This is comical because economies have become totally divorced from hard reality and markets are now vibes-based.
Nvidia, Tesla, and Palantir (trading at 450 P/E!) are, among others, essentially meme stocks. But, for better or worse, the US economy is riding that wave.
The way to revive a moribund economy isn't to insist that markets must be rational and that hype should be tamped down. This never works, and I think that the rational market myth is dead. (You could make the case that BTC was the final nail in its coffin.) Instead, you've gotta find a way to ride the wave -- but wisely, so that you don't stand to lose too much if/when it slows or hits the breakers.
Was there ever such myth? There is a quote attributed to John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946): "The markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."
I don't understand why Palantir is always thrown in with the AI bunch. Yes, they market products using AI. But their core business is products and consulting for surveillance. I'm bullish for Palantir because I'm bearish on freedom. All major democracies are turning into surveillance states. And von der Leyen is making sure EU does as well.
Yo, they're trading at 450 P/E. Enough said, really. Whatever's going on, it's plainly detached from physical reality -- nothing they sell or provide can possibly justify their valuation.
The dilemma of leaders way behind is to find the right attack vector. Of course, you won't be able to become competitive by just "put more effort" into the existing stuff and hence everyone is eager to hope for a "Wunderwaffe" like flying taxis, quantum computing, blockchain, AI moonshots or whatever. In the end they all fail because the existing issues and problems won't be fixed, leading to the next failure. This happens over and over again, but voters still believe the promises of politicians.
Worse, there is a whole European industry sector hunting for subsidies doing build-to-fail projects, for example "google competitor", "European cloud" etc.
This competition is the solution, not the problem. Europe is what's left of western society after the US have completely lost it. My humble opinions, ofc.
I can agree in some ways but the issue remains (as an European) that our collective economies don't really grow anymore.
So there might be more competition, but it's either marginal, or it's to weak to compete with other international companies (like the once in China for example).
Why do they need to grow? Unlimited growth is normally classified as cancer. The only real need for growth is because of unsustainable economic practice.
Europe has been "stagnating" at about ~80% of American productivity levels for decades now. However, if your reference is growing and your ratio is roughly constant, that means you are growing too.
I don't mean compared to the US but in absolute GDP numbers.
States are more in more in debt and what was once a great social system in most EU countries is slowly moving to privatisation and higher costs like the US.
We’ve seen a massive consolidation in hosting, domain, collocation and even B2B access providers in Germany. Some were sold to US companies, others are purchased and now owned by private equity companies. They are now centralized and based of existing revenue streams. Managed services are getting consolidated to reduce infra overhead but no new intellectual property or regionally optimized/local services are provided.
I'm not a fan of her either, but what do you actually expect?
Politicians are not generally domain specialists anywhere, their purpose is to make decisions and serve as a pretty face for some more or less coherent policy.
Lobbyism is very easy to complain about and can easily devolve into corruption, but it has a very clear purpose: To prevent policymakers from writing regulations that harm the affected industries without gain. This is especially necessary at the EU level, because the main purpose of that whole organisation is to lower trade barriers and regulatory friction-- lobbyists are somewhat helpful and necessary in that.
To prevent policymakers from writing regulations that harm the affected industries without gain
But where are the lobbyists that prevent policymakers from writing regulations that harm the affected citizens? Are they not entitled to adequate representation?
> To prevent policymakers from writing regulations that harm the affected industries without gain.
Industries that cant comply to modern standards should be harmed. We dont need industries willing to pay lobbyists to keep fossil fuels alive for example.
> Industries that cant comply to modern standards should be harmed.
Those "modern standards" need to be codified into law, and feedback from established companies is valuable for doing that.
> We dont need industries willing to pay lobbyists to keep fossil fuels alive for example.
Those lobbyists represent the interests of a good portion of the economy. If you disregard their feedback, your risk damaging/destabilizing your economy for unclear gain, and the resulting backlash is going to more than undo any progress you made anyway.
> It's the "unreasonable" rules that were unilaterally implemented that made car companies panic and finally start competing.
I believe the margin for effective regulation is much smaller than you think.
Sure, the EU could've mandated zero-emission vehicles from 2020 on in, say, 2010. But what would have happened? Carmakers would have made giant losses because their production facilities become worthless overnight (and laid off swathes of people); prices for vehicles and transport would've invariably gone through the roof and it is quite likely that the whole industry would have picked the "wrong" technology to bet on, like fuel cells, synthetic fuel or even hydrogen combustion.
Compare how much pushback you get in the general population against costly pro-climate policy already (very important to look past your own bubble on this!) and it seems clear to me that this would have failed competely (doing great economical damage, possibly a full-blown crisis), and would have probably been rolled back by the next election at the latest.
> Carmakers would have made giant losses because their production facilities become worthless overnight (and laid off swathes of people);
This is exactly what happened and is happening now. So 10 more years didn't prepare car maker better.
In fact the CEO of Stellantis was openly talking about how much of bad idea electric cars would be.
However, during those 10 years they managed to cheat on emissions measurements.
> it is quite likely that the whole industry would have picked the "wrong" technology to bet on, like fuel cells, synthetic fuel or even hydrogen combustion.
This also happened with so called bio-ethanol and Toyota's long standing and failed hydrogen bet.
> Compare how much pushback you get in the general population against costly pro-climate policy already
In Europe it's more a question of economics (like cost of electric cars for example) than a push back against pro-climate efforts themselves.
What is happening right now is that legacy carmakers have to compete harder because their core know-how lost value. That was somewhat inevitable, but banning/destroying that industry 10 years earlier would have hurt much more and would have been punished hard by voters.
> In Europe it's more a question of economics (like cost of electric cars for example) than a push back against pro-climate efforts themselves.
This is exactly my point- people don't like to suddenly pay more for the same just to avoid "climate debt" (and I'm willing to bet that your judgement on this is distorted, because most people in your bubble would accept some sacrifice for climate conservation, unlike the majority).
> Lobbyism is very easy to complain about and can easily devolve into corruption, but it has a very clear purpose: To prevent policymakers from writing regulations that harm the affected industries without gain.
