Cyberspace depends on physical reality and everything that comes from that. Resource constraints, economics, politics, arms races, warfare, etc.

This declaration was written from the days when those who were interacting online were making a real effort to do so, who really wanted to be there, who were in a niche, who were observing 'netiquette' and other quaint notions. They were generally educated, generally technologists by profession or interest, and in those circumstances it's easy to see the utopia you have created and declare it good, with no need for regulation.

It's a little like when you have a small team of skilled, motivated engineers - work gets done to a high standard without the need for onerous processes. But when you start recruiting and growing the team wider, and bring in lots of juniors...

> We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

That didn't turn out so well IMHO. People got on there and then ... yuck, they did people stuff. Harassed each other, commited fraud, blackmail and extortion, created and exchanged CSAM. Cyberspace has suffered from government and commercial overreach, certainly, and so much regulation has been commercial in nature rather than actually about safety.

But the dream of an internet free from any form of government regulation? Never could have lasted when everyone got on here.

And just look at our civilisation of the mind, in its centralised fortresses with its own aristocracy exerting control over what information gets fed to the masses.

And even on a technical level, in 1996 people still used to leave mail relays open to be neighbourly!

I figured Mistral was a nice idea and liked because it was a European competitor more than because it competes. I'll be happy to be wrong if it has improved

Obviously Opus and Codex are better for coding, but I dont really use it much to generate actual code so I don't think I'm missing much.

https://livebench.ai/

I think this post is useful if you are, say, a European that wants to find a nearby tech company to work for or are curious where the tech "scene" is at in Europe

(yes, I see the .eu domain but that's minor)

It’s ludicrous to pretend important ideas only come from the US and China.

There are places in Europe where you can easily achieve a higher standard of living (on average) than the US, and there are places where you can't.

I believe the reason that Europe is behind on commercial software is just economic: Solid, standardized solutions were available coming from US companies, and they were seen as low-risk for decades, so why would any company try to compete? Network effects apply to things like office suites and e-mail clients just as much as social media. Microsoft doesn't have any serious US or Chinese competitors in this space either.

That's not to say there aren't problems: The pipeline from startup to big tech firm is extremely difficult in Europe, largely because capital is much more conservative, stemming from the fact that European capital tends to be concentrated in things like pension funds. For years, successful European tech startups have at some point or another hooked into the US Bay Area ecosystem (capital, talent pool, etc.), because the local environment was way too risk-averse.

But I think you, like many, have succumbed to anti-European propaganda, which comes in a couple of forms: pro-corporatist, pro-Putinist, orientalist/sinophile, etc.

In Europe, valuation is still largely tied to tangible assets and steady EBITDA. This creates a massive 'Patient Capital' gap. While US investors have evolved to price the long-term unit economics of digital scaling, where high initial burn is the cost of building a global moat, European private equity remains culturally risk-averse. They prefer the predictable, incremental returns of a specialized factory over the 'winner-takes-most' volatility of digital platforms. By prioritizing collateral over code, our domestic capital is effectively subsidizing the past rather than financing the future. That's our problem.

Where in the EU is a software engineer paid SV FAANG rates?

> Oura announcing their departure from Finland yesterday

The article I read said they were moving their HQ domicile to Delaware in preparation for a US stock market listing. A bit like US companies do. It said firmly that roughly half of its staff were already in the US, half in Finland, and that wasn't going to change.

Imagine a food version: "I don't see a McDonalds equivalent!". Good, you can keep that obesity-supporting fast-food crap, we (those without the addiction) don't want it.

Legally speaking, a one person company can address the whole EEA market. From a marketing/sales standpoint yeah, sure, it's probably hard to address culturally different markets like Portugal, Poland and Sweden.

But it does not have much to do with regulations, especially not ones decided at the EU level.

I'm all for better integration but diverse cultures are here to stay....

Sample size of one, but done business in Italy, Spain, Belgium, France, Switzerland and Germany: main issues were not regulation related...

It was a travesty that the UK government let it be sold, admittedly.

As for leaders, von der Leyen might not be the best but still lightyears better than the orange pedo in the wh.

The "avoid dependence on the US" movement only really started picking up steam with Trump's accelerating dementia in his second term.

The iPhone, Microsoft, and nVidia all took multiple decades to develop into the behemoths they are today. Famously, the first iPhone was actually expensive trash: no apps, no 3G, couldn't even cut and paste text. It wasn't until the 3G model and the App Store that it became a true success.

> Europe needs a single market for capital and the removal of legal barriers to extend across the continent, foremost for the little guy.

?!?

You can trivially sell your software inside the EU. As for software that I use almost daily: OsmAnd. LanguageTool, which is spell-checking this message, is made in Germany. IntelliJ products are made in Czechia, and I'm using them right now.

Unfortunately, most Eastern Bloc countries are led into the false belief that the EU is encroaching on their ways of life and "making them eat ze bugs", and the Brussels elite is more concerned with using their slim remaining political capital to push restrictions on internet freedoms rather than federalisation.

China's LLM development relative to resources spent is impressive, but it also happened to be predicated on Chinese miners buying into the previous pyramid scheme and having a lot of GPUs on hand already. I don't think the lack of European commitment to the previous pyramid scheme putting it a bit behind in that regard indicates any kind of grand regional failure, so much as an event of pure circumstance that probably has little lasting meaning 5 or 10 years from now.

But the lack of risk capital and investor brainpower has been a huge problem.

Your comment is also blind to the absurd amount of research and projects which are born here but later move to look for funding.

So the EU is not irrelevant, on the contrary, we’re just mourning the fall of the US and transitioning to an independent future. Who would’ve though, we’d end up needing to build a copy of everything…

1. I'm not sure China caught up so quickly due to any lack of nationalism.

2. There's an allure to working with an EU business because it's in the EU because they're less likely to jerk you around. You have no idea how many times I get told their in nothing they can do, then have to drop the 'I live in the EU and this is illegal' card, and magically the problem is resolved by the next email.

That depends who you are, and what you are doing. If you have information stored such that having it in US infrastructure is a national security risk, then you might think differently.

>but governments should copy some of the reasons the breeding grounds in the US and China exist.

Which reasons should they copy? Massive government subsidies? Large grants masquerading as defence contracts? Threatening foreign governments to force market access with taxation lower than the native businesses? Are you saying European governments should favour European companies just because they are European?

And the whole point here is a more diverse alternative to the extreme dependency on the US tech companies

The traction which is proverbial "wind in the sails" for further development must come from somewhere. A new promotional channel might help with it.

Also I don't think it's any kind on nationalism. Just pragmatism for the very unstable times.

However, it is going to require public funds to achieve. A public/private partnership scenario is very likely at least the near to mid term future for European tech development. And the world can only stand to benefit.

Politically, nationalism is absolutely very bad and it's a shame the world is headed in this direction. This global distrust only serves chaos agents and accelerates us into another World War (if we aren't already in the early stages of one). I had hope that people would prefer to come together but it's unfortunately too risky with US politics.

Isn't that largely nationalism and pressuring companies to use (initially) mediocre local tech solutions though? Once the market is there, quality catches up rapidly.

Nationalism, but armed with actual law enforcement and economical support instead of good intentions and lip service.

And what are these other reasons?

China is an example, countries that had become technology independent through sanctions is another

You can’t foster excellence if you don’t reward it monetarily (enough).

No unified capital markets, no high reward as an investor.

As an employer/employee takes a year to fire people even when they don’t show up, ergo the incentive is to coast.

As a founder you’re buried in bureaucracy and taxes, so the incentive is to stay an employee.

It’s a trifecta of shit.