If "70% of Canadian exports are to the US", that's probably why the US has so much leverage, and I can see why the Canadian government would like a change.
Hence the need for a rebalancing of trade partnerships.
I'd like to take a closer look at what exactly Canada is exporting to the US, and what exactly the EU is importing from elsewhere, to see if there's a match. I'd rather buy from Canada than from Russia. Or China. Or the US.
You know how despite climate change being very real, in day to day discussions with other level headed people, they still very regularly say stuff like
"We ran the numbers for an EV, and right now gas is still cheaper, so we are holding off on the switch until it makes financial sense"
Canadian oil would need to be shipped halfway around the world. It would be more expensive. Price is always the top factor for everyone.
The politically-important Alberta oil mostly goes to the mountain states down here. Coincidentally, those same states rely heaviest on coal for electricity. So, the choice is recharge an EV on coal (think arsenic and mercury accumulating somewhere nearby) or good ol gasoline (which is piped from Canada).
Fair point. What we really need of course is more renewables, and that is happening, but not fast enough, so we still need oil. And I'd rather get our oil in a way that doesn't fuel the Russian war machine, even if it does cost a bit more.
I’m sure China would, too. I wonder what’s harder: diverting that oil to the northwest passage, or diverting Persian Gulf oil around the strait of Hormuz?
Right… so why do you think the US imposed tariffs? Germany is already seeing gigantic problems via declining exports because of China. Are they going to stop exports to the United States too?
The EU can’t add any more “trade bazooka” than it already has. Canada doesn’t change anything in that dynamic.
That's rich considering it was France and the UK that threw Poland under the bus despite having a signed defense pact. The US just came in to clean up the mess.
WW2 ended with Yalta conference where Roosevelt agreed to Stalin's proposition of giving Poland to USSR's sphere of influence, making Poland (and rest of EE) their puppet state.
Churchil wanted to pressure Stalin to leave Poland (and at least parts of EE) independent and even considered "Operation Unthinkable".
At least that's what I think the guy above referenced.
That's pretty much what happened. Trouble was the stakes were already high, if Starlin didn't yield to a bluff (had one been pursued) it would have been an embarrassing backdown and a show of weakness on part of the allies.
"Bluff" because no one other than perhaps Stalin would have followed through—to essentially extend WWII (this time between former allies).
So pragmatism was the order of the day, thus Poland and EE were sacrificed.
In 1960, 75% of Ireland's exports went to the UK, and 50% of its imports came from there. By 2000, it was 35% imports, 25% exports. Today it is 20% imports, 8% exports. There are a few things going on here, but a lot of it was EU membership giving Ireland options beyond its 'natural' trade partner (and then the big drop from 2000 to now was mostly Brexit).
Being in a situation where 70% of your exports go to one country is arguably pretty unhealthy; that is something that Canada would do well to work towards reducing, even _if_ the US administration wasn't openly hostile.
Exports are really easy to move and replace, as has been proven again and again in the past two years. Turns out that imports can be far trickier and pose larger problems to an economy.
Polish export to US is about 3% of its total export and import - about 5% of Poland's total import. Not much to lose, honestly. We trade more with Czech Republic.
Polish export to EU is 74% of its total export and import is about 60% of its total import.
Economically - whatever's good for EU is good for Poland and US barely matters.
What about the importance of that trade. The US exports a lot of critical things that cannot be supplied from elsewhere. Everyone is heavily reliant on American technology.
I’ve always been told don’t let perfect be the enemy of good, and the journey of 1000 miles starts with a single step.
The lesson here is that you can’t rely on the US anymore. Not for military protection, not for defence procurement, and not for trade or supply chain. That legacy has ended entirely by choice of the United States.
The problem has moved beyond monetary trade value and into existential risk.
Remember International Criminal Court sanctioned for investigating Israeli and American role in the crimes being committed on the Palestinian territory?
Or sanctioned Francesca Albanese, a UN Special Rapporteur, for her work related to human rights abuses in the Palestine.
She can't have bank account (or other financial product), own a property or work in many sectors in countries holding meaningful bilateral relationships with the USA.
The hardware is produced in Asia but American controlled. its still a dependency on being supplied by American companies.
"Only services" covers a lot of critically important things. Clouds services and payment systems, for example. Even just one American company like AWS could turn off a huge chunk of European economies.
Yes, but services are easier to replace than hardware. And control is something you have, and then you don't have if the country in which you operate decides otherwise (or US presidents throws another tantrum).
Companies use AWS because it is there and others used it, so they got ball rolling. It doesn't mean one couldn't replace it with another service, most probably more pricey one. If there would be some kind of war, then one doesn't need to have servers in US, and European ones are right there.
You can't easily replace e.g. lithium or other metals.
Fuel is problematic, but there are places that are closer that could sell them (middle east, if we ignore current Russian state of mind).
As for machinery, it is hard to guess what kind. Germany produces a lot of it, and I would guess China also.
Not sure about pharmaceuticals.
Generally US is not our greatest import partner, China is. And we have a big internal market also.
After decades of globalization, everyone is just extremely dependent on everyone.
I think hardware is a bit complicated by the way. A lot of hardware is also not US controlled. For instance ARM Holdings is British, Japanese, or global depending on how you look at it and quite a lot of vendors rely on ARM's reference designs. Europe also has a lot of important chip designers, but they are more focused on embedded systems and support chips, like NXP and ST Microelectronics.
"Only services" covers a lot of critically important things. Clouds services and payment systems, for example. Even just one American company like AWS could turn off a huge chunk of European economies.