Industries are not the only thing affected by policy, citizens are affected too.
Not harming industries often means harming normal people, and industries have a much stronger lobbying power than normal people,
Lobbying could be ok if every interaction with politicians were recorded and public, and if the money you have wouldn't matter on how easily you can reach the lawmakers.
If lobbying were illegal, lawmakers could inform their decisions by turning to independent experts, who provide some slightly more impartial information
Lobbyists are how companies talk to governments. If you believe that companies create value, then you should believe that companies should communicate with governments. It can help prevent low quality regulations from being pushed through.
Of course what they say should be validated and taken with appropriate weight. Companies are usually blinkered; they know a lot about their specialist area but aren't incentivized to consider collective action problems or externalities. Something similar can be said for every political interest group. Governing effectively means balancing everyone's interests.
> If you believe that companies create value, then you should believe that companies should communicate with governments
Sorry, you're going to have to prove that.
Companies are made up of people, and it's completely reasonable to assume that if people were allowed to have a voice within government, then they could also speak on behalf of their own interests, which will often coincide with that of the companies that they're involved with.
There's no reason to consider companies a separate entity that has its own power to communicate and many reasons not to do that.
> Ursula is basically a lobbyist without much expertise in anything.
She doesn't need to have any expertise, nobody can have deep expertise on everything. It's basically a politician job to have no clue and find reliable sources for an educated decision. And this usually fails hard on bleeding edge topics, because not many have an educated opinion at that point.
But as a side note, she did study something medical, so she does have some deeper expertise outside the political area.
> I think the whole EU should be reformed.
No reform can fix this problem. And always calling for reforms because of some detail not working how you want it is harmful.
Devs should not recommend rewrites until they have a workable plan on how to move forward without a rewrite, so they can compare the costs of rewrite vs. no rewrite.
> By living in a bubble, she became less knowledgeable on common matters that an average citizen
I would trust an average citizen in those matters even less. We are not talking here about the daily egg-prices or which is the hottest celebrity at the moment. That woman is the leader of the executive branch of a Pan-National Organization. This is by definition a job with problems, which are very far away from the daily dread of the average citizen.
> The proof at hand is the story of her landing in Plovdiv.
What are you talking about? Pretty sure she is not flying here own plane, nor making the technical decision when it lands. Whatever happened there, has no relation to whichever abilities she might have or is lacking.
The majority of HN readers would have immediately understood that such lies can be easily disproved.
That there was none around Ursula von der Leyen nor her press secretary to warn them about this is really worrying me.
Not only these ladies are clueless... the whole cabinet is probably as clueless as they are.
If you take time and watch that press conference, you'll notice something even more alarming. Podesta, the press secretary, uses the words front and frontline quite a lot and give the impression that they are already at war.
The EU comes with a whole range of flaws, that's true, but as far as I'm concerned it's still the best place to live in the world as far as personal freedom, quality of life, etc, go. Fixing the bad bits is important, yes, but you gotta be careful not to break too many of the good bits while you're doing it.
Couldn't agree more. As a European: Yes, there's a lot (and I mean A LOT!) of things that could be improved but for all that is bad, it could be much worse. Especially when you look around. There are only few countries I would permanently move to. Nearly all of them are European.
The lack of investment in AI, science, and research and development along with the inability to create a single market which was the promise of the EU is what undermines the EU.
I think originally the EU was conceived as a peace project and it succeeded so far in that. Some do not like how it evolves, some want the benefits of the market but not the rules that come with it. Ok, but at least nowadays the EU is promising more than just the market, for instance democratic standards, health regulation, social cohesion, addressing climate change.
I think it's not fair to pick the one thing that appeals to some group and say, this was their mission and they've lost track of what they exist for. I do not think this was ever the case and certainly isn't the case now.
Yes and they believed that the solution that would provide peace would be mixing their economies so they no longer competing directly and instead had a common market like the USA.
Which has slowly been happening the whole time the EU existed, no?
The difference between a single market like the USA, and the EU has much more to do with cultural and language barriers, at the same time different countries in the EU have found their niche in the common market, different countries have their own comparative advantages, and use that to supply other EU members much more easily than pre-EU.
Can you expand on the argument that the EU has failed as a single market? Quite curious to hear that perspective.
>“These are marketing statements driven by profit-motive and ideology rather than empirical evidence and formal proof,” the scientists write in the letter.
This statement itself seems ideological, born of upset at being left behind in the AI race by the US. AI is absolutely approaching general human cognitive ability and in many ways has already far surpassed it. Is passing the LSAT, SAT, proving a helpful research assistant to Terrence Tao, etc not proof enough?
Elsewhere in this discussion I see the point being made that to fight the supposedly irrational market is hopeless and the EU's wise and noble bureaucrats should stoop, however begrudgingly, to the exuberance of the US to win, but this is just the EU's fatal conceit speaking, the idea that it knows best and that its rationally structured and orchestrated policies are superior to the irrational and disorganized market. Perhaps AI is really delivering on the hype and the ludicrous valuations of today will seems reasonable in a few years time. We won't actually know until a few years actually pass and we have the luxury of hindsight. Until then, the EU should just let things happen and stop constantly getting in its own way.
I guess AI approaching human reasoning next year is probably not happening, depending on what you mean by 'approaching'. But I'm not sure about the scientists advice to "ensure you have the benefit of the necessary impartial scientific advice in future". Do the 'impartial scientists' know the date any better?
We need a european regulation of hype , and these scientists can form the exploratory committee that will select the candidates for the college of directors that will draft the guidelines of the new regulation
This is comical because we used to have something called the turing test which we considered our test of human-level intelligence. We never talk about it now because we obviously blew past it years ago.
There are some interesting ways in which AI remains inferior to human intelligence but it is also obviously already superior in many ways already.
It remains remarkable to me how common denial is when it comes to what AI can or cannot actually do.
There are also some interesting ways in which bicycles remain inferior to human locomotion but they are also obviously already superior in many ways already.
Still doesn't mean we should gamble the economies of whole continents on bike factories.
