eu/acc

Official X account of eu/acc, a movement to save Europe by @levelsio

Started here:

[eu/acc @euacc]

🇪🇺eu/acc

After 2 years in existence, the first 4 points of the @euacc manifesto, which was crowdsourced by all of you, are now passed as laws

That means 1/3rd of eu/acc's points is complete:

✅ 1. Reduce regulatory burden for startups
✅ 2. Make skilled immigration easier, unskilled harder
✅ 3. Repeal the cookie law
✅ 4. European Inc: a single pan-EU business entity

Now for the next 8 objectives:
🔲 6. Tax discount during startup phase
🔲 7. Tax stock options when sold, not when exercised
🔲 8. Embrace AI and technology, don't fight it
🔲 9. Champion free speech, don't censor it
🔲 10. Reform bankruptcy laws to empower entrepreneurs
🔲 11. Make English the primary language of the European Union
🔲 12. Teach AI and tech in European schools and universities

[@levelsio @levelsio]

🇪🇺 @steipete on why Europe was unable to retain him as talent:

"In the US, most people are enthusiastic.

In Europe, I get insulted, people scream REGULATION and RESPONSIBILITY.

And if I really build a company here, then I get to struggle with things like investment protection laws, employee rights, and paralyzing labor regulations.

At OpenAI, most people work 6-7 days a week and get paid accordingly.

In Europe, that's illegal."

[@levelsio @levelsio]

What's VERY interesting here

Last few years the European Commission tried to censor speech on social media platforms with the Digital Services Act (DSA)

But it didn't really work, it caused so much outrage on here and elsewhere, thanks to all of you posting about it, that it became super unpopular

So I think the people behind all this thought "okay if we can't censor on EU level, let's just go national"

So now you see the Spanish PM announce they will change the laws to prosecute speech on social media platforms (specifically X), and on the same day French authorities are raiding the Telegram offices

What you see here is a consistent effort to take power over social media and chat channels because they're the dominant places where we exchange thoughts now

Nobody but boomers watch TV anymore which they still partly controlled via state media, so this is their attempt at taking back control

[eu/acc @euacc]

🇪🇺📈 eu/acc progress of your crowdsourced ideas to save Europe:

✅ 1. Reduce regulatory burden for startups 📑
🔲 2. Make skilled immigration easier 🛂
✅ 3. Repeal the cookie law 🍪
✅ 4. European Inc: a single pan-EU entity 🏛️
🔲 5. Secure Europe's energy future with nuclear ☢️
🔲 6. Tax discount during startup phase 💵
✅ 7. Tax stock options when sold, not exercised 💸
🔲 8. Embrace AI and technology, don't fight it 👐
🔲 9. Champion free speech, don't censor it 📣
🔲 10. Reform bankruptcy law⚖️
🔲 11. Make English the primary language the EU 👄
🔲 12. Teach AI and tech in EU schools/universities 🎓

https://t.co/aVtiSJjavd

[@levelsio @levelsio]

This is great news for Europe

28th regime means a virtual state where companies can register

The details approved are a bit unclear, but I hope it will include actual taxes and regulation too that fully override the national taxes and regulation for companies and staff hired

That would create a super attractive place to start and run startups similar to Delaware (or now increasingly Texas), the UK, and Singapore

And you don't have to change anything on a national level per EU country, it exists besides it, but does compete with it but from a blank slate

👏

[@levelsio @levelsio]

Same in large parts of Europe

Europeans are NOT lazy

But the tax system here actively discourages people from working harder because it literally makes them poorer not richer

And it discourages businesses from hiring more people to grow their business because the increase in tax and bureaucracy costs more than the increase in profits

The end results is you have no new businesses and the only businesses that have remained are generational family businesses started before 1950 that are closely tied to national governments and those people and businesses actively support those high taxes and bureaucracy because by avoiding the creation of new businesses it keeps them in power

But the idiocy of this protectionism is that at of course if you 1) don't have new businesses bringing innovation, 2) you essentially protect your old businesses, you will soon get outcompeted by better products from outside Europe

Which is exactly what's now happening to the German car industry for example, and that's kinda symbolic for the rest of Europe's industries now

