Researcher @hallerite argues Europe's AI bottleneck is institutional governance and uncompetitive salaries, not a lack of hardware

@hallerite nailed it. It is considered "unfair", it is considered "unequal", that's why there is a social contract implying a big no-no. Only Government people and government sponsored jobs like Lawyers are allowed to earn that much on a moral level.

@hallerite Europe discourages growth, wealth, entrepreneurship, and risk taking.

Promotes socialism, over regulation, over taxation, “nanny state”.

Until that paradigm will change, EU will continue sliding into irrelevance.

@hallerite Not exactly. In Europe it is the gerontocratic professor that has to be paid $600k, while the young guy is generously allowed to do all the work for a modest salary. And any paper eventually published or any discovery has to be credited to the professor first. Ask me how I know

it's not lack of compute that's the issze. it's that in Europe, it's unthinkable to pay a guy in his mid 20s $600k salary and give him resources and freedom to train models without having oversight by a committee of gerontocratic professorswho don't keep up with the research

@hallerite In Europe there's still multiple places where the public servants job contract specifies that u will earn more as more years u have been doing the job. The whole mentality is to reward inactivity instead of young ambicious people. Everything needs to burn down

We spend billions at the European level on bullshit, useless things, and above all, on things that work against the interests of member states. If we spend less on bullshit and reduce costs, we can pay people up to 500,000 a year without any problems. Furthermore, life in Europe costs much, much less than in the US.

@hallerite Yes. Exactly. Even if you luck out and work at a company thats willing to spend the $$$s, here’s the kind of bullshit you have to do to comply with only ONE of the million rules of the land https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/navigating-eu-ai-act-requirements-for-llm-fine-tuning-on-amazon-sagemaker-ai/

@Sifossifoco1 @hallerite Not even. The professor makes around 200k and the young researcher gets 60k. Even if they quit and go to US companies, they'll be paid half of what that company pays in the US. Cost of living is far more than half, assets are worth the same. Workers can't get wealthy in Europe.

The issue is that Europe is a communist continent What do old professors matter? They can have fun in ETH Zurich. AI startups are supposed to be ran by people in their 30s-40s.

It's on all levels as well. It somehow is in the EU DNA. We look at Japan and call them heirachical, but I think in the EU we might be even worse. Big companies are filled with upper layers of people who "deserved" a promotion and positions just get created. Meanwhile you have a company which is made up of 80% upper and middle management and advisors etc, which all stepped out of keeping up with the actual tech progress at least 10 years ago. And the other 20% have 0 say in anything that happens, direction, tech used etc.

@hallerite Im from the best school in france and the people from my promo got hired anywhere from 35k to 75k a year in AI These are top IQ kids from the school that churned pple that made the theorems u learn in school

@hallerite just start your own startup and do whatever you want?

@hallerite yes from what i hear mistral pay is subpar as well, maybe they’re capital constrained

@hallerite It’s about compute availability to young people.

@hallerite Ironically enough, that has historically often been how actual wars have been won Which might be the category states will need to employ thinking about the issue Feels a little like the knives are finally out in the open

@hallerite Also taxes are so high with that salary you'd just move elsewhere

If they’re there for 10 years first taking no salary. Or if they contribute to a company where the revenue per employee is as competitive as on the US, sure.

Otherwise why the hell would they even deserve that? Since clearly they weren’t there building the foundation of a globally adopted new tech stack…

@hallerite Not only that, you also need massive amounts of data, which Europeans don’t have access to or are not willing to dabble in the gray area of the law in order to get it. So chances of success are slim to none.

@agcty_ @hallerite In Europe start ups get no money since banks are mostly savings and loans.

@hallerite There’s a lot of truth to this. There are all kinds of US investors giving high school and “summer off from college” kids $100k-$250k to just go and do whatever. The level of trust and “it’s just money” attitude in the US is…unlike anywhere else.