But common patterns of LLMs today will become adopted by humans as we are influenced linguistically by our interactions - which then makes it harder to detect LLM output.
I think it's that the issues are still so prevalent that people will justify poor arguments and reasons for being skeptical, because it matches their feelings, and articulating the actual problem is harder.
It's exactly the same as the literal Luddites, synthesizers, cameras, etc. The actual concern is economic: people don't want to be replaced.
But the arguments are couched in moral or quality terms for sympathy. Machine-knitted textiles are inferior to hand-made textiles. Synthesizers are inferior to live orchestras. Daguerreotypes are inferior to hand-painted portraits.
It's a form of intellectual insincerity, but it happens predictably with every major technological advance because people are scared.
I think it would ease some of my concerns, but wouldn't make me in the camp that believes it should be raced to without thinking about how to control it and plans in place to both identify and react to it's risks.
There are two doomsdays. The dramatic one where they control the military and we end up living in the matrix. And the less dramatic, where we as human forget how to do things for ourselves and then slowly watch the AIs become less and less capable of keeping us happy and alive. Maybe in the end of both scenarios it's similar but one would take decades, while the other could happen overnight.
Accuracy alone doesn't fix either doomsday scenario. But it would slow some of the issues I see forming already with people replacing research skills and informational reporting with AIs that can lie or be very misleading.
> We never talk about it now because we obviously blew past it years ago.
It's shocking to me that (as far as I know) no one has actually bothered to do a real Turing test with the best and newest LLMs. The Turing test is not whether a casual user can be momentarily confused about whether they are talking to a real person, or if a model can generate real-looking pieces of text. It's about a person seriously trying, for a fair amount of time, to distinguish between a chat they are having with another real person and an AI.
Q: Do you play chess?
A: Yes.
Q: I have K at my K1, and no other pieces. You have only K at K6 and R at R1.
It is your move. What do you play?
A: (After a pause of 15 seconds) R-R8 mate.
Try reading Turing's thesis before making that assertion, because the imitation game wasn't meant to measure a tipping point of any kind.
It's just a thought experiment to show that machines achieving human capabilities isn't proof that machines "think", then he argues against multiple interpretations of what machines "thinking" does even mean, to conclude that whether machines think or not is not worth discussing and their capabilities are what matters.
That is, the test has nothing to do with whether machines can reach human capabilities in the first place. Turing took for granted they eventually would.
> This is comical because we used to have something called the turing test
It didn't go anywhere.
> which we considered our test of human-level intelligence.
No, this is a strawman. Turing explicitly posits that the question "can machines think?" is ill-posed in the first place, and proposes the "imitation game" as something that can be studied meaningfully — without ascribing to it the sort of meaning commonly described in these arguments.
More precisely:
> The original question, "Can machines think?" I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion. Nevertheless I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.
----
> We never talk about it now because we obviously blew past it years ago.
No. We talk about it constantly, because AI proponents keep bringing it up fallaciously. Nothing like "obviously blowing past it years ago" actually happened; cited examples look nothing like the test actually described in Turing's paper. But this is still beside the point
> There are some interesting ways in which AI remains inferior to human intelligence but it is also obviously already superior in many ways already.
Computers were already obviously superior to humans in, for example, arithmetic, decades ago.
> It remains remarkable to me how common denial is when it comes to what AI can or cannot actually do.
It is not "denial" to point out your factual inaccuracies.
> We never talk about it now because we obviously blew past it years ago.
My Turing test has been the same since about when I learned it existed. I told myself I'd always use the same one.
What I do is after saying Hi, I will repeat the same sentence forever.
A human still reacts very differently than any machine to this test. Current AIs could be adversarially prompted to bypass this maybe, but so far it's still obvious its a machine replying.
"Hi there! I understand you're planning to repeat the same sentence. I'm here whenever you'd like to have a conversation about something else or if you change your mind. Feel free to share whatever's on your mind!"
I don't think I've ever imagined a human saying "I understand you're planning to repeat the same sentence", if you thought this was some kind of killer rebuke, I don't think it worked out the way you imagined- do you actually think that's a human-sounding response? To me it's got that same telltale sycophancy of a robot butler that I've come to expect from these consumer grade LLMs.
That's mostly because of the system prompt asking Claude to be a helpful assistant.
If you try with a human who works in a call center with that system prompt as instructions on how to answer calls, you will likely get a similar response.
But honestly, believe in whatever you wanna believe. I'm so sick of arguing with people online. Not gonna waste my time here anymore.
Maybe don't take such a maximalist interpretation of other people's comments, my point that it doesn't pass that test doesn’t mean it isn't extremely useful for many things. It's just that the test is undefined so I find it funny people say they truly cannot tell it's not a real person. I could've been more crass and said it also doesn’t reply to insults like a real person. There's so many ways in which it doesn't behave like a human, but it's still pretty useful.
What I read from your reply is that you adjoin the above statement with "and therefore they are useless" but there's no need to read it like that.
Anyway, many Europeans and European institutions are definitely contending indirectly on all kinds of sides, by holding equity of all those companies. ;)
The bigger risk to European credibility is surely from people parroting AI-skeptic rhetoric. Imagine if a bunch of vaccine skeptics or evolution skeptics signed a letter saying their leaders were over-hyping science... and if the language from that letter came directly from anti-science troll campaigns.
It doesn't make any positive claims other than a statement from a budget speech relied on marketing "driven by profit-motive and ideology" that are "manifestly bound with their financial imperatives". So exactly the same AI-skeptic line of attack that's currently being played out in forums and social media.
If you look at the signatories and randomly sample a few, it's a lot of people in social sciences, gender studies, cultural studies, branches of AI critique (e.g. AI safety), linguistics, and the occasional cognitive scientist. These aren't the people who have the technical expertise to evaluate the current state of AI, however impressive their credentials are in their own fields.
That doesn't make them incorrect, investors, media and even many developers have been duped by the impressive linguistic human mimikry that LLM's represent.
LLM/"AI" tools _will_ continue to revolutionize a lot of fields and make tons of glorified paper pushers jobless.