You could fix this overnight by the way: agressively lower taxes and bureaucracy on a pan-European level, easiest way to do that is create a virtual pan-European legal space where companies can legally register (aka the 28th regime) instead of existing in their national countries, as well as letting people be hired in that legal space

Just by the sheer benefits of that legal space you will see most companies move there, and in turn you will increase federalization of Europe into a US-like entity while at the same time making Europe one of the most attractive places to do business

Of course this likely won't happen because we have idiots in power now and no real democracy in Europe due to the terror of the European Comission

But if we wanted we could

[@levelsio @levelsio]

This is great news for Europe

28th regime means a virtual state where companies can register

The details approved are a bit unclear, but I hope it will include actual taxes and regulation too that fully override the national taxes and regulation for companies and staff hired

That would create a super attractive place to start and run startups similar to Delaware (or now increasingly Texas), the UK, and Singapore

And you don't have to change anything on a national level per EU country, it exists besides it, but does compete with it but from a blank slate

👏

[@levelsio @levelsio]

✅ Fixed

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

The EU Commission should be disbanded in favor of an elected body and the EU President should be directly elected.

The current system is rule by bureaucracy, not democracy.

[@levelsio @levelsio]

🇪🇺 So good to see the world wake up to the terrors of the European Commission

I hope all the attention helps European people via their country's governments force the European Union to reform and redesign its structure to one that's actually democratic

No indirect appointment of corrupt cronies but actual democracy close to the people

It also makes no sense to have 720 members of the European Parliament, it's simply too much and makes it too inefficient

The real cancer rotting the EU from within though is the European Commission which should be disbanded and replaced with a democratic body

FYI the European Commission consists of 32,000 paid civil servants and all it does it create laws that nobody agrees with

Europeans, you should keep posting about the terrors of the European Commission and vote parties into power in your country that can put real pressure on the EU to change and reform

[Ondřej Tesárek @bratricek]

EU will scan every message
ECB will scan every transaction

We are approaching levels of control never even dreamed by the KGB.

[@levelsio @levelsio]

We've literally just lost power in Europe

The European Union is not of the people, by the people or for the people

Not even in the slightest anymore

[@levelsio @levelsio]

🇪🇺 More great news from Europe 😊

Gradually, then suddenly. Nothing changed for 2 years and now a lot of things are finally changing:

The Netherlands is changing its stock options tax to be modeled after the American system, which is the default in startups

(!) Stock options will now be taxed when sold, not when exercised (!)

This was #7 most voted idea on https://t.co/NdorAWrhrB to save Europe and now it's happening!

Right now in most of Europe, stock options are taxed when exercised

This creates very problematic situations: imagine you have stock options for a startup you worked for. Many/most startups have a clause that says "you must exercise your vested options within 90 days after leaving, or you lose them". So you exercise them, which in Europe means paying tax on their value immediately, that's regardless if you actually made money on them!

So you could exercise your stock options when the price is $100, and let's say you have 10,000 stocks, so that's 10,000 * $100 = $1,000,000 in value at the time of exercising. Let's say you pay 50% tax on that, so you pay $500,000 in tax

Where do you get that $500,000 from in the first place? Remember you now exercised your stock option but you haven't sold it yet. So you're still a broke startup guy. Often you'd loan the money from the bank.

And then you could just sell the stock immediately right? No wait...you can only sell your stock that you just exercised during a liquidity event. That means when the company is acquired, or IPOs, or a secondary sale happens (you can sell your stock to other investors)

So that means the wait can be forever, while you already paid tax on your options, now you pay back that $500,000 loan over many years

But startups are risky, we know that. What if the stock price crashes from $100 to $10? Doesn't matter. You already paid $500,000 on the exercised stock. But now you only make 10,000 * $10 = $100,000 instead of $1,000,000!

So now you got a $500,000 loan, paid $500,000 in tax with that loan, only made back $100,000, and now have to pay back this loan with what money? Exactly. You can't and you lost at least $400,000! And that's without the interest of the loan!

You just lost a lot of money by being European and working for a startup!

Crazy right? But that's the reality in most of the EU (including Germany, Spain, etc).

