>Whereas our coverage of your political system is such that anyone with a passing interest in politics can _really_ get into it on US politics; it's a very asymmmetric experience that is hard to explain.
I don't share your enthusiasm in this being a good thing. In fact, this is a common problem I've noticed over the last decade in that Europeans feel like they know the US and are qualified to comment on issues by virtue of consuming movies and political media of a certain spin (like all media). You are simply consuming someone's opinion with little to no opportunity to validate it against day to day life.
But this time round in particular, it is absolutely a thing. People in Denmark, for example, have no choice but to understand at some level the internal cabinet politics of the USA. Because they need to know, when JD Vance turns up, who is he actually talking for? What does it mean if he refuses to rule something out? What real power is there in his confidence?
It's the same as needing to know, if Biden offered something, what was the likelihood of it simply being torn up by a returning Trump.
The asymmetry comes from scale: the UK and individual EU countries needed to know a lot more about the internal directions of a country six times our size, because those internal directions will very much affect us.
It is changing, because the EU is finding its collective voice this time round, whereas in Trump 1 they still had to worry that individual countries might not wish to follow a party line. Now everyone understands the stakes of not having an aligned voice, and the UK is in a position to at least sing the harmony.
You have a literal king, so maybe you shouldn't criticize them lest the coppers show up at your doorstep. Our "king" was democratically elected and has so little power he can't even organize a birthday party as you say, let alone do anything else.
> so maybe you shouldn't criticize them lest the coppers show up at your doorstep.
Not sure what you imagine the UK is like but we literally don't have lèse majesté laws, so there is no legal basis for that to happen. It does not happen. (And no, merely saying it online isn't a basis either).
Apart from stupid comedy overreactions at the coronation protests that exasperated us all and saw significant pushback (our police lean so firmly against use of force at protests that they sometimes do silly things in the name of stopping "disruption"), we have a rich, varied, centuries-long tradition of being able to soundly criticise our monarchy.
Indeed we did so with such efficiency recently that our king actually listened and took his own brother's title, powers and roles away.
Meanwhile there are people in the USA fighting lawsuits over being falsely imprisoned for saying true things about Charlie Kirk.
You're arguing with people who don't understand the word Parliament in the term "Parliamentary Democracy". Just nod, tut, and move on, it will be better for your mental health.
Funnily enough I am OK about this stuff, these days.
It would be absurd to pretend that we don't have problems; we obviously have problems. And things are extremely bad right now, especially with our former transatlantic friends actively agitating the situation.
But internationally it has got a lot easier to see our problems with clarity in the last year and a half, and a lot easier to argue that every significant country has its difficulties.
Sure, there is a guy with a title of King, but this isn't some medieval fairytale ruler. The British monarchy has effectively zero power over the country and its population and are simply there for historical reasons and to continue making the country a rather lovely tourist destination.
The monarchy simultaneously has zero power and all the power.
In the sense that it is the entity in whose name the government acts on behalf of the people: it's the representation of the state.
In principle, the monarch could refuse royal assent. In practice, if it did, the entire unwritten constitutional convention that preserves it would collapse.
So in practice, the monarch is the head of state in the same way that the Irish or Israeli presidencies are: it's non-executive, with relatively little indirect influence. "My government will" means "the government will". A formality.
As the article explains, Queen’s/King’s consent is a parliamentary decision. It is part of the balance struck; consent is always granted. If it were not, it would trigger a constitutional crisis.
This is somewhat like asking your girlfriend’s parents for permission to ask her to marry you. You are going to do it anyway; they cannot stop you. They do, however, have a bit more life experience than you and that discussion might be valuable, and it is literally tradition to ask; the process allows you to consider and discuss that things have lifelong consequences and more.
In the case of the late queen, prime ministers appeared to enjoy and value the opportunity to talk completely privately with someone who had more experience of the process than anyone else.
Is it eccentric, nuanced and odd, yes. Does it sometimes give the monarch a little time to digest changes to the royal finances or rattle on about tradition, or bend their PM’s ear about how an equerry was shadily wheel-clamped in a Windsor pub car park, yes. Could it be seriously corrupted by the monarch, maybe. Has it been? I kind of doubt it. Again, there are no lèse majesté laws. We can critique the process and prime ministers have.