But they're not much closer to actual intelligence than they were 10 years ago, singluarity level upheavals that OpenAI,et al are valued on are still far away and people are beginning to notice.
Spending money today to buy heating elements for 2030 is mostly based on FOMO.
This is a different claim than what I was responding to, which is that the claim that the letter was based on science and common sense experts.
If you grant that it wasn't then we're in agreement, although your stating that people have been "duped" is somewhat begging the question.
At any rate, my goal here isn't to respond to every claim AI skeptics are making, only to point out that taking an anti-science view is more risky to Europe than a politician stating that AI will approach human reasoning in 2026. AI has already approached or surpassed human reasoning in many tasks so that's not a very controversial opinion for a politician to hold.
And it's a completely separate question from whether the market has valued future cash flows of AI companies too highly or whatever debates people want to have over the meaning of intelligence or AGI.
You're asserting that they're unscientific by sampling some random signatories.
Looking through the signatories a bit closer there's a bunch of comp-sci professors and phd's, some of them had been working directly with neural network based methods, bunch of other that are in adjacent fields related to speech systems I encountered during my studies that have been upended by neural networks so they should also have a fair grasp of what capabilities have been added over the years.
One of the papers listed in the letter you linked to does seem to cut directly to the argument that there's a correlation in the data LLM's store that give people an exaggerated view of AI's capabilities by successfully encoding knowledge data.
I do agree that we shouldn't base policy on unscientific claims, and that's the main crux, since Der Leyens's statements mostly seems to be parroting Altmans hype (and Altman is primarily an executive with a vested interest in keeping up the valuation of OpenAI to justify all the investments).
In those cases the correct term is "denialist". Skeptics care about evidence for or against the thing, and there is plenty of evidence in favor of skepticism about AI, unlike about vaccines or evolution.
Assistant Professor of Sustainability
Lecturer in Critical Intersectional Perspectives on AI
Professor of History and Anthropology
Assistant Professor of Gender and Diversity in AI
Professor of English Language and Literature
The first two people you mentioned co-wrote a paper titled "Towards decolonising computational sciences" and certainly anyone at DAIR would also be in that ideological cluster. I don't think an absolute majority of the signatories have those sorts of associations, but a good many do. What's puzzling me is why so many are Dutch?
From the first two of your cherrypicks' web pages:
I am committed to [...] the broader decolonisation of cognitive and computational sciences. My research interests comprise (meta)theoretical, critical, and radical perspectives on the neuro-, computational, and cognitive sciences broadly construed.
and
Central to my research is challenging and dismantling societal and historical inequalities and power asymmetries; holding responsible bodies accountable; and paving the way for a future marked by just and equitable AI systems that work for all.
“Usual types”: you included a history professor and an English professor, which are arguably better candidates for judging the quality/accuracy of LLM writing than a CS professor.
This is comical because economies have become totally divorced from hard reality and markets are now vibes-based.
Nvidia, Tesla, and Palantir (trading at 450 P/E!) are, among others, essentially meme stocks. But, for better or worse, the US economy is riding that wave.
The way to revive a moribund economy isn't to insist that markets must be rational and that hype should be tamped down. This never works, and I think that the rational market myth is dead. (You could make the case that BTC was the final nail in its coffin.) Instead, you've gotta find a way to ride the wave -- but wisely, so that you don't stand to lose too much if/when it slows or hits the breakers.
> ...that the rational market myth is dead.
Was there ever such myth? There is a quote attributed to John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946): "The markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."
I don't understand why Palantir is always thrown in with the AI bunch. Yes, they market products using AI. But their core business is products and consulting for surveillance. I'm bullish for Palantir because I'm bearish on freedom. All major democracies are turning into surveillance states. And von der Leyen is making sure EU does as well.
Yo, they're trading at 450 P/E. Enough said, really. Whatever's going on, it's plainly detached from physical reality -- nothing they sell or provide can possibly justify their valuation.
They are a boogeyman like Soros
It maybe it's because their value makes absolutely no sense.
> Instead, you've gotta find a way to ride the wave -- but wisely, so that you don't stand to lose too much if/when it slows or hits the breakers.
Care to elaborate? Are you talking about stop losses? Options?
The former is a form of market timing and hard to get right. The latter is complicated.
Imo just buy the entire market at your appropriate risk tolerance level.
The dilemma of leaders way behind is to find the right attack vector. Of course, you won't be able to become competitive by just "put more effort" into the existing stuff and hence everyone is eager to hope for a "Wunderwaffe" like flying taxis, quantum computing, blockchain, AI moonshots or whatever. In the end they all fail because the existing issues and problems won't be fixed, leading to the next failure. This happens over and over again, but voters still believe the promises of politicians.
Worse, there is a whole European industry sector hunting for subsidies doing build-to-fail projects, for example "google competitor", "European cloud" etc.
This competition is the solution, not the problem. Europe is what's left of western society after the US have completely lost it. My humble opinions, ofc.
I can agree in some ways but the issue remains (as an European) that our collective economies don't really grow anymore.
So there might be more competition, but it's either marginal, or it's to weak to compete with other international companies (like the once in China for example).
Why do they need to grow? Unlimited growth is normally classified as cancer. The only real need for growth is because of unsustainable economic practice.
> The only real need for growth is because of unsustainable economic practice.
Our whole retirement social system is based on growth.
Europe has been "stagnating" at about ~80% of American productivity levels for decades now. However, if your reference is growing and your ratio is roughly constant, that means you are growing too.
I don't mean compared to the US but in absolute GDP numbers.
States are more in more in debt and what was once a great social system in most EU countries is slowly moving to privatisation and higher costs like the US.
Most of the time one can't compete by mimicking. We lost on European cloud but European hosting has never been as strong.
We’ve seen a massive consolidation in hosting, domain, collocation and even B2B access providers in Germany. Some were sold to US companies, others are purchased and now owned by private equity companies. They are now centralized and based of existing revenue streams. Managed services are getting consolidated to reduce infra overhead but no new intellectual property or regionally optimized/local services are provided.
Ursula is basically a lobbyist without much expertise in anything.