With the new Netherlands law, that finally changes. And that makes working for European startups much more attractive for the top-tier talent. Because startups in the beginning are lean and can't pay a high salary but they can pay in stock in their company easily.

The Netherlands also reduces the tax rate of stock options to something more similar to the US: from 49.5% to 32.17%

The new ruling only applies to employees at a startup or scale-up

The amendment to the Netherlands Income Tax Act is expected to come into effect on January 1, 2027 (in ~1 year)

h/t @bobbygaal for the tip

[@levelsio @levelsio]

🇪🇺 Something is finally happening!

EU is:
- scaling down the GDPR (data privacy laws)
- watering down the AI Act (more like AI Ban), and
- finally removing the Cookie Banner laws

This gets us a bit closer to the top eu/acc ideas being reached
https://t.co/fU2jmU91xL

[@levelsio @levelsio]

Just a month later and...

🇪🇺 ChatControl is back!

Now they're trying to pass an even more far reaching ChatControl law through the back door, in a form even more intrusive than the originally rejected plan, without needing any of the EU countries votes

The new proposal:
- total mandatory surveillance of ALL text chats, emails and social media in the EU
- obligatory registration of your ID/passport to your chat, email or social media account
- minimum age requirement for chat, email and social media apps of 16 (!)

The only way to stop this law is if EU countries veto it

Read more here by @echo_pbreyer:

https://t.co/Yg2iXX9uWs

[@levelsio @levelsio]

The 🇪🇺 European Commission has unfortunately denied my request for GPUs

🥺

[@levelsio @levelsio]

The story gets stranger...

Apparently I was never able to use the 🇪🇺 EU's GPUs in the first place

Because I wasn't on their pre-approved organization list of "Horizon 2020"

So how can you join the Horizon 2020 list as an organization?

Well, you can't. It was made in 2014 and closed in 2020!

????

[@levelsio @levelsio]

💻 I just wanted to show how easy it is getting a GPU in the regular way compared to the 🇪🇺 EU's "AI Factory" plan where you have to apply for a proposal

Funnily enough @LambdaAPI actually shows "Design your AI Factory" on their landing, maybe they're trying to get that juicy EU money too (but I don't think they have servers in EU anyway)

So I sign up/login, select what GPU I want, like 8x H100s, which is $24/hour, select the location, add a filesystem and launch the server

Then about 5 minutes later, I have a running 8x H100 cluster, with a Jupyter notebook ready with Terminal access and I can see and work with my GPUs!

And no Lambda did not ask me if I was mindful of "Individual, and Social and Environmental Well-Being", and I did not need to apply to some proposal, and wait months.

They just gave me a GPU to build a business on, within 5 minutes, as it should be!

If the EU wants to help AI startups, the infrastructure is already there! Just fund/subsidize GPU rent prices for European citizens and businesses on existing European hosting companies like @Hetzner_Online or @OVHcloud that already have GPUs (where the process of getting a server is pretty much the same as Lambda btw)

For example, a 8x H100 is $24/hour now but with EU's funding could be $12/hour, giving European startups an unfair advantage to compete with the rest of the world for training and inference (generating)

Personally I don't think you should mess with the market like that, but this was the EU's intention, so then do it properly!

I thought about it in the shower this morning and realized I guess the fundamental problem in the EU is they just don't respect technology or the people making it. And they don't listen to them like they do elsewhere in for example US or China. You have lots of European founders who'd tell you the same I tell you here, but they're never heard by the EU either

In the US you have the top tech CEOs and founders at dinner with the president regularly to advise him and it feels more properly run and they actually listen to smart people

In China you have essentially technocrats running the country and fair you can disagree with their system (see Jack Ma etc. not great oaky) but they do understand tech as we can see from how fast they progress and deploy it

But the EU just never listens to skilled people, it's always design by committee by midwits and the EU is just systemically rekt like that. It's not a meritocracy at all

But I'm a European and an eternal optimist, so maybe we can help improve it by telling them how to do it then (like this tweet)

See how easy it could be @vonderleyen

[@levelsio @levelsio]

🇪🇺 As a European citizen and AI founder, I can apparently use these "AI Factories", so I just signed up to use them!

