Amodei (love of god) Altman (alternative to man?) Arthur Mensch fighting from the ethical side
A couple of weeks ago they were calling for a European AI tax to pay creatives.
Love that idea.
I'm also using Voxtral TTS to try to replace OpenAI. It "works", but I've had problems with volume levels being radically different between different audio chunks. It doesn't seem to "understand the full text" the way OpenAI's voice models do, which can be more expressive. Voxtral sometimes sounds robotic in the reading. And some Voxtral TTS output contains music in the background occasionally, which suggests their training corpus isn't that clean. Try generating a personalized news podcast, and the intro may occasionally sound like the music for BBC News underneath....
As for not focusing on AI, there's this interview in the Big Technology Podcast 2 months ago, where the Mistral CEO says their main focus is on helping companies fine-train models for internal use, over being a general model builder.
yeah, no shit ? All you're saying is that you're happily locking yourself in to models you have zero control over and that Anthropic can fuck you over at any time.
However, yes, Mistral is not in the business of providing you with a perfect, general purpose model. They fine tune from their base models for specific tasks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
Ridiculous, and it didn't take money from the right people or give it to the right people. I would expect the same from an AI tax.
On the bright side: people seem to be moving away from such nationalistic ideas. Here's to Orban being the first of many defeats for them in the near future.
> This playbook provides a clear, actionable framework to position Europe as that powerhouse, accelerating AI development and adoption, attracting and retaining top talent, simplifying regulation without sacrificing values, and mobilizing public and private investment to build homegrown AI infrastructure. Only with it, Europe can ensure AI is not only developed in Europe, but for Europe and on Europe’s terms.
playbook for what?
> This document is not a theoretical exercise. It is a practical playbook
Seems quite theoretical? A lot of random statistics, and all the sections start with abstract empty claims in 'not x, y' slop format "Artificial intelligence is not an abstract promise. It is a tool that fulfills its potential when embedded in the real economy."
I'd love an executive summary of this for anyone who has AI tokens to spend (I've got some other stuff to get done with what remains of my quota this week). I'm not saying this report is bad, I'm just saying it didn't do enough to convince me to read it, and it has some patterns that would make me guess it's bad.
Multiple sections have expandable subsections for more details on proposals.
They essentially want a bunch of stuff and most importantly funding from the EU and using the FOMO angle to get them to act. This of course is not on merit. They see that no other lab in Europe really exists and are trying to seize an open opportunity.
But messagebird is another example.
Nobody acts like you need to invent steel to have a steel mill.
> The mechanism consists of a revenue-based levy applied to all commercial providers placing AI models on the market or putting them into service in Europe, reflecting their use of content publicly available online. This levy would apply equally to providers based abroad, creating a level playing field. The proceeds would flow into a central European fund dedicated to investing in new content creation, and supporting Europe's cultural sectors.
Presumably Mistral is putting forth the most pro-AI position possible for the region.
So it sounds like anyone doing what you described is at risk of a tax that will make their offerings uncompetitive.
So why even bother?
> The question is no longer whether Europe can compete, ...
But it, too, do not ask myself this question any more. Since EU seems to have already lost completely.
Even Proton's new local AI service uses Ollama, which was developed in USA and is pretty outclassed. Does HN say europe can do more than hope to catch up in five to ten years, if the race is still on then?
Being European, I love the idea of European AI labs. But I wish there was more competition.
That being said, as a German for example, I can't think of an AI company successfully training a competitive foundation model here. The copyright mafia would take your investor's money before you could even finish the first training run (hyperbole.)
I did not spend 10 years writing (A)GPL code for all of it to be stripped of its license, remixed and sold for profit.
Of course in a truly just world, the LLM companies who took my code without permission would beg with offers of owning a share of them because if I didn't consent their models would have to be destroyed.
Since my work is apparently so valuable that they just have to have it, it should count towards my retirement age too.
Given how un-startup-driven adoption of new technologies usually happens in Europe, I don't see this playbook becoming a cornerstone of how AI adoption will pan out in Europe.
I wonder if recent US actions will start to influence this as there now appears to be more risk in sending your money to the US or founding your company there as a foreign entity than there used to be.
BoorishBears•1h ago
> Tell HN: docker pull fails in spain due to football cloudflare block
next to it on the front page
tclancy•1h ago
BoorishBears•1h ago