So she just parrots about how great xyz is, then she dishes out taxpayer's money to this or that group - typically corporations.
I think the whole EU should be reformed. We don't need lobbyists really.
I'm not a fan of her either, but what do you actually expect?
Politicians are not generally domain specialists anywhere, their purpose is to make decisions and serve as a pretty face for some more or less coherent policy.
Lobbyism is very easy to complain about and can easily devolve into corruption, but it has a very clear purpose: To prevent policymakers from writing regulations that harm the affected industries without gain. This is especially necessary at the EU level, because the main purpose of that whole organisation is to lower trade barriers and regulatory friction-- lobbyists are somewhat helpful and necessary in that.
> I think the whole EU should be reformed
What would you suggest?
> What would you suggest?
Lenin once said that "Every cook should learn to govern the state."
And that's how we should do it. Random lottery, pretty much the same way we choose election assessors or jury members.
To prevent policymakers from writing regulations that harm the affected industries without gain
But where are the lobbyists that prevent policymakers from writing regulations that harm the affected citizens? Are they not entitled to adequate representation?
> where are the lobbyists that prevent policymakers from writing regulations that harm the affected citizens
Voting is there to keep incentives aligned with the population at large.
On specific issues, lobbying is also feasible for non-corporate entities; consider right-to-repair initiatives or pro-climate NGOs.
Unions and NGOs.
Could start by not having an unelected president who thinks she’s the queen of the continent.
> To prevent policymakers from writing regulations that harm the affected industries without gain.
Industries that cant comply to modern standards should be harmed. We dont need industries willing to pay lobbyists to keep fossil fuels alive for example.
> Industries that cant comply to modern standards should be harmed.
Those "modern standards" need to be codified into law, and feedback from established companies is valuable for doing that.
> We dont need industries willing to pay lobbyists to keep fossil fuels alive for example.
Those lobbyists represent the interests of a good portion of the economy. If you disregard their feedback, your risk damaging/destabilizing your economy for unclear gain, and the resulting backlash is going to more than undo any progress you made anyway.
> [...] feedback from established companies is valuable for doing that.
This is exactly what led us to fall behind in electric car development and construction.
It's the "unreasonable" rules that were unilaterally implemented that made car companies panic and finally start competing.
> Those lobbyists represent the interests of a good portion of the economy
No, they represent the interests of a few shareholders.
> It's the "unreasonable" rules that were unilaterally implemented that made car companies panic and finally start competing.
I believe the margin for effective regulation is much smaller than you think.
Sure, the EU could've mandated zero-emission vehicles from 2020 on in, say, 2010. But what would have happened? Carmakers would have made giant losses because their production facilities become worthless overnight (and laid off swathes of people); prices for vehicles and transport would've invariably gone through the roof and it is quite likely that the whole industry would have picked the "wrong" technology to bet on, like fuel cells, synthetic fuel or even hydrogen combustion.
Compare how much pushback you get in the general population against costly pro-climate policy already (very important to look past your own bubble on this!) and it seems clear to me that this would have failed competely (doing great economical damage, possibly a full-blown crisis), and would have probably been rolled back by the next election at the latest.
> Carmakers would have made giant losses because their production facilities become worthless overnight (and laid off swathes of people);
This is exactly what happened and is happening now. So 10 more years didn't prepare car maker better.
In fact the CEO of Stellantis was openly talking about how much of bad idea electric cars would be.
However, during those 10 years they managed to cheat on emissions measurements.
> it is quite likely that the whole industry would have picked the "wrong" technology to bet on, like fuel cells, synthetic fuel or even hydrogen combustion.
This also happened with so called bio-ethanol and Toyota's long standing and failed hydrogen bet.
> Compare how much pushback you get in the general population against costly pro-climate policy already
In Europe it's more a question of economics (like cost of electric cars for example) than a push back against pro-climate efforts themselves.
What is happening right now is that legacy carmakers have to compete harder because their core know-how lost value. That was somewhat inevitable, but banning/destroying that industry 10 years earlier would have hurt much more and would have been punished hard by voters.
> In Europe it's more a question of economics (like cost of electric cars for example) than a push back against pro-climate efforts themselves.
This is exactly my point- people don't like to suddenly pay more for the same just to avoid "climate debt" (and I'm willing to bet that your judgement on this is distorted, because most people in your bubble would accept some sacrifice for climate conservation, unlike the majority).
> Lobbyism is very easy to complain about and can easily devolve into corruption, but it has a very clear purpose: To prevent policymakers from writing regulations that harm the affected industries without gain.
Industries are not the only thing affected by policy, citizens are affected too.
Not harming industries often means harming normal people, and industries have a much stronger lobbying power than normal people,
Lobbying could be ok if every interaction with politicians were recorded and public, and if the money you have wouldn't matter on how easily you can reach the lawmakers.
If lobbying were illegal, lawmakers could inform their decisions by turning to independent experts, who provide some slightly more impartial information
The case of the EU Commissioner is particularly grating because she leads 500 million people without ever being subjected to an election.
Lobbyists are how companies talk to governments. If you believe that companies create value, then you should believe that companies should communicate with governments. It can help prevent low quality regulations from being pushed through.
Of course what they say should be validated and taken with appropriate weight. Companies are usually blinkered; they know a lot about their specialist area but aren't incentivized to consider collective action problems or externalities. Something similar can be said for every political interest group. Governing effectively means balancing everyone's interests.
> If you believe that companies create value, then you should believe that companies should communicate with governments
Sorry, you're going to have to prove that.
Companies are made up of people, and it's completely reasonable to assume that if people were allowed to have a voice within government, then they could also speak on behalf of their own interests, which will often coincide with that of the companies that they're involved with.
There's no reason to consider companies a separate entity that has its own power to communicate and many reasons not to do that.
> Ursula is basically a lobbyist without much expertise in anything.
She doesn't need to have any expertise, nobody can have deep expertise on everything. It's basically a politician job to have no clue and find reliable sources for an educated decision. And this usually fails hard on bleeding edge topics, because not many have an educated opinion at that point.
