“Beware, baffled humans. Beware of false prophets who will sell you a fake future, of bad teachers, corrupt leaders and dirty corporations. Beware of cops and robbers, the kind that rob your dreams.”
— Ryan Ray
This is part one of a two-part series. You can read part two here.
Needless to describe what has happened in the AI world in the past month. I assume you follow the news and spare me the effort. Here, I want to unpack this piece. Occasionally, I might refer to things the news have covered by linking them, if memory allows it.
The Europe 2031 piece is decent, but what it lacks in depth, it covers in mimicry. While predictive scenarios tempt with clairvoyant clarity, stating the obvious is often necessary because “there’s nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.” I want to say more about the bits left out: the benevolent Leviathan that Europeans could thrive under, if only they were willing to accept a social contract paid for culturally.
Europe isn’t a thing
The United States has fifty states; Europe has forty-four countries, twenty-seven of which are EU members. That is not the first sentence of a world geography course, I promise. If you were to pick two American states and two European countries at random, and conceptually imagine a “cultural distance” as a measure of how many layers of everyday meaning have to be renegotiated when moving from one place to another, you would likely discover greater within-variance in Europe than in the United States. Stand in Romania and look outward and you will see a Romance island in a largely Slavic sea; part of that same sea, a Uralic island, not too far to the west, is almost tucked within. For some, it would not be too difficult to argue that the latter is even more linguistically isolated. As a Romanian, I still have not made up my mind about which is weirder.
To a wanderer’s foot, Europe’s rough terrain appears as a perpetual sense of mutual unintelligibility (or maybe, negotiated intelligibility). As it governs, Brussels is both overweening and invisible, the shadow of a government, never in the way Washington is. And that is because Europe isn’t a thing.
However, the mistake is to think of Europe as a failed United States. The apparent inconvenience of cultural difference may turn out to be Europe’s greatest strength, as its plurality enables diversity at a scale almost inconceivable to the American mind. Immigration does not unlock the same ethos. The American immigrant diversifies the host society from within, while the European neighbor diversifies it from beside. That is not to say that they both do not embody difference — they do. But at the same time, they are qualitatively different figures. Being a representative of a whole new world is less intrusive but more coercive for the latter.
Europe has an obsession with America
If not a fetishism of sorts. I will weave three threads: financial, political, and, for lack of a better word, clownery.
They say to follow the money. The picture that emerges is crystal clear: the euro favors American markets. But these capital flows are a drought. And as we sow our soil with dry tears, our intellectual heritage and European pride warm no soul when our technical founders are handed checks lighter than a feather. The same technology that is worth billions across the ocean — why not here?
Those who argue, “Not the same standards of living” or “We obviously don’t need as much of it,” miss the point. A rack of B300s is worth the same inflated sum, regardless of geography.
“Dear Nvidia, we’re a promising European seed startup that just raised €700k to build the next generation of LLMs. We’re active in pre-training. Might we secure that $100M in compute credits to truly get somewhere? Pretty please.”
What is the most catatonic and deject tale of capital and influence drift if not that smearing Europe’s alleged crown jewel? Do not get me wrong, I like Mistral. My torrent account is 18 years old today (yes, I still have it). When they dropped Magnet links on Twitter, I thought that was undeniably bold and cool. But it was American capital filling an otherwise close-to-empty cup. It took several rounds and billions of dollars, and still were not European VCs leading the largest round — it was ASML which broke the pattern.
On the political front, the contrast is subtler but no less insidious. America has two parties and a handful of lonely independents. I live in Europe and I have no idea how many parties there are. Even ChatGPT says “it’s tricky,” but nonetheless (confidently, but wrongly) claims a total of 886 active core parties across 43 countries.
