Cutting-edge AI products often come with a tonality that is essentially American.
American models might be able to output text in Finnish, but they can’t think—or appear to think—in Finnish.
If closed source models owned by American companies come to dominate across Europe, the economic value will flow to them, Sarlin says.
And it lacks big homegrown tech companies—the Microsofts, Googles, and Metas—which are vital conduits linking AI products to users.
Six of the world’s 10 most valuable public corporations are US tech companies.
When a Finn talks to an AI helper like ChatGPT, they often get the sense that something is subtly wrong. “You really feel that this conversation is not the way that you would have a discussion in Finland,” says Peter Sarlin. For a start, Finnish people are known for a blunt approach to dialog and chatbots are usually tuned to be overly courteous. But there’s also the fact that most leading chatbots and the large language models behind them are developed in the US and trained on mostly US data. Cutting-edge AI products often come with a tonality that is essentially American.
Sarlin, founder and CEO of Helsinki-based Silo AI, one of Europe’s largest independent artificial intelligence labs, worries that in the age of ChatGPT, regional social nuances across Europe will start to disappear. As chatbots and large language models mostly derived from North American data become ubiquitous, the understanding of what normal conversation looks like “converges toward one,” he says.
That cultural flattening could have huge consequences as large language models start to power not just chatbots, but also many other digital services and products. American models might be able to output text in Finnish, but they can’t think—or appear to think—in Finnish. “These models usually have what you call a reasoning capability, and that reasoning capability should descend from data representing this region,” Sarlin says. “But if you look at most of the models out there, they are dominated by English, and dominated by English that represents North America.”
The concern isn’t just cultural, but economic. If closed source models owned by American companies come to dominate across Europe, the economic value will flow to them, Sarlin says.
The dominance of American models is driving many in Europe to talk about the concept of “AI sovereignty”: making sure that the core “digital infrastructure” behind the AI boom isn’t entirely controlled by private companies outside of the continent. Europe is investing heavily in supercomputers and AI research to try to catch up with the US and create domestic champions. But Europe’s AI challengers are starting from a long way behind. The continent lags a long way behind the US and China in the availability of capital and computing power. And it lacks big homegrown tech companies—the Microsofts, Googles, and Metas—which are vital conduits linking AI products to users.
“What is sovereignty when you don't have any champions?” says Raluca Csernatoni, a research fellow specializing in emerging technologies at Carnegie Europe, a think tank.
European preoccupations with the power of American tech aren’t new. Generation after generation of technology has been dominated by big US companies, whose products have become embedded into Europe’s social and economic infrastructure. Europe’s businesses run on Microsoft Office and Amazon Web Services, and its mobile devices rely on Apple and Google, which also run the app stores. European politics happens on WhatsApp, and its news media happens on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Even the French watch Netflix.
And US tech companies operate on a different scale. Only two of the 10 most valuable public European corporations are in tech: German business software provider SAP and Dutch semiconductor equipment maker ASML. Six of the world’s 10 most valuable public corporations are US tech companies. Nvidia and Microsoft, the two largest, are each worth more than 15 times SAP.