But as a side note, she did study something medical, so she does have some deeper expertise outside the political area.
> I think the whole EU should be reformed.
No reform can fix this problem. And always calling for reforms because of some detail not working how you want it is harmful.
"I think the whole EU should be reformed" reads exactly like a junior dev demanding a full rewrite from scratch.
Sometimes you have to rewrite from scratch when the original is broken beyond repair and institutional knowledge is lost.
A young dev may have an easier time seeing this.
Devs should not recommend rewrites until they have a workable plan on how to move forward without a rewrite, so they can compare the costs of rewrite vs. no rewrite.
> She doesn't need to have any expertise
By living in a bubble, she became less knowledgeable on common matters than an average citizen, and this even extends to her cabinet.
The proof at hand is the story of her "GPS-jammed" landing in Plovdiv.
She lied, her press secretary lied and there was none around to tell them about ADS-B, FlightRadar24 and how these lies can be trivially verified.
> By living in a bubble, she became less knowledgeable on common matters that an average citizen
I would trust an average citizen in those matters even less. We are not talking here about the daily egg-prices or which is the hottest celebrity at the moment. That woman is the leader of the executive branch of a Pan-National Organization. This is by definition a job with problems, which are very far away from the daily dread of the average citizen.
> The proof at hand is the story of her landing in Plovdiv.
What are you talking about? Pretty sure she is not flying here own plane, nor making the technical decision when it lands. Whatever happened there, has no relation to whichever abilities she might have or is lacking.
> What are you talking about?
Sorry for not being specific enough. I am talking about the "GPS jamming" of the plane that she flew to Plovdiv 31 August 2025.
Here are the fake news by Ursula von der Leyen press secretary at the morning briefing next day: https://audiovisual.ec.europa.eu/en/media/video/I-276341
Here FlightRadar24 publishing the facts: https://twitter.com/flightradar24/status/1962565122326700178
Here is the parliamentary question that asks why EU Commission was spreading fake news: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/O-10-2025-0000...
The majority of HN readers would have immediately understood that such lies can be easily disproved.
That there was none around Ursula von der Leyen nor her press secretary to warn them about this is really worrying me.
Not only these ladies are clueless... the whole cabinet is probably as clueless as they are.
If you take time and watch that press conference, you'll notice something even more alarming. Podesta, the press secretary, uses the words front and frontline quite a lot and give the impression that they are already at war.
The EU comes with a whole range of flaws, that's true, but as far as I'm concerned it's still the best place to live in the world as far as personal freedom, quality of life, etc, go. Fixing the bad bits is important, yes, but you gotta be careful not to break too many of the good bits while you're doing it.
Couldn't agree more. As a European: Yes, there's a lot (and I mean A LOT!) of things that could be improved but for all that is bad, it could be much worse. Especially when you look around. There are only few countries I would permanently move to. Nearly all of them are European.
She's also 67 by now, which is the regular retirement age in Germany. Can we just get rid of all the old people in positions of power... ?
It's happening over and over again that old people decide on things that mess up the younger generations.
The lack of investment in AI, science, and research and development along with the inability to create a single market which was the promise of the EU is what undermines the EU.
I think originally the EU was conceived as a peace project and it succeeded so far in that. Some do not like how it evolves, some want the benefits of the market but not the rules that come with it. Ok, but at least nowadays the EU is promising more than just the market, for instance democratic standards, health regulation, social cohesion, addressing climate change.
I think it's not fair to pick the one thing that appeals to some group and say, this was their mission and they've lost track of what they exist for. I do not think this was ever the case and certainly isn't the case now.
Yes and they believed that the solution that would provide peace would be mixing their economies so they no longer competing directly and instead had a common market like the USA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Rome
Which has slowly been happening the whole time the EU existed, no?
The difference between a single market like the USA, and the EU has much more to do with cultural and language barriers, at the same time different countries in the EU have found their niche in the common market, different countries have their own comparative advantages, and use that to supply other EU members much more easily than pre-EU.
Can you expand on the argument that the EU has failed as a single market? Quite curious to hear that perspective.
Absolutely. Overregulation as well. But the lack of investment is the main factor.
>“These are marketing statements driven by profit-motive and ideology rather than empirical evidence and formal proof,” the scientists write in the letter.
This statement itself seems ideological, born of upset at being left behind in the AI race by the US. AI is absolutely approaching general human cognitive ability and in many ways has already far surpassed it. Is passing the LSAT, SAT, proving a helpful research assistant to Terrence Tao, etc not proof enough?
Elsewhere in this discussion I see the point being made that to fight the supposedly irrational market is hopeless and the EU's wise and noble bureaucrats should stoop, however begrudgingly, to the exuberance of the US to win, but this is just the EU's fatal conceit speaking, the idea that it knows best and that its rationally structured and orchestrated policies are superior to the irrational and disorganized market. Perhaps AI is really delivering on the hype and the ludicrous valuations of today will seems reasonable in a few years time. We won't actually know until a few years actually pass and we have the luxury of hindsight. Until then, the EU should just let things happen and stop constantly getting in its own way.
LLM-s are definitely not intelligent. The market is definitely irrational. The hype is insane.
I guess AI approaching human reasoning next year is probably not happening, depending on what you mean by 'approaching'. But I'm not sure about the scientists advice to "ensure you have the benefit of the necessary impartial scientific advice in future". Do the 'impartial scientists' know the date any better?
We need a european regulation of hype , and these scientists can form the exploratory committee that will select the candidates for the college of directors that will draft the guidelines of the new regulation
This is comical because we used to have something called the turing test which we considered our test of human-level intelligence. We never talk about it now because we obviously blew past it years ago.
There are some interesting ways in which AI remains inferior to human intelligence but it is also obviously already superior in many ways already.
It remains remarkable to me how common denial is when it comes to what AI can or cannot actually do.
There are also some interesting ways in which bicycles remain inferior to human locomotion but they are also obviously already superior in many ways already.
Still doesn't mean we should gamble the economies of whole continents on bike factories.
I'm half joking but people who can't tell which side of a chat is an LLM aren't conscious
You are absolutely right!
