The LLM they were involved in last year (Apertus) still was a letdown.
As someone who actually went there, my impression is that Europe in general is complacent when it comes to computers, and any bright eyed student will get their motivation choked out of them in academia here.
If you want to do things with AI in Europe, you can have a bigger effect by working for a consulting company than being at a university. That's … not a good sitatution.
Europeans do not have the hustle mentality to break the law like Uber so you wont see them compete in anything data heavy. They also are quite risk adverse, probably from having a lower Gini coefficient.
I feel people are too focused on US/China and don't pay attention to what is going on in the world.
ASML in the Netherlands for example was the only company in the world that makes EUV lithography machines, which all the major chip companies depend on. China recently reverse engineered their work to create machines since late 2025, but not sold commercially.
Ireland has chip production facilities.
EU might not be in the top 2, but it is not out of the running at all.