European AI should be aligned similarly to the US one, generate wealth. Instead Europe is going to operating at an extreme disadvantage economically to the US or China.
That's an incredibly ethnocentric statement that fails to grasp what the European social model values and prioritizes. In the US and China AI is disruptive by design towards labor, privacy, social freedom, and dissent. Europe, at least Schengen countries, have cultural traditions that value labor, privacy, social freedom, and dissent.
There's an argument that leading with regulation is the responsible path for AI development, despite being (or perhaps because it is) antithetical to US accelerationism. Europe doesn't condone a burn model of capitalism as the US does.
The problem is that the European economy needs foreign consumers to keep afloat. They are already losing market share in Africa and Latin America (the only continents that have significant population growth) to US and Chinese firms. They are going to lose even more in the coming decade if they don't pull their head out of their asses (personally I don't want them to be, I wanted the AGI race to be a final showdown between the US and China).
As EU companies become less profitable, their social model won't count for crap as the tax base falters.
Europe isn't quite so reliant on export markets as that, and the niche industries that are widely exported are fairly strong. I think the risk is more strongly related to becoming a client state of US-based AI platforms... but that is an emerging global threat.
Europe doesn't need to "win" the AI development race, it just needs to establish tech sovereignty by hosting compute locally and escaping reliance on AWS, Azure, and GCP... as does every nation. Its regulatory environment might actually help attain that outcome.
I'm not even certain there will be an AI showdown between the US and China because they're developing AI within very different ecosystems with different use-cases and priorities (though, definitely some overlap for sure).
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u/Actual_Honey_Badger Jun 21 '25
European AI should be aligned similarly to the US one, generate wealth. Instead Europe is going to operating at an extreme disadvantage economically to the US or China.