It's a tricky balance to strike. I don't want EU to fall behind further in the AI race, and I do want them to be more competitive in the tech landscape. At the moment, EU really isn't competitive in tech (and neither in tech salaries) and it leads to a certain amount of 'brain drain' as people move abroad.
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 don't think its about regulation, its the mindset. Since some time there's this trend of indie European developers with some who managed to make themselves a name like Peter Levels and be hosted on big podcasters and these people keep calling their projects "startups" and making about as much as a high street kebab shop(in this community they like to boost about their revenues). Levels is famous enough to be interviewed by Lex Friedman and in this 4 hours talk they mention how an American company just took his idea and copied his ways and made 30 million dollars by making an iOS app of it and Levels talks as if it never crossed his mind to be the person who did it and make serious money.
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.
Levels is all hype, no depth. It’s absurd that he frames himself as somehow “disadvantaged” by the EU’s HPC access rules, when those systems are explicitly reserved for scientific research, not for cranking out AI avatars or the latest “AI-generated game” cash-grab. Complaining that you can’t use taxpayer-funded supercomputers for your next hype cycle isn’t a sign of innovation - it’s Levels' so often displayed self-entitlement and pseudo-intellectualism.
Sure but he became the poster child of a certain trend. Besides, you can see the mentality all over the place.
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.
Greenpeace was founded to oppose nuclear energy, because it would lead to nuclear war (that was their position at least), which illustrates that, even now, nuclear power is considered not-green.
>> Until very recently the EU stated that being carbon neutral by 2050 was of overriding importance[1].
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.
"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"
Keeping the planet habitable, or making line go up? Truly a difficult choice...
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?
Another factor in being competitive in artificial intelligence is the price of electricity, which is four times higher in the EU than in the US. Changing this would require a break with the “green industrial complex”, which is close to untouchable (to many EU politicians).
I think there are plenty of ways to provide cheaper green power in Europe, if it is permitted.
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.
But what is 'tech'? When we say the EU isn't competitive in 'tech', what technology capacity do they lack?
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.
> Mostly ad market monopolies, then mostly massive-scale IP theft, etc.
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.
I like the EU, but what's annoying about things like this, or the Chat Control law that keeps getting pushed, is that civil society and privacy advocacy groups always need to stay vigilant and keep mobilizing people. It's an attrition game.
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?
> Giant GDP boosts are always just one deregulation away, hm?
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.
They should just copy Polish laws. They are far from perfect, and yet they provided Poland with almost 30 years of stable, few percent growth, regardless of global and European economic struggles. When you plot the chart of Polish GDP even such a significant event as entering EU doesn't even register in the shape of the growth.
Literally so, because the European """Parliament""" is the only institution with this name that I'm aware of that does not have the power to introduce laws. Which means it doesn't have the power to repeal them.
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.
Biggest problem is you need two types economy at once.
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.
No one can call software and AI mature, they are still innovating. We do not even know how they will look in give years. Premature regulation kills this innovation. Harms of AI are not the same as harms from traffic accidents.
"Draft changes would create new exceptions for AI companies that would allow them to legally process special categories of data (like a person’s religious or political beliefs, ethnicity or health data) to train and operate their tech."
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?
Ethnicity can correlate with certain genetic or health predispositions - for instance, the U.S. has long recognized that some conditions (like sickle-cell anemia or hypertension) appear more frequently in Black populations. If AI systems were forbidden from even considering such demographic factors, diagnostic accuracy could suffer.
I'm always boggled by the logic of thinking that somehow having big companies going around doing harmful actions to people is "good for the economy" or "keeps us competitive". If having strict AI regulations means AI companies leave Europe, that's good! I wish we could do the same and get them to leave the US. These big AI companies are bad. We shouldn't want them, we shouldn't try to attract them, we shouldn't provide any conciliations or incentives. The sooner and more completely they're eradicated from any jurisdiction, the better. Forcing that kind of toxic waste out of your country should be perceived as a win.
How about also reviewing the copyright laws in favour of the public? The AI actors consume everything for profit and nobody cares. But if an ordinary Joe does this for personal amusement, he should face consequences.
This whole thing is obviously biased, because of money.
EU dictatorship at its finest, love to see it. This whole thing cannot disintegrate soon enough, and I say that as a (still, unfortunately) EU citizen.
