YHK - yet another hacker news clone

German companies rely almost exclusively on AI models and services from the USA

15 points raincole 2 hours ago 17 comments

raincole 2 hours ago | parent

Title is edited as the original title buries the "German" part.

bilekas 1 hour ago | parent

Isn't it applicable to all EU companies though?

raincole 1 hour ago | parent

It obviously is applicable to all companies outside China, but the article is about German companies.

riedel 1 hour ago | parent

Actually the German title of the aricle reads: > China's open-weight models do not yet play a significant role

We have long accepted the fact that EU plays no role I guess

dark-star 1 hour ago | parent

I mean what other competitively similar AI models are there? DeepSeek is nowhere near. Are there others?

rurban 1 hour ago | parent

Local DeepSeek, qwen or kimi models are far better privacy-wise, faster, but much more expensive (to get a 2TB GPU RAM cluster). So everybody went with the Claude, OpenAI or CoPilot business contracts, so their secret business data leaves the EU, but will not be used to train the model. Unlike with the cloud Chinese services.

beernet 1 hour ago | parent

The short answer is No.

There are "sovereign" clouds like StackIT, OVH, OTC or Scaleway. What they all have in common is that they are lightyears behind hyperscalers in terms of performance, reliability and security. Needless to say, these alternatives can only serve open-source models because they are not capable of training a SOTA equivalent by themselves. The cherry on top is that you have to pay a sovereignty premium for inferior performance.

BlackRabbit1 27 minutes ago | parent

You can use Deepseek from EU-only hosters. DS is openweight.

mbjvhj 13 minutes ago | parent

I use DeepSeek and GLM for coding. They are on-par or better than Opus/Astra.

WarmWash 1 hour ago | parent

Sounds like primetime to bring charges against the labs with multibillion dollar fines, to force them to create a domestic lab with SOTA model development for Europeans.

You know, anything but create fertile business conditions.

andy_ppp 1 hour ago | parent

You know there was a lab that was cutting edge in Europe and it is still there - Deepmind - but the UK let it be sold to the US for a fraction of what it's worth today - $400m. We just allow US companies to asset strip the EU and then people complain about us never having big companies here...

Deepmind would likely be worth conservatively $200 BILLION today (probably more without the overheads of joining Google to be honest) or around 500 times the sale price in 2014, not a bad return.

mainecoder 1 hour ago | parent

If there was a good EU alternative it may have been used but Mistral was out of the game a long time ago now that does not mean they will close down or will not be profitable so long as they work on regulation and other things like ethics and how good they are for the environment etc some may choose them.

BlackRabbit1 27 minutes ago | parent

You can use Asian Opensource models from EU-only hosters. Zero problems - they are around for a while now.

ndom91 1 hour ago | parent

You don't say?! :joy:

This applies to pretty much everyone who isn't the US/China, no? I guess Russia also has a good amount of home grown web services (Yandex, Wildberries, etc), but not much in the AI space that I'm aware of.

raincole 1 hour ago | parent

The real surprising part is that Anthropic is also negligible (according to this article) in Germany. It's all OpenAI. But I didn't dare to change the title that much.

nkmnz 36 minutes ago | parent

One of the reasons self-hosting is not sustainable in Germany is that electricity is prohibitively expensive for non-industrial purposes. If you run a service company and do not own a data center, you pay more for the electricity than the equivalent in token costs overseas or in China.

BlackRabbit1 27 minutes ago | parent

You still can use EU-Hosted Opensources models like from Tensorix.