Creating, not just regulating: Europe’s AI future

The European Union has earned a reputation for regulating rather than innovating: a place with ambitious legal frameworks for the digital economy but lacking the actors able to compete on a par with the United States or China in creating global players. However, this narrative is beginning to wear thin: the reality today is that Europe has its fair share of talent and innovators who are busy going about their business.

More and more European companies are not only attracting substantial funding, they’re producing internationally recognized technologies. Take the case of Black Forest Labs, a German startup with less than 50 employees and barely a year in business, which is negotiating a financing round that could see it valued at $4 billion.

The Freiburg-based company, from the team that developed Stable Diffusion’s well-known imaging technology at Stability AI, has managed to position itself on the radar of big tech companies and blue-chip investors thanks to its Flux imaging models. Its mainly open source developments not only rival those of giants such as Google or OpenAI, but are already integrated into applications from companies such as Adobe, Meta or Microsoft, and have even been used by Elon Musk’s xAI.

Meanwhile, in France, Mistral AI is enjoying success in the field of language models, attracting…