I think I do, as in I'm pretty sure I've never ever voted for this European Commission thing, neither has any other EU citizen that I know of, and yet they're running the whole show here in Europe. If if walks and quacks like a duck it most certainly is a duck. Granted, they don't have North Korea's interesting military parades, I'll give them that.
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.
You've voted for the people who elect the European Commission, though I'm sure you know that, just conveniently decided to leave it out, you're a known troll on Reddit too.
Brexit worked out so well that it basically quelled any dreams of other EU countries exiting after seeing it just creates a lot of headaches and almost no benefit to then just go back to having trade agreements with the EU while not being part of it.
It's really stupid that people imagine that the GDPR would hold back European AI.
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.
It's a tricky balance to strike. I don't want EU to fall behind further in the AI race, and I do want them to be more competitive in the tech landscape. At the moment, EU really isn't competitive in tech (and neither in tech salaries) and it leads to a certain amount of 'brain drain' as people move abroad.
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 don't think its about regulation, its the mindset. Since some time there's this trend of indie European developers with some who managed to make themselves a name like Peter Levels and be hosted on big podcasters and these people keep calling their projects "startups" and making about as much as a high street kebab shop(in this community they like to boost about their revenues). Levels is famous enough to be interviewed by Lex Friedman and in this 4 hours talk they mention how an American company just took his idea and copied his ways and made 30 million dollars by making an iOS app of it and Levels talks as if it never crossed his mind to be the person who did it and make serious money.
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.
Levels is all hype, no depth. It’s absurd that he frames himself as somehow “disadvantaged” by the EU’s HPC access rules, when those systems are explicitly reserved for scientific research, not for cranking out AI avatars or the latest “AI-generated game” cash-grab. Complaining that you can’t use taxpayer-funded supercomputers for your next hype cycle isn’t a sign of innovation - it’s Levels' so often displayed self-entitlement and pseudo-intellectualism.
Sure but he became the poster child of a certain trend. Besides, you can see the mentality all over the place.
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.
> I don't want EU to fall behind further in the AI race
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...
Finland, France and other countries can lower the price of electricity just by disconnecting neighbours like Germany from their grid.
Germany can be a leader in Green AI or emission neutral Chatbots.
Nuclear energy is carbon neutral according to the EU definition
Is it not? What is it instead? Carbon negative?
Greenpeace was founded to oppose nuclear energy, because it would lead to nuclear war (that was their position at least), which illustrates that, even now, nuclear power is considered not-green.
Greenpeace is a big part of the problem, especially with most of the European left being aligned with them on nuclear hate.
>> Until very recently the EU stated that being carbon neutral by 2050 was of overriding importance[1].
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.
China's target is 2060.
China doesn't have one side of the political spectrum trying to shutter any talk of renewables, they're just installing them at breakneck speed.
> China's target is 2060
"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-...
And yet they used less coal in 2024 than they did in 2023.
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.
Keeping the planet habitable, or making line go up? Truly a difficult choice...
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?
Another factor in being competitive in artificial intelligence is the price of electricity, which is four times higher in the EU than in the US. Changing this would require a break with the “green industrial complex”, which is close to untouchable (to many EU politicians).
I think there are plenty of ways to provide cheaper green power in Europe, if it is permitted.
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.
To start, EU data protection laws make it almost impossible to store customer PII overseas or send it to overseas data centers for inference.
And as an EU citizen I like that they do. After all this is what they are for.
interesting. sounds like the EU is getting the growth trajectory its voters desire, then - best of luck!
Oh no, I live more years, work less hours, and breathe cleaner air, but unfortunately line goes up slightly less than in the US of A.
Who's going to pay your pension. Hopefully you have 10 kids.
> Changing this would require a break with the “green industrial complex”, which is close to untouchable (to many EU politicians).
I’m sure like with everything “green” they can get around having to use cheaper, dirty energy by buying enough indulgences^w carbon offsets.
Depending on the class of carbon offset, I think the comparison with indulgences is unnecessarily critical when it actually does net fewer emissions.
But what is 'tech'? When we say the EU isn't competitive in 'tech', what technology capacity do they lack?
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.
> Mostly ad market monopolies, then mostly massive-scale IP theft, etc.
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.
Definitely! Preventing as much innovation as possible is always good for an economy.
Sorry, I think I saw a similar comment recently - did you pay royalties?
