However, if you don't trust cloud providers or inference providers for whatever reason then you probably aren't going to be excited to enter a co-op model where you're still effectively renting access to hardware that you don't directly own. There are already reasonably priced options to rent bare metal from a cloud provider.

The only way I see it working is if it's a bunch of medium to large sized businesses getting together to be able to rent out the spare capacity on hardware that they physically control. So an AWS equivalent where each rack is owned by a different company and retail VMs migrate between them transparently. But I question the overall economics of such an arrangement.

If we're imagining a co-op, then the participants should all be equal owners in an organisation that owns the hardware itself, otherwise it's not much of a co-op really.

The advantage is having a voice in setting direction, investment and ultimate shared incremental profit recovery over the rent capture from hyperscalers.

It's an interesting idea really. But it also comes with cooperation, which means trust, and a lot of for-profit enterprises are bad at operating cooperatively outside of 2- or 3- way engagements.

I don't see it happening. A current gen GPU with a huge and fast block of memory isn't a perfect fit for these algorithms but it's relatively close. With cryptocurrency, mass small sha256 hashing was a totally different kind of computation.

I don't think that's true. The best fit out of what's presently available perhaps. Inference is almost entirely memory bandwidth bound at present, to the extent that GPUs with HBM have a massive advantage over those with GDDR. TPUs appear to be a much better overall design.

I expect that a hypothetical advance in fabrication enabling processing elements to be placed directly adjacent to dense RAM on the same silicon (not merely in the same package) would be superior in all regards.

Processing scales better than DRAM does. I think an HBM-like stack where the bottom layer has the math units is probably the ultimate form of that.

And it's possible that flash instead of DRAM is actually the better play, as long as you can hook up enough in parallel. RIP Optane.

Isn't it already happening with Cerebras? It's mentioned at the end of OpenAI's GPT 5.6 announcement:

"We're also launching GPT‑5.6 Sol on Cerebras at up to 750 tokens per second in July"

Even my parents who speak no English and aren’t spending time in US-based social media have taken a break from hating Russia for the Ukraine invasion to talking about how we need to get rid of the dependency on the US.

This boat is turning slowly but it won’t turn back anymore.

Not to mention how ridiculous the narrative of "provocation" is, I can almost hear "provokatsiya, provokatsiya" in Putin's weak and whiny old-man voice. Entry into NATO meant that NATO spent billions upon billions introducing proper civilian oversight of militaries in the new members, and other key features of first world countries. Former RU foreign minister Kozyrev hits the nail when he calls it free security for Russia.

Europe is becoming a museum and a retirement home. Young people leave to make their fortune and maybe return to have a family or avail of healthcare. And while I have nothing against old people my own street in a _very_ family-oriented suburb in the Netherlands is over 50% retirees.

Though I see the flow of migrants between the US and Europe has shifted, so there's a net gain of Americans in Europe. I wonder if it's where young people with dreams want to go, or if it's just where people like my in-laws (nice, culturally aware, but no longer very economically productive) who have a few million dollars in their 40's and want a pretty place to retire young, go.

> The Commission backs the Dutch [...]. The European position fragments before it has properly formed.

That the EU would, after recognizing AI's value, freely give up control of its few advantages to the US, despite of this being a conventional trade issue which the EU has experience with, seems like a very pessimistic assumption.

(I stopped reading after that part.)

At the same historical turning point when Europeans are finally waking up to the need to become less dependent on their so called US ally for weapons production and security, they are immediately choosing to become dependent on the next layer of critical infrastructure.

Instead of learning the obvious lesson, Europe seems ready to purchase the future from whoever Washington allows it to purchase from. It used to be the guns, now it's the AI.

It is so idiotic and short sighted that you can barely even blame anyone who keeps exploiting this over and over again. It is always the same story.

The bigger issue is the growing number of retired woodworkers collecting pensions for much longer than the system was ever designed for. Life expectancy rose dramatically, yet the retirement age not. These retired woodworkers then vote for politicians who keep increasing their benefits, while costs are cut elsewhere. Add a declining birthrate, a trend started by previous generations, and you get a system that is politically almost impossible to reform. It will probably take a very hard societal crash before people seriously reconsider this old, inefficient model. Like in Greece, where pensions were cut on third of it's original size. Sadly, woodworkers never learn other way than this.

With ever present threat of war on the old continent because some woodworking tribes just can't supress their need to chop someone else, this is the biggest long term issue.

As a European, the way I see it, Europe declared fealty to the US and relinquished its sovereignty a long time ago, sadly.

Also, the way these agreements tend to work is that you agree that you won't source from the 'enemy side' i.e. China. It works this way for NATO and it will work the same way here.

No such declaration was ever made. Europe has just failed to compete.

Of course not, there's no need for a 'declaration' that would be a hard sell to the European public. Actions is all that matters.