Why European governments and increasingly companies are trying to move away to European alternatives. It all starts small, but e.g. a bunch of governments are already disentangling from Office. The sale of the maintainer of the Dutch DigiD infrastructure to a US company has been blocked (would have happened without any blockers a few years ago). Countries are reducing US arms purchases in favor of European alternatives.
It's like turning a mammoth tanker, but it is slowly happening.
Let's just hope we have critical mass before the right-wing populists take over, big tech has been intensively lobbying them in recent years [1]. So much 'for the people', like they always proclaim.
Arm is important, but for R & D. The impact of not having Arm will take a long time to be felt. The same for a lot of the others you mention. Not having a supply or Intel and AMD CPUs would be felt much faster and would be harder to find replacements for.
> It's like turning a mammoth tanker, but it is slowly happening.
Is it really happening? As has been mentioned on HN multiple times the EU's age verification app will only run on American controlled devices. Some countries are moving some things away from US suppliers, buts its very much one step forward then two steps back.
> Let's just hope we have critical mass before the right-wing populists take over, big tech has been intensively lobbying them in recent years
Unfortunately, not only them. As the article says the existing European Commission is already going in the direction big tech want, just not as far. The current British government (a historically left wing party) has also been cosying up to big tech. One of the organisations mentioned in your link has a lot of info on EU lobbying in general: https://corporateeurope.org/index%2Ephp/en/lobbying-the-eu
Arm is important, but for R & D. The impact of not having Arm will take a long time to be felt. The same for a lot of the others you mention. Not having a supply or Intel and AMD CPUs would be felt much faster and would be harder to find replacements for.
ARM doesn't just do R&D, they design full CPU cores. Until recently, Qualcomm's cores were ARM's reference design with their own extensions on top. It's only since Oryon that their CPUs are more dependent (the tech was acquired through their Nuvia acquisition).
> Whether they have a soul or consciousness or feelings doesn't matter here
It does when it comes to accountability for what the model does. If the model is nothing more than the sum of its training data and regime, then the company (or individual) is responsible for its behaviour just like any other machine.
Few people think Waymo shouldn't have to take on the full liability risk of what it's cars do; it should be the same for LLMs.
> If the model is nothing more than the sum of its training data and regime, then the company is responsible for its behaviour.
What stops the company from being responsible regardless? They created this entity, it's running on servers they own or rent, and (in these cases) it's acting on their instructions.
If it's also conscious, then IMO that greatly broadens their moral responsibility, because now model welfare matters. But we're talking about their responsibility for the model's actions, and I don't see how this could be weakened by model consciousness, given all of the above. As for their legal responsibility, the models don't have legal personhood, so who else but the company could be responsible?
It gets more complicated when the person who sets the model in motion (i.e. prompts it) is a third party, but in cases of internal models committing cybercrime during testing, surely the locus of responsibility is obvious.
They are responsible either way. If a company hires bad persons and they do bad things with company ressources - the company is held accountable (in theory).
As is generally the case for dog owners whose dogs attack (sometimes kill) other people/animals. There would need to be a degree of negligence demonstrated (e.g. the dog was 'out of control' which has a specific legal criteria/threshold in the UK).
Extreme temperature levels (>2.0) can push a GPT of its manifold, essentially producing predictions barely distinguishable from random noise (it flattens the probability distribution of the next token). In theory this could predict anything including the next field of mathematics (infinite monkey theorem) but realistically that would never happen.
However, how to we know the next field of mathematics isn't a novel combinations of several other sub-fields? That level of mathematics would be indistinguishable from magic to most people and so in their eyes the GPT did something truly inventive.
You're suggesting that LLMs get better at fixing bugs/vulnerabilities, but at the same time stop getting better at finding them? What if this difference is inherent and essential?
Absolutely not. By most accounts they're terrible at fixing anything other than trivial bugs in complex codebases e.g. Linux kernel, but they're much better at finding them.
Manual testing, and making sure that the AI didn't create so many bugs.
But, to the underlying question, obviously as we automate more and more of our work, of course we provide less and less value. We're heading towards a future where selling thought for money isn't going to work so well.
> The next problem is making the models efficient enough to run a profitable business.
In that world, what does Oracle do with a bunch of data centres which 1. It needs to pay for and 2. nobody needs. This is what the article is about: building supply far in advance of demand.
I don't know, but unless that contract is public, not many people know. I get the impression Oracle got a little bit of market pushback on the risk, as theirs seems to be one of the largest.
What contract? It's mostly corporate debt. Seems pretty plain and simple to me.
The contracts I guess you're talking about are compute obligations which frontier labs have. I don't need to know what those obligations are to know what happens to Oracle.
GPUs depreciate at a far, far faster rate than houses do. And then they need to be replaced. Who's paying for that? OpenAI and Anthropic don't even have positive free cash flow.
I think OpenAI's opportunity is ai first hardware; I mean, the consumer is Google, simply because the distribution and the product are perfect. Enterprise is much better with AI; I do not see any AI-first enterprise companies succeeding in the long run.
It doesn't matter what the valuation is, they won't raise the money to meet their procurement commitments without circular financing. Why would a sovereign wealth fund step in to meet those commitments?
The financials of OpenAI make no sense at all unless you're a True Believer.
A similar metaphor (I think I came up with but can't remember) is the slop sandwich. You can deliver slop to me but only when wrapped in a thick layer of human intervention (which usually also means removing 50% of the slop)
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