>I don't want EU to fall behind further in the AI race
Buddy, EU didn’t even sign up for the race
I like the EU, but what's annoying about things like this, or the Chat Control law that keeps getting pushed, is that civil society and privacy advocacy groups always need to stay vigilant and keep mobilizing people. It's an attrition game.
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?
> Giant GDP boosts are always just one deregulation away, hm?
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.
Usually people quit when they have to go to a notary the first time, impressive that you held out.
They should just copy Polish laws. They are far from perfect, and yet they provided Poland with almost 30 years of stable, few percent growth, regardless of global and European economic struggles. When you plot the chart of Polish GDP even such a significant event as entering EU doesn't even register in the shape of the growth.
> civil society and privacy advocacy groups always need to stay vigilant and keep mobilizing people. It's an attrition game.
In a game of cat and mouse, the cat only has to win once.
Literally so, because the European """Parliament""" is the only institution with this name that I'm aware of that does not have the power to introduce laws. Which means it doesn't have the power to repeal them.
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.
What do you mean abroad? I don't think anyone is considering moving to the USA. But maybe you mean a different country?
I think you replied to the wrong thread ^^;
I think it was meant to be https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45880024.
I actually see a large stream of people moving to the US. Europe is doomed.
Biggest problem is you need two types economy at once.
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.
No one can call software and AI mature, they are still innovating. We do not even know how they will look in give years. Premature regulation kills this innovation. Harms of AI are not the same as harms from traffic accidents.
That’s true - but social media is a different kettle of fish.
The problem is it all gets lumped under “technology”.
Unemployment insurance and redistribution is a much better solution than keeping people in jobs that have been obviated decades ago.
"Draft changes would create new exceptions for AI companies that would allow them to legally process special categories of data (like a person’s religious or political beliefs, ethnicity or health data) to train and operate their tech."
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?
Ethnicity can correlate with certain genetic or health predispositions - for instance, the U.S. has long recognized that some conditions (like sickle-cell anemia or hypertension) appear more frequently in Black populations. If AI systems were forbidden from even considering such demographic factors, diagnostic accuracy could suffer.
Original title: Brussels knifes privacy to feed the AI boom
I'm always boggled by the logic of thinking that somehow having big companies going around doing harmful actions to people is "good for the economy" or "keeps us competitive". If having strict AI regulations means AI companies leave Europe, that's good! I wish we could do the same and get them to leave the US. These big AI companies are bad. We shouldn't want them, we shouldn't try to attract them, we shouldn't provide any conciliations or incentives. The sooner and more completely they're eradicated from any jurisdiction, the better. Forcing that kind of toxic waste out of your country should be perceived as a win.
What harmful actions?
How about also reviewing the copyright laws in favour of the public? The AI actors consume everything for profit and nobody cares. But if an ordinary Joe does this for personal amusement, he should face consequences.
This whole thing is obviously biased, because of money.
EU dictatorship at its finest, love to see it. This whole thing cannot disintegrate soon enough, and I say that as a (still, unfortunately) EU citizen.
You don't seem to understand what "dictatorship" actually means.
I think I do, as in I'm pretty sure I've never ever voted for this European Commission thing, neither has any other EU citizen that I know of, and yet they're running the whole show here in Europe. If if walks and quacks like a duck it most certainly is a duck. Granted, they don't have North Korea's interesting military parades, I'll give them that.
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.
You've voted for the people who elect the European Commission, though I'm sure you know that, just conveniently decided to leave it out, you're a known troll on Reddit too.
Unfortunately the downfall of the EU will not be easy or quick.
I agree it won't be easy. About quick, they were saying the same thing about the Soviets up until 1989.
Germany's right-wing AfD is on a trajectory to become the largest party. One of their goals: a Dexit.
An EU without the main net payer will disintegrate within months.
Brexit worked out so well that it basically quelled any dreams of other EU countries exiting after seeing it just creates a lot of headaches and almost no benefit to then just go back to having trade agreements with the EU while not being part of it.
It's really stupid that people imagine that the GDPR would hold back European AI.
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.
Shared European value is a ridiculous concept
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.
Hopefully it's the end of GDPR and privacy laws that absolutely no one requested.
Like nobody requested that encrypted chats stop being encrypted or that X becomes a censorship target of EU comissars
More like the continuation with more complex regulation and exceptions.