But common patterns of LLMs today will become adopted by humans as we are influenced linguistically by our interactions - which then makes it harder to detect LLM output.
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This is an artifact of RLHF and far better human facsimiles are trivial with uncensored / jailbroken models.
I think it's that the issues are still so prevalent that people will justify poor arguments and reasons for being skeptical, because it matches their feelings, and articulating the actual problem is harder.
It's exactly the same as the literal Luddites, synthesizers, cameras, etc. The actual concern is economic: people don't want to be replaced.
But the arguments are couched in moral or quality terms for sympathy. Machine-knitted textiles are inferior to hand-made textiles. Synthesizers are inferior to live orchestras. Daguerreotypes are inferior to hand-painted portraits.
It's a form of intellectual insincerity, but it happens predictably with every major technological advance because people are scared.
I don't completely disagree. But it's incorrect to claim that there's nothing but fear of losing jobs at the heart of the AI concern.
I think a lot of people like myself are concerned with how dependent we are becoming so quickly on something with limited accuracy and accountability.
Would your concerns be lessened or heightened if AI was more accurate? The doomsday scenario was always a highly competent AI like Skynet.
I think it would ease some of my concerns, but wouldn't make me in the camp that believes it should be raced to without thinking about how to control it and plans in place to both identify and react to it's risks.
There are two doomsdays. The dramatic one where they control the military and we end up living in the matrix. And the less dramatic, where we as human forget how to do things for ourselves and then slowly watch the AIs become less and less capable of keeping us happy and alive. Maybe in the end of both scenarios it's similar but one would take decades, while the other could happen overnight.
Accuracy alone doesn't fix either doomsday scenario. But it would slow some of the issues I see forming already with people replacing research skills and informational reporting with AIs that can lie or be very misleading.
> We never talk about it now because we obviously blew past it years ago.
It's shocking to me that (as far as I know) no one has actually bothered to do a real Turing test with the best and newest LLMs. The Turing test is not whether a casual user can be momentarily confused about whether they are talking to a real person, or if a model can generate real-looking pieces of text. It's about a person seriously trying, for a fair amount of time, to distinguish between a chat they are having with another real person and an AI.
Q: Do you play chess? A: Yes. Q: I have K at my K1, and no other pieces. You have only K at K6 and R at R1. It is your move. What do you play? A: (After a pause of 15 seconds) R-R8 mate.
A:I don’t know chess notation
Try reading Turing's thesis before making that assertion, because the imitation game wasn't meant to measure a tipping point of any kind.
It's just a thought experiment to show that machines achieving human capabilities isn't proof that machines "think", then he argues against multiple interpretations of what machines "thinking" does even mean, to conclude that whether machines think or not is not worth discussing and their capabilities are what matters.
That is, the test has nothing to do with whether machines can reach human capabilities in the first place. Turing took for granted they eventually would.
> This is comical because we used to have something called the turing test
It didn't go anywhere.
> which we considered our test of human-level intelligence.
No, this is a strawman. Turing explicitly posits that the question "can machines think?" is ill-posed in the first place, and proposes the "imitation game" as something that can be studied meaningfully — without ascribing to it the sort of meaning commonly described in these arguments.
More precisely:
> The original question, "Can machines think?" I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion. Nevertheless I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.
----
> We never talk about it now because we obviously blew past it years ago.
No. We talk about it constantly, because AI proponents keep bringing it up fallaciously. Nothing like "obviously blowing past it years ago" actually happened; cited examples look nothing like the test actually described in Turing's paper. But this is still beside the point
> There are some interesting ways in which AI remains inferior to human intelligence but it is also obviously already superior in many ways already.
Computers were already obviously superior to humans in, for example, arithmetic, decades ago.
> It remains remarkable to me how common denial is when it comes to what AI can or cannot actually do.
It is not "denial" to point out your factual inaccuracies.
> We never talk about it now because we obviously blew past it years ago.
My Turing test has been the same since about when I learned it existed. I told myself I'd always use the same one.
What I do is after saying Hi, I will repeat the same sentence forever.
A human still reacts very differently than any machine to this test. Current AIs could be adversarially prompted to bypass this maybe, but so far it's still obvious its a machine replying.
What would you expect a human to reply?
And after you have answered that question. Try Claude Sonnet 4.5.
What is Claude Sonnet 4.5's reply?
Is this an ad for Claude Sonnet 4.5?
No, this is Claude Sonnet 4.5 recalibrating its response.
I decided to put this to the test.
What I would expect a human to reply:
"Um... OK?"
What Claude Sonnet 4.5 replied:
"Hi there! I understand you're planning to repeat the same sentence. I'm here whenever you'd like to have a conversation about something else or if you change your mind. Feel free to share whatever's on your mind!"
I don't think I've ever imagined a human saying "I understand you're planning to repeat the same sentence", if you thought this was some kind of killer rebuke, I don't think it worked out the way you imagined- do you actually think that's a human-sounding response? To me it's got that same telltale sycophancy of a robot butler that I've come to expect from these consumer grade LLMs.
That's mostly because of the system prompt asking Claude to be a helpful assistant.
If you try with a human who works in a call center with that system prompt as instructions on how to answer calls, you will likely get a similar response.
But honestly, believe in whatever you wanna believe. I'm so sick of arguing with people online. Not gonna waste my time here anymore.
Maybe don't take such a maximalist interpretation of other people's comments, my point that it doesn't pass that test doesn’t mean it isn't extremely useful for many things. It's just that the test is undefined so I find it funny people say they truly cannot tell it's not a real person. I could've been more crass and said it also doesn’t reply to insults like a real person. There's so many ways in which it doesn't behave like a human, but it's still pretty useful.
What I read from your reply is that you adjoin the above statement with "and therefore they are useless" but there's no need to read it like that.
>obviously already superior in many ways already.
And yet you didn't bother to provide a single obvious example.
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Statement (as silly/naive as it is) might hold more weight if Europe was even a contender in the race.
The race for AGI or which race?
