I feel that not only is Europe losing its independence to the US and China, but it does not even try to take part in the race.

Unlike the US, Europe has no California-level VCs. I don't expect hundreds of billions of Euros to be poured into long-shot projects.

Unlike China, Europe has neither cohesive public investment at the global level nor the drive to grow. Long-term investments have a lot of words, a lot of regulations, a lot of proxy goals, but there is neither a lot of money nor urgency. It was captured by this post: https://x.com/piotrsankowski/status/2065795919623438546

So yeah, both in economy and warfare, Europe dooms itself to be in the hands of the US, China, or a mix of both.

> Unlike the US, Europe has no California-level VCs.

Some would consider that a good thing. There is a lot to be said for VC in recent years not being beneficial for the economy, certainly on an individual level, other than "number go up".

Europe decided to regulate the hell out of foreign AI instead of investing in their own systems. It's sad to see the European continent lost the race to create a decent startup ecosystem (no decent search engines, social networks, cloud, mobile OS) and now it seems to be hellbent in losing this battle.

You are saying that as if China or the US are completely isolated from the EU. We live in a globalized world whether you like it or not, and every supply chain spans multiple countries.

Arguably, staying out of the AI "race" is a good thing

I'll play devil's advocate a little bit - I'm not sure it is losing its "independence" by not taking part in the race. It could very well be that it is gaining independence from tech and choosing a "second mover advantage" to decide how it gets deployed after seeing how it impacts everyone else. Let the US and China experiment on the bleeding edge (and their citizens feel the effect, both good and bad), and then be picky about how you use it.

I don't know if it is the right strategy but there's certainly a legitimate strategy in there.

Serious question: what does any of that have to do with the submitted article? Where is the relevance to the topic at hand?

> Unlike the US, Europe has no California-level VCs. I don't expect hundreds of billions of Euros to be poured into long-shot projects.

My ex-neighbor (when I was a teenager, living in Belgium) and very good friend really wanted to make it big. He became a chip engineer, moved to California, raised money for a first startup (it tanked) then raised money for a second startup. He made the world a better place (he created some very specific micro-inverters for solar panels) and made a $$$ exit.

The EU saw exactly zero of the wealth he created and he's never ever coming back to what he considers a failure of a continent.

That's the problem: many of the great minds with the mindset required to do great things already left the EU.

> So yeah, both in economy and warfare, Europe dooms itself to be in the hands of the US, China, or a mix of both.

And in energy (economy is energy and energy is economy, and China really understood that) the EU doomed itself to be in the hands of Russia.

We are a failure of sinking continent.

Europe is not a country.

Regulations are not even throughout each of the 27 member states. Each country is relatively small in the world stage.

Until EU progresses towards federalization, discussing this is a moot point.