lordkekz

Yeah, I'm not against AI research fundamentally, I just think they are (i) investing in the wrong kind of AI research and (ii) investing more in AI than desirable given the numerous other challenges which are under-funded in comparison. I'm going to argue this in a bit more detail:

(ii)

According to this article referenced by OP's article the EU is going to spend about 35% of 200 billion, so 70 billion, for AI. Imagine they'd invest just 1 percent of that into FOSS. The German sovereign tech fund, which is hugely successful, has a budget of around 20 million euro per year. That's literally nothing for a government. With 1% of the 70 billion, the EU could invest 700 million euro in digital sovereignty, which is more than SUSE's 2022 revenue and more than double the Linux Foundation's 2024 budget (around 290 million USD). Additionally, leading robotics company KUKA (meanwhile bought by a chinese firm) had just 4.4 billion USD revenue in 2022. All of the above ventures would provide better returns in terms of (a) improving labor productivity and (b) sovereignty versus USA's big tech and Chinese manufacturing. These 500k NVIDIA GPUs will become outdated within a few years, meanwhile it's still unclear if and how they will facilitate any benefit at all to EU citizens.

(i)

Now, IMO there are also decent ways to invest in AI: Invest in academic research and invest in under-developed areas of machine learning. Not every machine learning problem is an LLM problem. Today's transformer-based LLMs are only a small subset of the thinkable architectures of neural networks, let alone machine learning in general. Robotics (e.g. controlling robot arms in a more dynamic manner), medicine (e.g. protein folding), infrastructure (e.g. predicting failures, optimized planning) or economics (e.g. coordinating production processes to optimize cost/emissions/latency/fault tolerance) are all very concrete, high-value targets for research funding. Regulations like the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive are currently very expensive for small to medium size companies due to the bureaucratic overhead, but a EU-driven standard for digital and automated tracking of supply chain metrics could reduce the running cost to near-zero if implemented well. Companies like SAP (34 billion USD revenue in 2024), which is a leading company in enterprise resource planning, have the potential to co-develop and implement such standards to provide affordable yet precise enforcement of regulations. Also, if the EU defines such a standard, it will likely also be adopted by global suppliers because they need it to sell to EU customers. This would of in turn give EU software and cloud companies a huge advantage globally.

To summarize, both better AI and non-AI investments compared to the EU's planned AI/LLM training datacenters.

Sorry for the long post, but I feel it is neccessary to properly make my point. Am I making any sense? 🙃

Exactly!

Tesla is by no means the go-to for EVs in europe, not for a long time. I think Renault, Dacia, Fiat and VW make decent EVs. Especially Renault and Fiat also still produce most of it (I think including batteries, but not sure) in the EU.

VW is also decent but I am somewhat shocked because they still introduce and advertise non-EV models. WTF?

Sadly all the EVs are overpriced massively compared to combustion engines. Even more sadly, the EU and its member countries have failed to create a truly pan-european high speed rail network with affordable pricing. In Germany at least, a one-person train fare is comparable to the price of using a car (with only one person using the car). WTF. It should be 3-4 times cheaper.

This is a nothing burger, they are only proposing it in hopes that tech giants will negotiate and make concessions on their own.

Just introduce the tax. Companies should have zero say in this.

These datacenters planned by SAP, Telekom etc. appear to focus on AI datacenters, not general digital sovereignty. I think LLM training is much, much less important than getting governments, companies and individuals away from american tech giants.

Also, who will get most of the money? NVIDIA, an american company. Buying 500k american GPUs for billions isn't the grandiose step towards sovereignty they make it out to be.

Why not invest the money in EU chip design? Why not EU hardware design and manufacturing? Why not industrial automation and robotics? Installing renewables, improving infrastructure? There are other challenges which are more likely to be useful than power-hungry slop machines. I have yet to see LLMs being used for non-trivial tasks reliably. The most frequent use for LLMs I have seen is to relieve people from thinking critically or putting in the effort to learn skills properly. Which are both extremely bad and dangerous things that will actually reduce productivity and quality in the long term.

In terms of preservation, digital media is surely superior if you use it right (i.e. using long-lasting storage media, backups and error detection).

But, some people prefer physical books just for the experience. Also physical books don't need electricity.

Also, a DRM-free ebook may still miss some layout or images compared to a printed copy, depending on the format and how good it's made.

All in all, I still prefer e-books.

You're right. It's still stupid though.

Companies should be at least as concerned with privacy and autonomy as individuals. Running everything on Microsoft Clouds, with Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office makes you massively vulnerable to the whims of Microsoft. And many of the potential customers are actually Microsoft's competitors on some level.

Thin clients may be a good model for some businesses, but this device particularly seems to be tailored to use only Microsoft's Azure cloud as opposed to self-hosting. Moving the computation to Microsoft's cloud doesn't make it inherently safer.

Sure, let's just move your personal desktop to someone else's computer where you don't even own the data. What could possibly go wrong?

I also have these concerns. It's really hard for consumers to tell where products come from and who actuslly makes them. We need a lot more supply chain transparency.

I think there's an EU law requiring some larger companies to explain their suppliers to prevent things like forced labor even outside the EU. But I think it doesn't nearly go far enough while also not providing an efficient digital path to verify supply chains, thus causing bureaucratic overhead and disadvantaging smaller businesses.

I think this happens in other countries too. It's a result of neoliberalism:

• They cut spending on education, social security and publix infrastructure. That makes it harder for the youth to get started.
• They also cut taxes on the wealthy - meaning a lot of the wealth remains with older generations and especially the richest 5%.
• And finally, they pursue union busting, deregulation and globalization. By playing out the interests of workers in different countries (or different ethnicities in the same country) they're making it harder to collectively bargain for good wages and good working conditions.

Now, I think the US is having it especially bad. In Germany they do regularly cut social security but we have public health insurance (though the rich get to opt out instead of paying their share) and overall a wealth distribution which is not good but also not quite as bad as the US. We also have a very different job market: Due to lack of highly educated workers, it's easy to get a job and good conditions if you have a good education (which is basically free if you can afford to take the time). And they can't fire you willy-nilly, this is hugely important for becoming financially stable and feeling safe.

Our main problem economically is the "Debt Brake" - a rule that limits government debt (and thus spending) without accounting for the required infrastructure investments. That doesn't make any economic sense - anyone would loan money to make an investment if that facilitates economic growth!