@levelsio@levelsio
🇪🇺 As a European citizen and AI founder, I can apparently use these "AI Factories", so I just signed up to use them!
Every "supercomputer" has an [ ACCESS NOW ] button which made me very excited
I expected to sign up, maybe pay a discounted H100 rate (funded by EU, that'd be nice?) and get a Jypyter notebook, or some SSH login so I can access my GPU like I'd do on @lambdaapi or @awscloud or @Hetzner_Online
But I celebrated to early, I signed up, confirmed my email, then ended up in a "Supercomputer Access Calls" page, where I had to select from a tedious list of "Call For Proposals" to get access to a GPU
So I could NOT just access a H100 GPU, I have to make sure my project (in this case my business) fits a specific proposal, ok fair
This process was already tedious enough but then when I tried to actually go through with it, it started asking me if I had "Respect for Human Agency?", I do I think, and if I was mindful of "Individual, and Social and Environmental Well-Being?", well I am, right guys??? Right??? The questions didn't stop, just endless pages of this
Look I get what they're doing, they pivoted the classic university "I need to rent a giant computer for my research" to an EU wide thing and then present it as the "European AI plan"
But this isn't really how AI works in production? As a founder in AI, if I wanna do stuff I'd rent a whole bunch H100 GPUs again at @lambdaapi or @awscloud or @Hetzner_Online and SSH into a box
Or if I want it more simple I run AI models on @FAL, @wavespeed or @replicate which is just an API call or web front end I can click stuff and run a model
The EU has the right intentions here but it's just the wrong execution, this thing will 100% go nowhere, and I'm a born optimist, I want to believe, I'm also a proud European, and I'm in AI a bit and not a complete idiot. There's just better ways to do this
If you really want to have the GPU servers in Europe (which arguably isn't that important), then let me rent a GPU box with SSH access at @Hetzner_Online or @OVHcloud that's hosted in Europe and subsidize that for European citizens and European businesses. I don't even believe in that, but at least that'd make it accessible for Europeans. Now it really isn't?
What's REALLY much more important though if you want to be a part of the AI race and I've posted for years here with @euaccofficial is to make Europe a really extremely attractive place to start and run an AI business. Remove regulatory obstructions and give tax discounts for startups. Let them build a business first that can compete worldwide and once they make enough money (let's say $100M/y), then slowly start adding regulation. Because right now the regulation only benefits the European incumbents, the dinosaur companies, while making it very difficult for European citizens to start new AI companies here.
Which is why we literally have none left.
Anyway, I applied to get my GPU, let's see if I get it!