If you drank every time a “progressive” technophile said “we need to be able to fire people easier” while talking about 0.1% of employees (when the other 99.9% are on poverty wages and already have shit rights protections), you’d die of catastrophic liver failure in about 2 days.
I frequently hear people say that European governments should procure European AI systems.
But Mistral’s Medium 3.5 performs worse than GPT-5.4 nano, while costing fourteen times as much. Hence, going through with these proposals would see European governments opt for bad, expensive models instead of better, cheaper alternatives.
And the revenue thus generated will not be enough to allow European companies to become competitive:
- Large European governments spend around $5 billion per year on IT.
- Three such governments might pay Mistral $3 billion a year for model access.
- The resulting revenue would represent only six (!) percent of Anthropic’s annual revenues.
A far better path to nurturing European AI labs is supply side policy. E.g., the financial returns to IP law reform are incredibly high. Non-EU countries could probably move fast here. Same with labor law—you can't hire $600k engineers, if you're unsure about the ability to let them go on a moment's notice.