Here is a thought experiment. You are a tech billionaire. In Washington, you face a binary choice, but in Europe, you are met with a buffet of small, angry parties you can walk into with a single endorsement. Do you think Elon Musk needed to buy the AfD? Certainly not. He only had to livestream with Alice Weidel because American elite attention is political capital. In Europe, every promise factory gets its own version of “Make {Country} Great Again.” A union of nations that is not a thing can be skillfully thwarted by gridlock. And we have already seen that Europe is not a thing. Vance traveled to Munich to declare there was “no room for firewalls,” whatever that truly means. But if you notice, what actually “gets traveled” is attention. In other words, never underestimate the legitimacy of an American nod.
And I can safely say that through it all, as Europeans, we mock. I am certainly guilty of this. Armed with savage memes, we make terrific mockers, and there is not a day on which America is not Europe’s favorite punching bag. But jesters were employed at someone else’s court, and a jester who mocks the king in the king’s language, filling its daily appetite on the king’s platforms, is not a virtuous dissident, but an expendable jester, always one joke away from the gallows.
A view from inside the cockpit
The words before were meant to cover the harsh reality Europe 2031 hid — if not entirely left out — behind a rosy story. And they should be enough. But here, I will lay out my experience as a technical founder. And let me start by saying that I am not in the room where the future is being built, and probably never will be. I know the Internet like the back of my hand, so that gets me closer to the next room over, but pressed against the wall, straining to listen. Oftentimes, everything is muffled.
I run an AI deeptech company in Central Europe. It is not a frontier lab or a hyperscaler. Nor is it one of the names that appear in the sort of breathless Wired profile where the founder is photographed staring meaningfully at a server rack to connote visionary intensity. I want to be careful here because I do not want to inflate or performatively deflate our own significance. That might be tempting and almost irresistible. I am merely saying that we are not those people.
But that is not to say that we were not a visionary company or that we could not anticipate the future. I have to say that I have never felt the zeitgeist the way I have felt it in the past two years. Most of my ideas instantly manifested in reality after I discussed them in closed circles in very elaborate and specific detail. It was as if somebody would tune in and listen to my own thoughts. You do not have to believe me. People of far greater impact in my life had seen me at both ups and downs and would back what I write here, as they were there seeing me performing.
We were first in Europe in many ways.
We built software that leveraged large language models (text-davinci-002 and text-davinci-003) before ChatGPT came out, and released it at roughly the same time as LangChain; in fact, we went public with the repository two weeks later.
We were seemingly less lucky, or we did not manage to take off the way a San Francisco-based company would, and that is fine.
We were cited by different labs that managed to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, while we did not manage to raise even one million.
We were also the first to build technology in Europe that was very early at that point and is now behind some ambitious projects.
We did all of this and did not earn much recognition because our geography does not give us an advantage.
Our technical prowess was not enough to navigate the muddled waters of European politics and capital flows.
We were a handful of people with a vision, but we were not the right people in the right place at the right time.
We simply wanted to build technology for Europe and not waste time.
Nobody understood the urgency of the moment, and we were not able to convince them.
Nonetheless, I am grateful for these experiences. I had a surprisingly clear view of the entire room, much as a beggar sees more of the city than a king.
What I saw was not a shortage of intelligence. Europe is capable of leading projects of equal, if not greater, challenge. But Europe is teaching ambition the reluctance of a closed door. It is Europe’s way of catching tigers only to tame them, cutting their fangs and claws and confining them to a space designed to fit an already distorted worldview.
I still remember to this day a conversation that we had with one investment fund from Germany that went quite far. We were discussing for at least six months. Then, part of our team met in person with the general partner, who, two weeks after that meeting, told us that he does not believe we can do it. To this day, I still keep that email as a reminder and as fuel for a fire that will one day burn so brightly its warmth will be felt across the continent.
Ursula von der Leyen declared at the Paris AI Action Summit that the AI race is far from over and that global leadership is still up for grabs. However, she was not describing the world as it is, but as it would need to be for the European self-esteem to remain intact. In other words, she was acting. Europe is not going to win the AI race.