The Chinese company DeepSeek made a surprising entrance into the market of ChatGPT and other leading language models in January 2025, creating a new situation for European AI developers as well. The company, founded by Liang Wenfeng in July 2023, has made its advanced language model freely available, aiming to break the dominance of OpenAI, Google, and Meta.
European AI development currently faces considerable challenges: according to an EU Court of Auditors report published in May 2024, the AI investment gap between the EU and the US grew to more than 10 billion euros between 2018 and 2020. French company Mistral AI - which announced its new model competing with ChatGPT in 2024 - warns that Europe lacks the data centers necessary for training AI models. As stated by Anna Rogers, Associate Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, growing social awareness about privacy could create new opportunities for EU-based businesses that prioritize data protection and social sustainability.
The appearance of DeepSeek proves that innovation doesn't necessarily require enormous resources - claims Nathalie Smuha, Associate Professor at the University of Leuven. Among European developments, the EuroLLM project stands out, which launched in September 2024, aiming to create a competitive multilingual model in all 24 official EU languages. Additionally, the German company Aleph Alpha with its Luminous model and French Mistral AI are actively developing their own solutions for the European market.
Sources:
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Cynthia Kroet
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Cynthia Kroet
3.
Maygane Janin
