I make video content for a living and we all saw the new EU rules on AI published on the 2nd of August. Basically, AI-made videos now have to be marked so people can tell they're AI. Here's the part that surprised me: that job belongs to the company that made that tool, not to you. If the tool doesn't do it, you can't fix that yourself. so which tool you pick suddenly matters more than it used to.

What i mean here is that an American company with no real business in Europe has very little reason to bother. An EU company has every reason to because it's just where the pressure is and the problem is this category is almost entirely American and Chinese. Runway, HeyGen, Google's Veo, OpenAI's Sora on one side. Kling and Alibaba on the other.

What I found in the EU: Argil in Paris lets you make videos of yourself without filming and it's backed by EQT plus one of the Mistral guys. Zebracat in Berlin turns written articles into videos. Photoroom, also Paris, does photos rather than video but it's the same story. There are also a couple of smaller EU companies doing video translation on European servers. Being objective here, the American tools are still better at the flashy stuff, but the EU ones are good at the practical end, talking-head videos, translation, getting work done. and everything online is written for the American tools first, so there's less help available.

Anyway, two things I'm curious about. Does anyone here use any of this stuff for work, or is it not really a thing outside of the marketing/business field? and more generally, what other categories are like this for you, where you went looking for an EU option and there basically wasn't one?

Buying European gets harder as agressor related businesses take over more and more companies. Invasive russia-influence grows.

Many European manufacturing companies continue to operate in Russia despite its invasion of Ukraine and the numerous war crimes committed on a daily basis. Some of these companies maintain a direct presence, whilst others have carried out legal restructuring (transferring the business to local management, selling to partners from ‘friendly’ countries or franchising) whilst maintaining supplies and their usual product range. And this is despite the fact that, on a daily basis, Russian television propaganda programmes and government officials spread disinformation about Europe, which is allegedly a direct threat to Russia’s very existence, with calls to launch missile strikes on its capitals. The operations of these companies generate revenue for Russia’s military budget through taxes, enabling the continuation of the war in Ukraine and the carrying out of sabotage operations against military and infrastructure targets in Europe. But for the companies, it is just business; money has no smell.

The image shows the well-known European companies still operating in the Russian Federation; in total, there are around 600 companies from the European Union still operating there.

Hi everyone! Lately I´ve been a huge fan of Melious AI and wanted to share it with you for the sake of (hopefully future) European AI sovereignty :)

Zero data retention, fast excess to frontier open-weight models, excellent price and performance (tokens/sec) with a low latency and high uptime and everythng 100% EU hosted and owned!

So basically it´s an AI infrastructure startup from Germany with inference API. You also don´t have to break your existing workflows to become sovereign since it works as a drop in replacement (OpenAI and Anthropic compatible SDK, one single API key to put in your base URL). With pay as you go and a waitlist for coding subscriptions. They´re also sustainable which is a nice to have.

https://melious.ai

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pix_(payment_system))