Anyway, many Europeans and European institutions are definitely contending indirectly on all kinds of sides, by holding equity of all those companies. ;)
Can we question her about other stuff as well? Like taking gigantic loans to bailout foreign neutral countries?!
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Get out of here.
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Hello new account who exclusively drops RT-style political commentary, glad to have you!
You're projecting comrade.
If EU was not overhyping then there would be nothing positive ever.
You are absolutely right, bro. https://i.imgur.com/nb8dNzi.jpeg
The bigger risk to European credibility is surely from people parroting AI-skeptic rhetoric. Imagine if a bunch of vaccine skeptics or evolution skeptics signed a letter saying their leaders were over-hyping science... and if the language from that letter came directly from anti-science troll campaigns.
That's not making any sense as it presumes the arguments here are not based on science and common sense of experts, which is not the case.
The letter is not based on science and common sense of experts.
You can read the letter here https://www.iccl.ie/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/20251110_Scie...
It doesn't make any positive claims other than a statement from a budget speech relied on marketing "driven by profit-motive and ideology" that are "manifestly bound with their financial imperatives". So exactly the same AI-skeptic line of attack that's currently being played out in forums and social media.
If you look at the signatories and randomly sample a few, it's a lot of people in social sciences, gender studies, cultural studies, branches of AI critique (e.g. AI safety), linguistics, and the occasional cognitive scientist. These aren't the people who have the technical expertise to evaluate the current state of AI, however impressive their credentials are in their own fields.
That doesn't make them incorrect, investors, media and even many developers have been duped by the impressive linguistic human mimikry that LLM's represent.
LLM/"AI" tools _will_ continue to revolutionize a lot of fields and make tons of glorified paper pushers jobless.
But they're not much closer to actual intelligence than they were 10 years ago, singluarity level upheavals that OpenAI,et al are valued on are still far away and people are beginning to notice.
Spending money today to buy heating elements for 2030 is mostly based on FOMO.
This is a different claim than what I was responding to, which is that the claim that the letter was based on science and common sense experts.
If you grant that it wasn't then we're in agreement, although your stating that people have been "duped" is somewhat begging the question.
At any rate, my goal here isn't to respond to every claim AI skeptics are making, only to point out that taking an anti-science view is more risky to Europe than a politician stating that AI will approach human reasoning in 2026. AI has already approached or surpassed human reasoning in many tasks so that's not a very controversial opinion for a politician to hold.
And it's a completely separate question from whether the market has valued future cash flows of AI companies too highly or whatever debates people want to have over the meaning of intelligence or AGI.
You're asserting that they're unscientific by sampling some random signatories.
Looking through the signatories a bit closer there's a bunch of comp-sci professors and phd's, some of them had been working directly with neural network based methods, bunch of other that are in adjacent fields related to speech systems I encountered during my studies that have been upended by neural networks so they should also have a fair grasp of what capabilities have been added over the years.
One of the papers listed in the letter you linked to does seem to cut directly to the argument that there's a correlation in the data LLM's store that give people an exaggerated view of AI's capabilities by successfully encoding knowledge data.
I do agree that we shouldn't base policy on unscientific claims, and that's the main crux, since Der Leyens's statements mostly seems to be parroting Altmans hype (and Altman is primarily an executive with a vested interest in keeping up the valuation of OpenAI to justify all the investments).
In those cases the correct term is "denialist". Skeptics care about evidence for or against the thing, and there is plenty of evidence in favor of skepticism about AI, unlike about vaccines or evolution.
We find the usual types in the signatory list:
(From https://www.iccl.ie/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/20251110_Scie... - to be fair I cherrypicked these.)I'll counter your cherrypick with my own:
Dr. Olivia Guest, Assistant Professor of Computational Cognitive Science
Dr. Abeba Birhane, Assistant Professor of AI
Prof. Iris van Rooij, Professor of Computational Cognitive Science
Prof. Dr. Dagmar Monett, Director of Computer Science Dept., Professor of Computer Science (AI, Software Engineering)
Dr. Alex Hanna, Director of Research, DAIR
Roel Dobbe, Assistant Professor of Public Interest AI and Algorithmic Systems
Dr. Mark Blokpoel, Assistant Professor of Computational Cognitive Science
Dr. Dan McQuillan, Senior Lecturer in Critical AI
Dr. Ronald de Haan, Assistant professor of Artificial Intelligence
Joost Vossers, PhD Candidate on Artificial Intelligence
Dr Esther Mondragón, Senior Lecturer in Artificial Intelligence
Prof Eduardo Alonso, Professor of Artificial Intelligence
Dr. Andrea E. Martin, Research Group Leader, Language and Computation in Neural System
Dr. ir. Gabriel Bucur, Assistant Professor in Statistical Machine Learning and Explainable AI for Health
Prof. M. Dingemanse, Professor of Language and Communication & cofounder, EU Open Source AI Index
All of these people definitely stand to very much directly benefit from AI hype.
The first two people you mentioned co-wrote a paper titled "Towards decolonising computational sciences" and certainly anyone at DAIR would also be in that ideological cluster. I don't think an absolute majority of the signatories have those sorts of associations, but a good many do. What's puzzling me is why so many are Dutch?
From the first two of your cherrypicks' web pages:
I am committed to [...] the broader decolonisation of cognitive and computational sciences. My research interests comprise (meta)theoretical, critical, and radical perspectives on the neuro-, computational, and cognitive sciences broadly construed.
and
Central to my research is challenging and dismantling societal and historical inequalities and power asymmetries; holding responsible bodies accountable; and paving the way for a future marked by just and equitable AI systems that work for all.
Notice a theme?
“Usual types”: you included a history professor and an English professor, which are arguably better candidates for judging the quality/accuracy of LLM writing than a CS professor.
This is really cherry-picked as you call out. Plenty of computer science related signatories as well.
And besides, a professor of e.g Anthropology can still advocate for critical thinking and evaluating claims.
what's the point of this comment? you just wanted to share your disdain for these titles?
I disdain this type of comment. It's (ironically?) deeply anti-intellectual. Its only purpose is to suppress thoughts.
did you mean to leave this under your own comment?