upvote
It's not that they can't, but why would they? It's a race to the bottom commodity wise, much smarter to build on top of the model layer like Legora and Lovable than make the models.
reply
> and Europe cannot?

Well there is Mistral. The EU is ahead on specialised models than general purpose LLMs.

There is.

- Flux3

- Kyutai (Open source AI lab)

- H Company

- LightOn

- AMD Silo (Finland)

- OpenEuroLLM and EuroLLM

There is probably more, but that's off the top of my head.

reply
These are mostly not significant businesses with large value capture or creation. I hope it could change though.
reply
What would be significant in your opinion?

Black Forest Labs for example has a $4B valuation with half a billion raised so far.

reply
In Europe AI is seen as evil that must be stopped. Unlike in the US, AI doomers have Commission well manned. Ursula addressed this in her State of Union speech yesterday. The EU rather chooses consumer protection, even if it means killing AI and maintaining status quo.

Because any AI company would be hit by hate and regulation derived from this, no VC invests in the EU. It's more state and large enterprise investments, good old East Germany style. And historically it has not been that efficient.

Or simply: lack of risk taking appetite.

reply
Wtf?

No?

Its just that the richest companys with the most VC sit in USA and Europe isn't used to pay what USA / VC is paying and we are a little bit slow.

reply
I agree with this, the rich actually are oddly MORE greedy in Europe and take double the equity for half the money (roughly) so founders get a lot less upside or they move their businesses to the US and get US capital at better rates.
reply
Great engineering schools and good tech companies to train them post graduation.

Europe has none;

The best tech university in Europe when compared to Chinese/US equivalents won't even rank in the top 10.

reply
ETH Zürich is up there high, particularly for computer science.

The LLM they were involved in last year (Apertus) still was a letdown.

As someone who actually went there, my impression is that Europe in general is complacent when it comes to computers, and any bright eyed student will get their motivation choked out of them in academia here.

If you want to do things with AI in Europe, you can have a bigger effect by working for a consulting company than being at a university. That's … not a good sitatution.

reply
The "Attention is all you need" paper authors where four (!) Europeans and one from US, amongst others. The "Top 10" lists are just complete rubbish, not worth the paper they are written on.

Europeans do not have the hustle mentality to break the law like Uber so you wont see them compete in anything data heavy. They also are quite risk adverse, probably from having a lower Gini coefficient.

reply
Simpler view for me: this is one of the most capital intense technologies to exist. Europe does not have enough capital to compete. China is building its own chips. It’s own everything. Silicon up. How do you compete with that. Only Google and maybe Aamazon is doing it domestically.
reply
> How do you compete with that.

I feel people are too focused on US/China and don't pay attention to what is going on in the world.

ASML in the Netherlands for example was the only company in the world that makes EUV lithography machines, which all the major chip companies depend on. China recently reverse engineered their work to create machines since late 2025, but not sold commercially.

Ireland has chip production facilities.

EU might not be in the top 2, but it is not out of the running at all.

reply
Europe has more capital than China, it's just spent on pensions for boomers, refugees and pointless vanity projects
reply
TUM, LMU, all the british ones, Delft...
reply
It's well documented that the Chinese models were enabled by training on openapi and anthropics models...

Europe actually follows americas rules, hence they're not doing that.

It's braindead for sure considering how the US treats europe, but it is what it's

reply
The Chinese were directed to it from their government.

We have no such government with a mandate to do that.

reply
While there is no official mandate, many countries of the EU are working on models that are government funded.

The main one (IIRC) is Spains ALIA.

https://alia.gob.es/eng

There is also OpenEuroLLM and EuroLLM.

https://www.openeurollm.eu

reply
Nah, they wouldn't have released deepseek open source if they were the case
reply
Source?
reply