It was tried:

For example, before Facebook, in Germany there existed studiVZ, schülerVZ, meinVZ (basically the same social network of the same company for different audiences). But this social network wasn't a commercial success, even though for some time it was much more popular in Germany than Facebook.

Generally, many successful German software companies were simply bought by US-American companies:

- SuSE was bought by Novell

- DLD (company: Delix; https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Linux-Distribution ) was bought by Red Hat

- Star Division (the company behind Star Office) was bought by Sun (which again was bought by Oracle)

- In 2023, Software AG was bought by the private equity company Silver Lake

- Recently, Hornetsecurity was bought by Proofpoint.

So, innovation in the EU (contrary to the assertions everyone seems to be making here) that was absorbed by bigger companies from the US (making it an acquisitions/capital/monopolistic issue, not one of startup ease)?

There are good people making good software all over the world. We just need to start using it more instead of this crap being thrown at us by big tech

Sure, I'd love to use an open source model locally that's trained on fully ethically-sourced data... once it's on par with ChatGPT or Sonnet.

For now, that "crap" big tech throws at us outperforms the "non-crap".

I'd love to see competition though, K2 is a nice step.

It means less data, and let's be realistic, under otherwise equal conditions, means less-accurate inference.

One can try it, but it will never be a fair game.

one of my friends claims his career would be at a different place if he had played politics and back stabbed his coworkers.

I don't know what to make of that.