German companies rely almost exclusively on AI models and services from the USA(www.heise.de)
15 pointsby raincole2 hours ago6 comments
  • nkmnz20 minutes ago
    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.
    • BlackRabbit111 minutes ago
      You still can use EU-Hosted Opensources models like from Tensorix.
  • ndom91an hour ago
    You don't say?! :joy:

    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.

    • raincolean hour ago
      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.
  • WarmWashan hour ago
    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.

    • andy_pppan hour ago
      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 conservatively $200 BILLION today (probably more without the overheads of joining Google to be honest) or around 500 times the sale price in 2014, not a bad return.

  • mainecoderan hour ago
    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.
    • BlackRabbit111 minutes ago
      You can use Asian Opensource models from EU-only hosters. Zero problems - they are around for a while now.
  • raincole2 hours ago
    Title is edited as the original title buries the "German" part.
    • riedelan hour ago
      Actually the German title of the aricle reads: > China's open-weight models do not yet play a significant role

      We have long accepted the fact that EU plays no role I guess

    • bilekas2 hours ago
      Isn't it applicable to all EU companies though?
      • raincolean hour ago
        It obviously is applicable to all companies outside China, but the article is about German companies.
  • dark-star2 hours ago
    I mean what other competitively similar AI models are there? DeepSeek is nowhere near. Are there others?
    • BlackRabbit110 minutes ago
      You can use Deepseek from EU-only hosters. DS is openweight.
    • beernetan hour ago
      The short answer is No.

      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.

    • rurbanan hour ago
      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.