Pointing to ASML, the Dutch chip manufacturer, Dines also reminded that some of the brightest minds involved in the development of AI have European origins.
“We have the talent, we have the technology to build the machines, but somehow we are losing [the race]. It’s very stupid,” Dines said in an interview for the 20VC podcast, created and hosted by venture capital investor Harry Stebbings.
The Romanian entrepreneur said that Europe and the US have a very different work culture and that he would have achieved the same success if he had remained in Europe.
“I’m European, but as an entrepreneur I’m American. That’s what I tell everyone,” Dines said.
According to him, the US offers a revenue-generating engine that is easier to access than Europe, while American companies rely more on vision, without waiting for as much concrete evidence as European companies.
Asked whether he would advise a young European entrepreneur today to take their business to the US, the UiPath CEO said yes.
“If they are not building for a specific market, keeping certain particularities in mind – meaning if they are developing a universal technology – they will have a greater chance of success in the US,” he said.
Although Europe has lost the head start in the race to develop AI, Dines said that many European companies will succeed in the applications area.
“All European customers would prefer ‘on-premise’ software models (installed locally) and a variety of model options right now. Yes, 100%. It’s a major business opportunity that is taking shape here,” Dines said.
According to him, AI has accelerated the creation of software to run processes in companies, but creating an AI agent to run customized software is just as difficult today as it was a year ago, and no “sane” company will currently allow AI agents to control important processes without supervision.
Dines said that a pessimistic scenario for UiPath’s future would be for AI to become brilliant, the cost of tokens to fall close to zero “and for us to literally have millions of Einsteins in a data center.”
“But Einsteins in the true sense of the word – not just capable of reasoning, but capable of replacing a person. And I will be able to assign each of them any activity within a company, and they will simply execute it. That is the pessimistic scenario for us,” the UiPath chief said.
Dines does not rule out such a scenario, but believes AI is still far from replacing human work, an idea he also reiterated at UiPath’s annual investor conference on Tuesday, September 22.
“The main difference between an AI model and a human is that AI does not learn on the job as it goes. It has memory, yes, but memory is not the same thing as learning. AI will need a manual (…) No company in the world has this manual. That is the biggest difference at present, and it is the reason why AI can fail in unforeseen ways,” Dines told investors.
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