How Europe's AI ecosystem could catch up with China and the U.S.

From Alibaba and Baidu to Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, China and the United States produced virtually every one of the top consumer AI companies in the world today. That leaves Europe trailing behind the U.S. and China, even though Europe still has the largest community of cited AI researchers. Startup founders, analysts, and organizations seeking to bring ecosystems together for collective action pondered how the European AI ecosystem can catch up with China and the United States at TechBBQ, a gathering of hundreds of Nordic tech startups held recently in Copenhagen. Presenters argued that Europe has to turn things around not just for the good of the European economy, but also to provide the world with an alternative to the corporate-driven approach of the U.S. and the state-driven approach of China. "If you look today at some of the spending, which is devoted to artificial intelligence and frontier technologies, we're pretty much squeezed between the U.S. and now China, and China is leading," said Jacques Bughin, a senior advisor at the McKinsey Global Institute.