Every "supercomputer" has an [ ACCESS NOW ] button which made me very excited

I expected to sign up, maybe pay a discounted H100 rate (funded by EU, that'd be nice?) and get a Jypyter notebook, or some SSH login so I can access my GPU like I'd do on @lambdaapi or @awscloud or @Hetzner_Online

But I celebrated to early, I signed up, confirmed my email, then ended up in a "Supercomputer Access Calls" page, where I had to select from a tedious list of "Call For Proposals" to get access to a GPU

So I could NOT just access a H100 GPU, I have to make sure my project (in this case my business) fits a specific proposal, ok fair

This process was already tedious enough but then when I tried to actually go through with it, it started asking me if I had "Respect for Human Agency?", I do I think, and if I was mindful of "Individual, and Social and Environmental Well-Being?", well I am, right guys??? Right??? The questions didn't stop, just endless pages of this

Look I get what they're doing, they pivoted the classic university "I need to rent a giant computer for my research" to an EU wide thing and then present it as the "European AI plan"

But this isn't really how AI works in production? As a founder in AI, if I wanna do stuff I'd rent a whole bunch H100 GPUs again at @lambdaapi or @awscloud or @Hetzner_Online and SSH into a box

Or if I want it more simple I run AI models on @FAL, @wavespeed or @replicate which is just an API call or web front end I can click stuff and run a model

The EU has the right intentions here but it's just the wrong execution, this thing will 100% go nowhere, and I'm a born optimist, I want to believe, I'm also a proud European, and I'm in AI a bit and not a complete idiot. There's just better ways to do this

If you really want to have the GPU servers in Europe (which arguably isn't that important), then let me rent a GPU box with SSH access at @Hetzner_Online or @OVHcloud that's hosted in Europe and subsidize that for European citizens and European businesses. I don't even believe in that, but at least that'd make it accessible for Europeans. Now it really isn't?

What's REALLY much more important though if you want to be a part of the AI race and I've posted for years here with @euaccofficial is to make Europe a really extremely attractive place to start and run an AI business. Remove regulatory obstructions and give tax discounts for startups. Let them build a business first that can compete worldwide and once they make enough money (let's say $100M/y), then slowly start adding regulation. Because right now the regulation only benefits the European incumbents, the dinosaur companies, while making it very difficult for European citizens to start new AI companies here.

Which is why we literally have none left.

Anyway, I applied to get my GPU, let's see if I get it!

[@levelsio @levelsio]

What in the F is an AI factory?

I had to investigate what the unelected @EU_Commission is talking about today

So according to them, it's some data centers (which they call supercomputers) in 6 different EU countries

I checked out the most powerful one: Karolina, a Czech data center, it mostly has CPUs though (see pic) not GPUs, so mostly useless for AI

The GPUs it does have are 72x 8x NVIDIA A100 GPU, so 576x A100, or equivalent of 240x H100s

(H100 is about 2.4x the compute power of A100)

So let's compare that:

@xAI has 200,000x H100 GPUs

So the xAI data center has 800x more compute than the Czech one

If we combine xAI, Meta, AWS, etc. it's about 750,000 H100s

If we assume the other 5 data centers in the EU are equivalent to the Czech one (which is massive stretch because most of the others seem AI consultacny services, they don't even HAVE chips!), the EU's new "AI factories" have a total of 1,440x H100 GPUs, let's round up to 1,500 to be nice

So the EU is trying to compete with 750,000 GPUs with their own 1,500 GPUs, so 500x less??

Correct me if I'm wrong but it's just seems very low impact and another ridiculous idea and burning of EU tax payers money that will end up in local cronies and bureaucrats and will do NOTHING to improve the AI business climate for Europe

The best way to improve it is to deregulate, make it super easy and low tax (especially when starting out) to start AI companies in Europe

[@levelsio @levelsio]

💨 Great article in @FT today urging Europe to stop restricting the installation and use of air conditioning

If Europe continues its current course and keeps regulating against air conditioning, then heat-related deaths will soon reach over 500,000 per year

Installing AC in Europe would reduce that guaranteed death toll by over 90%

@vonderleyen will you choose life or death?