”.
jmholla•2h ago