Nobody in EU ever tried to build a domestic CPU that was even remotely comparable to what Intel and AMD, for them to have had the opportunity to fail.(No, ARM is IP not a builder)

Nobody in EU ever tried to build a domestic GPU that was even remotely comparable to Nvidia, ATI or 3Dfx for them to have failed.

We just let the US companies fight it out, see who could build the best products, and become forever customers to them and then 20 year later wonder how come their economy grew 2x as much.

Of course the EU tries to compete with the US and in some industries it has done so successfully (e.g pharma or aviation). EU companies have also tried to compete in information technology - with some limited or temporary success.

ARM was founded in the EU. DeepMind was founded in the EU. Olivetti and Siemens had CPU designs and made computers. Nokia once dominated mobile. Ericsson was/is a leading telecom equipment maker. Skype used to be one of the most successful messaging apps. Spotify is a success. ASML is a success.

A certain Finnish university student started the operating system that now dominates the cloud, but for some reason I really do not understand, EU cloud providers like OVHCloud have failed to compete with the likes of AWS, Azure and GCP. And now the AI wave has completely washed over Europe.

The cloud situation is a mystery to me. Nothing stops EU companies like OVHCloud from competing there. Any anticompetitive behaviour is a very weak excuse. Europe can't even compete with something as mediocre as Palantir. Now everyone is calling for protectionism. Ridiculous.

AI is easier to understand. It requires huge capital investments. The US has far superior capital markets and far healthier attitudes towards risk taking. Europe's failure here was easy to predict but the consequences could be dire.

I was talking only about SW and HW in the context of the current AI race. Not about legacy industries like aero and pharma. Everyone knows EU is only good at legacy industries, well except cars, they're getting ass whipped there too.

> Olivetti and Siemens had CPU designs and made computers.

None of those domestic designs ever competed commercially with the X86 or amd_64, which is why I made that specific reamark. Please read my comment again and don't try to argue in bad faith by moving the goalposts.

>ARM was founded in the EU. DeepMind was founded in the EU. Nokia once dominated mobile. Ericsson was/is a leading telecom equipment maker. Skype used to be one of the most successful messaging apps. Spotify is a success. ASML is a success.

Most of those have massive US shareholders/financial backing or have outright been brought up by US companies or PE firms or US shareholders. And Spotify being called a succes is laughable given they bootstrapped thanks to initially distributing music they stole off the torrents, and then shafting their smaller artist once they became a multi billion dollar music streaming monopoly.

>Europe can't even compete with something as mediocre as Palantir.

France is copying Palantir to make their domestic version. Chaps Intelligence.

>A certain Finnish university student started the operating system that now dominates the cloud

What does it matter if he's Finnish or not? Linus is an American citizen now living and working from the US, mostly consulting on linux kernel topics for US big-tech. Why did he leave lovely Finland for the "third world" US? That's the question EU gospelers can never answer. He didn't like having walkable cities and free healthcare?

Wrt Linus - who knows? It is irrelevant; he is largely irrelevant. If he got ran over by a bus, the collective community (of whom quite a few are outside the US) will carry on.

Saying Linus is irrelevant is the most ignorant thing.

He's like the Schrodinger of Europeans tech sovereign nationalists on HN, he's relevant in arguments where he's European, but irrelevant in arguments where he's American.

Yes, but it was span off from Acorn Computers, which had its own European OS, CPU, computer etc, but ARM was all that was left of what could have been a fully European Apple had it been given more support.

Bitboys tried, but pivoted to embedded graphics and were bought by ATI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glaze3D

Falanx Microsystems tried (not EU but close enough), also pivoted to mobile/embedded graphics and made the #1 shipping family of GPUs in the world: https://developer.arm.com/community/arm-community-blogs/b/mo...

Except Bitboys never shipped any actual GPUs, their products were mostly vaporware, all they had was some IP of unknown performance that ...

> were bought by ATI

My point exactly.

> Facts, but the Europeans, tankies, and America haters here will never admit it.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Social programs have little to do with it. You can have both industry and social programs if you just choose not to start random wars of aggression in the US too, something for which you need $1.5T apparently.

China has both more industry and plenty of social programs as an example.

open source != open weights

open weights model is like... Winamp for example. it's free, you can download it and use it however you like, you could also do some binary patching or dll injections to alter it functionality but it's not enough to develop next version.

the same is with ai models, weights are the binary final artifacts. for development and improvements you need to have training data, pipelines, RL harnesses, etc.

also of you believe Chinese companies will be releasing weights indefinitely, you are not understanding motivations.

Chinese companies spend significant amounts of money to train a model so why they are releasing it for free? they basically provide researchers starting point for developing tooling and optimizations for serving the model in return. and also get some PR. They also do not have to pay for inference of those models that much, as they probably serve them with loss anyways to gain market. they are gov sponsored so money are not issue there, so they try to speedrun their way to what US companies have. And guess what happens when they reach it. they will stop releasing weights and increase pricing or will use them for gov purposes.