There’s more to life than LLMs, or why Europe needn’t fall behind in AI adoption 

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.

Does this mean that Europe has lost its chance to benefit from the AI revolution on equal terms with the U.S.?

Not necessarily. The value of AI mostly manifests in how firms use the technology, says Matthias Taube