If French, German and British nations start competing (like in the old days) for AI supremacy, it will unleash a level of creativity that we long forgot we are capable of in Europe.
He moved from Britain originally due to the difficulty in getting his research funded.
So the issue isn't one of intellectual capital - and while it's obviously the case that well place monetary capital is an issue - it's not clear to me what the real underlying issue is.
Perhaps Europe needs a tech/industrial revolution again - where the power shifts from the old guard to the new. Perhaps too many people in charge in Europe are from a certain class that studied history at university.
I'm not sure the problem is an understanding of economics, it's an understanding of how the real world works, and how to make it better - they are often too easily swayed by big lobby groups with vested interests.
Science and engineering isn't even a category for occupational background of UK MPs in the following report.
https://www.smith-institute.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/1...
https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/physics-nobel-2024-plagiari...
Now you could argue that the people in the 60's and 70's didn't have the compute available to make non-toy networks, and it was only applying the same techniques on bigger datasets with more compute that was the real difference.
Sure - but that happens all the time in science - every innovation is building on the shoulders of others and the assignment of the Nobel prize is as a result often rather arbitrary.
Also don't underestimate the value of reducing to practice - the difference between coming up with an idea and actually making it work in practice.
And if I remember correctly, PhDs in the UK are kind of weird compared to the US. Your thesis has to be research that you haven't published yet.
Plus, we first have to prioritize solving more urgent and important topics like affordable housing (WHEN?!), the collapsing pension and welfare systems which is a ticking timebomb, cheap energy, collapsing demographic (see affordable housing), illegal immigration, Putin's war next door, the rise of the right wing (see illegal immigration) before jumping into another pissing contest with the US and China on something that's not gonna help fix the pressing issues we have right fucking now. I don't see how we can recover from this downward spiral when I look at the inactions of our politicians who are just kicking the can down the road and blaming the EU and other countries of the union for their own systemic failures.
Winning the AI race might sound cool but it might also be similar to winning the race to the moon: a cool flex but not super useful to the general population if they can't afford a place to live or getting healthcare in a timely manner. Until ChatGPT can wipe your retired old ass in a care home I doubt many people will see AI investments as being a top priority.
Imho death spiral could be turned by providing enough affordable housing. That would be really long term goal, but the democracies do not have long term goals - the time after election ist time before election.
When a new citizen is born, there’s 18+ years for the required housing supply for that person to be created. When a new citizen is imported, they need housing TODAY. It’s just not a sustainable model on a continuous basis, but no one wants to hear that.
Germany has plenty of applied research organizations, from universities (e.g. RWTH) to things like Fraunhofer. The funding schemes behind these organizations are horrible and I would argue that in many ways, they are machines to burn up potential. Even with all this, Germany has been doing okay on the publicly funded AI research front, but that is irrelevant. The US isn't leading because of publicly funded AI effort, but because of privately funded AI effort.
Housing affordability is 100% because we let people tell their neighbors they cannot build as much housing as they want to, where they need to build it more slowly. There's no middle ground, there are no acceptable structures of land use law if you want affordability. If you get to tell your neighbor how much housing they can produce, bureaucracy will form around that and it will drive up the price of housing.
They CAN solve housing because, like you said, they're the ones causing it. They just don't want to because the housing bubble is making a lot of people rich.
The changes you see - like allowing ADUs - are inherently very limited impact so that they look good to those advocating for more housing without actually lowering prices.
No, only 3 above 3 trillion in market cap: Apple, Google, NVIDIA
US is also 3x the population of Germany.