Power is complicated. The British monarchy as representation of the state holds it in a form directed by government, but as they are people, they have the right to understand what they are doing. This is a balance struck over almost a thousand years.
Would I prefer a republic, yeah. Do I think our next king wonders how long the monarchy has in its current form, yes. But I think we will get to a republic over the next hundred years, shrinking the monarchy progressively in the way that other european countries have.
All of this nuance tends to confuse or annoy Americans and provoke romantic chest-beating about the power being vested in “we the people” etc. But I would contend that a lack of cultural understanding about the complexity of wielding power, and how it can be used against itself, is why the USA is in the situation it is in right now. Power is complicated and amoral; using it right is a matter of conventions as much as convictions.
The gap is nowhere near that large when controlling for the difference in demographics. Despite that, America is undeniably obese which is easily the largest factor contributing to life expectancy.
Preventative interventions can; preventing obesity falls under the purview of healthcare departments like the NHS.
But neither private insurance nor hospitals have any incentive to operate preventatively because insurance can just increase premiums and everybody happily makes more money... Some might observe how that also increases the GDP...
The USA doesn't do much of that though. It prefers medical care.
(E.g., adding a dose-dependent sin tax on food-like substances with added sugar, subsidizing real food for those on SNAP. Unpopular because who doesn't want their simple carbs?)
They don't want to, any more than someone who steps into traffic carelessly wants to have a broken hip (albeit on a different time scale). That's a stunningly paternalistic view.
I dont think the people in mississippi who are fat want to have diets that are comparable to french ones. I also think shame and peer pressure play a large role in keeping people from getting fat and personally find that a terrible way to run a society. Of course, all else equal, almost no one wants to be fat, but all else is not equal.
I honestly don't understand this statement. What else besides healthcare could fix that? Are you arguing that Mississippi obesity is due to genetics and cannot be changed?
The only other thing I can think of that would affect state wide obesity is food security and quality. Proper healthcare would be my first pick for fixing obesity.
Because we're still alive and also have a future and if the goal is to help people, there is no reason to draw the line at "paid it off already" when money is fungible and can still be used to secure a more comfortable future. Having paid off debts doesn't mean you climbed out of the hole, it means you did the responsible thing when you could have easily stashed the money away for your own retirement.
I'm not saying we shouldn't help people like us, who already paid off large sums of loans. I'm asking why we should only help people still saddled with debt if we also help people like us at the same time. That's classic crab mentality.
> it means you did the responsible thing
Not all fields are lucrative enough that paying off a pile of loans is even feasible. With how college is often pushes as all but required for many kids, it isn't possible to make an informed decision.
They catch up by distilling frontier models. They will eventually figure out how to prevent that from happening. No one has any interest in investing tens of billions if the product can be copied and sold for less.
Where are the competitive models from Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Russia, Canada, India, the UK? From anywhere that isn't China or the US?
There are none. Mistral Small 4 is pareto-competitive in its pricing bracket at $0.15/$0.60, at worst it's second to Gemma 4 26B A4B. The above countries have never had a model that is even close to being so.
This particular Mistral Medium looks to be uncompetitive at that pricing. I'm surprised it's so expensive given its size. Wonder if we'll see other providers offer it for cheaper.
but that doesn't mean Mistral has never produced anything useful.
You mentioned "pareto-competitive", and EXAONE certainly was that. The statement that the "above countries have never had a model that is even close to being so" is simply too broad.
You're talking about EXAONE 4.5 33B? Gemma 4 31B was released 1 week earlier and blows it out of the water. Which point in time/model size are you possibly talking about? The original K-EXAONE in January?
More than anything the availability speaks for itself. If it was indeed pareto competitive, all dozens of model providers would be doing their best to offer it for serverless inference. They don't. There's maybe one that does. Do you think a lot of companies wouldn't prefer a Korean model over a Chinese one? In this case, the market speaks. Go talk to people who run business based on putting billions or trillions of tokens through open weights models. And how much time they put into optimization of model selection to save money and latency. And ask why none of them are using EXAONE models. It's not because we're not aware of their existence. There's also reason to believe they've been benchmaxxing more than Chinese models, btw. Have you done the vibecheck?
