Tag: Innovation

Europe Hurries to Fund More Cutting-Edge Businesses to Compete With China and U.S.

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The shiny cylindrical tanks and slant-roofed control panels shoved against a wall in C3 Biotech’s laboratory have essentially been turned into a multimillion-dollar graveyard of high-grade stainless steel equipment. All of this state-of-the art gear was discarded during the company’s quest to discover a cheap way to convert agricultural waste like potato peels or sugar beet pulp into acrylic glass, a material widely used in manufacturing. Nigel Scrutton, a co-founder of C3 Biotech in Stockport, England, makes a point of showing off these expensive failures before explaining that the eureka…

The German Auto Industry, a Pillar of the National Psyche, Is Trembling

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The centerpiece of Mercedes-Benz’s 140th birthday party in January was a patent application filed in 1886 by an engineer named Carl Benz for a “vehicle with gas engine.” The way Mercedes executives spoke of the handwritten document, which at one point was projected on a large wall on the company campus in Stuttgart, Germany, it might have been a sacred parchment. It not only certifies that Germany is the birthplace of the automobile but also helps explain why the woes of the country’s automakers — Volkswagen, Mercedes and BMW —…

The Quest for ‘Technological Sovereignty’ in Europe (and Why It’s So Hard)

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The French government said this year that it would replace Zoom and other American videoconference software with a French-developed alternative. Germany is building a homegrown platform for artificial intelligence. Companies in both countries are teaming up to build A.I. chips to rival those of the United States and China. These are modest steps in Europe’s high-stakes race to catch up to America and China in the global sprint for digital independence. Without it, Europe’s political and business leaders worry, they will be vulnerable to sudden losses of access to critical…

We Returned From China. We Realized Our Century’s Biggest Challenge.

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Humanity is inching along a precarious tightrope. Our world is in the midst of deciding how the artificial intelligence revolution will unfold and what limits should be drawn. Too much caution could waste A.I.’s promise of faster economic growth, greater scientific discovery and more prosperity. Too little caution could unleash labor-market chaos and social disorder. Balance matters. If we get the balance between control and growth wrong at any point, we’ll fall into the gorge below. And no country is guaranteed to get to the opposite side. This is our…

The Real A.I. Race Isn’t America vs. China

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A globally recognizable tech executive, high-spirited from preparing for a public offering, offers imprudent remarks criticizing the government. The state strikes back harder than anyone expects. Overnight, the bargain between a skyrocketing sector of the economy and the government is shattered. If you think this story could be about Anthropic, you’re only half right. In 2020, the Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma found himself in the doghouse after he publicly rebuked Chinese regulators. Citing regulatory concerns, the authorities canceled the public offering of Ant Group, another company Mr. Ma helped found,…

China Takes Supercomputer Crown From U.S. For First Time Since 2017

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China took back a coveted computing crown from the United States on Tuesday, ratcheting up a fierce technological competition that has implications for science, national security and geopolitics. LineShine, a massive computing system in Shenzhen, China, was declared the world’s fastest by a group of researchers using a set of standard tests for supercomputers. Besides raw speed, the system stood out because it uses only standard microprocessors and not the special-purpose chips called graphics processing units, which most high-end supercomputers rely on for heavy number crunching. That underlying design could…

American Factories Lag in Adopting A.I. This Drugmaker Is an Exception.

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In a sterile Bristol Myers Squibb lab about an hour north of Boston, scientists in scrubs and hairnets transfer living cells to a 2,000-liter stainless steel bioreactor that grows them for weeks. The goal is to produce proteins that are genetically engineered to attack cells that cause disease. Tiny variations in heat, light or pH level can stop the cells from growing, causing drug shortages that endanger patients. Typically scientists would have to wait to see what went wrong during that fragile process, but now artificial intelligence is used to…

Ford Says an Affordable Electric Pickup Truck is Still Coming Next Year

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Last year Ford Motor suspended production of an electric pickup truck, shut down a battery factory in Kentucky and booked a $20 billion loss to account for its diminished plans. Then, last month, the senior executive who oversaw development of this new technology left the company. But Ford executives insist that those setbacks do not mean that the company has given up on electric vehicles. As evidence, they point to a former warehouse here in Long Beach, Calif. There, a team lead by Alan Clarke, a Tesla veteran, is building…

DeepSeek’s Sequel

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Remember the “DeepSeek moment?” The Chinese start-up announced in early 2025 that it had created an artificial intelligence model that could rival ChatGPT. Not only that, it had created it at a fraction of the cost of its American competitors. If China had been considered behind the United States on A.I., DeepSeek changed that. Almost instantly, its model became the most downloaded free app in the U.S. Some in Silicon Valley started calling it “A.I.’s Sputnik moment.” DeepSeek released its latest model last week. Today, my colleague Meaghan Tobin, who…

DeepSeek’s Sequel Set to Extend China’s Reach in Open-Source A.I.

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When the Chinese start-up DeepSeek published details about one of its artificial intelligence models last year, it sent shock waves through the tech industry. The company said it had built its system by spending far less on computer chips than American rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic. It marked the start of what became known as China’s “DeepSeek moment,” shorthand for the belief that Chinese A.I. companies were ready to showcase their technical capabilities to the world. The DeepSeek moment reflected a shift in the global A.I. landscape. The change was…