”While in Norway, OpenAI will also engage with government officials to explore opportunities for collaboration, including boosting AI adoption and helping to deliver on Norway’s sovereign AI goals for the benefit of its people.”
Aka, Snowden thought us nothing.
Norwegians beware of ChatGPT used as a weapon to move oil money from the people to the ”future of business ”.
Worked in Norway for six years in a research lab (50% private | 50% public).
First thing I noticed when I arrived: they are using Google for emails, sharing documents, drives, meetings, research projects, etc.
The loss of sovereignty that this represents AND the major risk for leaks/theft is MAD.
It was a research lab entirely focused on tech/CS/computational science
So it's not like they don't know stuff about technology.
Years prior to this, I'm in Finland in a tiny lab in Turku/Åbo (the city has two names, one in Finnish the other in Swedish.
I remember there was a dude doing his master's trying to integrate a bunch of devices (phone, desktop, laptop, cloud, etc.) so that basically your AI assistant can automatically handle stuff. This implied A LOT of constant (or almost constant) data collection.
During one of the meeting, I think I'm the one who asked: "But wait, isn't this a massive issue in terms of privacy?"
The big boss of the lab, replied: "Oh I know you're from France, and you guyz care a lot about this. But here we simply do not"
Conclusion:
I haven't looked at sociological studies trying to build an historical overview of the Nordic people and their relation to electronic privacy. But my experience goes so much against the idea I had about Nordic "culture" (this word means nothing here: Finnish and Norwegian are VERY different societies, but bear with me).
I really believed that in those countries I'd find some high priority, super secured, home made, safe solutions for handling messaging, data, research -> it is REALLY NOT THE CASE, I haven't seen ANY OF THAT; they're all using USA made cloud-(AI)-tech.
The Nordic countries act as if they were an extension of the Angloamerican culture for some reason. They sure would object to their data being used by China or Russia for example, but American companies doing it doesnt pose a problem. But France has its own national identity, and it does not see itself as the extension of Angloamerica. So its natural that Angloamerican corporations having unfettered access to its data would be a no no.
Maybe the nordic countries just have very similar value to the anglosphere and therefore they trust each other? That doesn't mean one is an extension of the other.
What's the European alternative to the things OpenAI puts in their datacenters?
What's the European alternative to Nvidia H100s and Quantum InfiniBand, AMD Epycs and Instincs, and Intel Xeons?
In the past you had European companies like ST, Ericsson, Nokia and Siemens who could design cutting edge compute and networking chips of the time, but those days are long gone, with European companies have missed out on the hyperscale race being relucted to making commodity low margin products, so they either have to buy American or Chinese if they want cutting edge.
Stock price says otherwise. Probably because replacing MS Office with Libre Office doesn't really mean much while still running your digital infrastructure on US services, US chips and US phones. Lemme know when EU creates its own You Tube.
>And they seem more than happy to take our scientific researchers.
Who's taking who's researchers? Got any examples. From what I saw Linus Torvalds is still in US.
I wouldn't call Linus a "scientific researcher". He's an engineer, and that's also a group that economies need, but he's not a scientist, and not a researcher.
I can only read the title due to paywall, but that doesn't answer the question that I made to your comment that someone is stealing someone else's researchers. I asked for hard examples of researchers being stolen that back up your point.
>He's an engineer, and that's also a group that economies need
And why is he and the rest like him in the US and not in Europe?
> I asked for hard examples of researchers being stolen that back up your point.
"Stolen" is a far cry from "taken". Researchers are not property, they have free will. And in this case, it's "taken" in the sense of "taken on" or "taken in", because the USA is actively cutting science and research budgets.
So, you want what, a dozen names of people you've likely never heard of because most researchers are not celebrities?
Or you could ask Shelly Sakiyama-Elbert, the vice dean of research and graduate education at UW Medicine, who said "We’re going to have a big brain drain in the U.S. of these really talented folks, … It’s not just a switch that you flip, right? If people move out into another direction with their careers, they often don’t come back." - https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/one-countrys-lead...
> And why is he and the rest like him in the US and not in Europe?
Why did he go to the USA in the first place? Because of the different world in 1997 when he graduated.
Why is he still there? Everyone's different, but I can say that the older you get, more ties you have. After Brexit, I was free to move to Germany, but my brother, a decade older and with a family, couldn't even though he was interested.
"Nature also analyzed its jobs board and found “that US scientists submitted 32% more applications for jobs abroad between January and March 2025 than during the same period in 2024.”
"Scientists who have felt abandoned in the U.S. are being courted by institutions across the world. Aix-Marseille University (AMU), located in France, "introduced eight U.S.-based researchers who were in the final stage of joining the institution's 'Safe Place for Science' program, which aims to woo researchers who have experienced or fear funding cuts under the Trump administration," said Politico. The program has received close to 300 applications from some of the top institutions in the U.S."
"There are also new scientific refugees in the making. Trump's "big, beautiful bill" calls for a 56% cut to the National Science Foundation budget and a 73% reduction in staff and fellowships. It also cuts resources from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Agriculture and U.S. Geological Service. There is a "whole generation of young scientists who see no pathway into the field for them,""
Aka, Snowden thought us nothing.
Norwegians beware of ChatGPT used as a weapon to move oil money from the people to the ”future of business ”.