I wish they were strong, I hope that in the future, they are. More diversity is better. So far they have not yet been a serious option at any point.
Yet ASML is always cited as a great Europe great achievement, but it's hardly ever mentioned that without American's EUV research and patents, and without Cymer there would be no AMSL as we known of.
In all honesty I believe ASML's success is mostly their own. Still, lamenting "being bought up by foreign countries" is a lame excuse.
Without Google’s funding its not obvious i DeepMind would have went anywhere.
Unless the moved to US for funding while keeping a back office in the UK.
It’s strange to expect anything significant to come out from Europe when VCs there are either very risk averse and/or don’t have enough cash to begin with. It’s not like government or EU funding can replace that since its almost always wasted or missdirected
It’s a company containing such remarkable talent that I’m sure they would not have run into significant issues raising capital on international markets.
It’s not like VCs are only allowed to invest in companies in their own country.
Usually to maximize its funding the company would move its HQ to the US and if they are lucky have an IPO there and eventually become effectively American after a few years (e.g. Unity)
Being near the Pareto frontier of inference cost vs. output quality.
This was released 6 days ago. The dust hasn't settled yet, and Mistral Small 4 was released earlier. Even if Deepseek V4-flash turns out to crush it, there was a period where it was Pareto competitive. None of the countries I named (i.e. no country that isn't China/US/Mistral) have had a Pareto competitive model at any point in time.
Although the Manus decision might change things for AI, Singapore-washing is quite rampant among Chinese companies, so I wouldn't call this place of origin an alternative market.
A few months ago China was being criticized left and right on how somehow it was not able to compete, and once DeepSeek showed up then all the hatred shifted onto how China was actually competing but exploring unfair competitive advantages.
Funny how that works.
Also, aren't the likes of OpenAI burning through over $2 of investment for each $1 of revenue?
2 businesses working to get money from the same customers in the same field is competition. Kellogs is competing with store brand cereal. People are choosing to use these Chinese AI apis because they are good enough for some workflows and cheaper. If they didn't exist, the money would go to the frontier labs. There is no world where this would not be defined as competition.
I find it funny how people don't realize the technical achievements and papers coming out of deepseek or Alibaba. They are making this whole AI thing sustainable and cheap and available to do at home. That's the future. I should be able to run my own harness and model and never bother with openai or anthropic at all.
Qwen3.6 runs on a single GPU and beats claudes sonnet. In benchmarks and real world tests from humans. Kimi is awesome but most people won't be able to host it themselves.
A lot of people are slowly realizing the moat of 1T closed source models is gone as of the last few weeks. It's going to change the industry. April was a huge month for open models, it'll be curious to see if that continues.
This Mistral submission is another nail in the coffin.
> China is not competing, it is distilling US models.
I think you should check your notes. The likes of Kimi K2 thinking shows up as high as the second best general purpose model currently in existence. It seems they compete just fine.
If you believe "distilling" is all it takes to put together a model at the top of any synthetic benchmark then I wonder what you would have to say about all US models that greatly underperform in comparison and still manage to be used extensively in professional settings.
But your argument is an emotional one and not rarional, isn't it?
According to benchmarks which are gamed to the extreme these days. Trusting them blindly isn’t exactly rational either. They don’t necessarily translate that well to real world tasks
It’s obviously not “distilling” as such but there are reasons why Chinnese models are consistently several months behind OpenAI/Antropic
Yes, but it would seem that Chinese models are much more efficiently trained than the US ones, (i.e. with fewer resources).
Europe doesn't invest nowhere near as much as the US does into tech, so we need to either figure out how to be at least as, and hopefully more, efficient as the Chinese models are (at least in terms of training) or there's little point in trying.
I suspect this is one of the reasons why Mistral's models are somewhat struggling; i.e. US style training costs, but nowhere near as much cash as OpenAI/Anthopic have.
There are multiple European Google alternatives as well for example, but being 80% as good just doesn't cut it. Chinese models win because they are 95-98% as good as the SotA US ones but at a fraction of the cost.
The fact that this comment is still up hours later but my comment below participating in the discussion got flagged should tell one everything they need to know about the intellectual rigor here.
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