Some races are won or lost in the first moments after the starting whistle, so let’s get this out of the way: as a whole, Europe is not competitive with the U.S. or China in developing the high-scale, foundational large language models (LLMs) on which the AI economy depends.
The continent’s sole noteworthy LLM, France’s Mistral, is the exception that proves the rule, and still substantially smaller than those of global market leaders like OpenAI, Google, Meta, Deepseek or Anthropic. The sums being invested into these American and Chinese models make catching up unlikely.
