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Article 3/4 on the threat of AI: What can the EU do to avoid the US using Superintelligence to crush the EU’s competitive edge and prosperity?
There is no discussion in the European Union, EU, in influential media or amongst responsible politicians of what will happen economically to the continent when the leading AI companies of China and the US reach Superintelligence. That is AI that can create new knowledge and new products of a sophistication and quality we cannot imagine today.
Av Timothy Tore Hebb.
> In that case, it is obvious the EU cannot remain industrially competitive. This article concludes with two possibilities that might save us economically. Though, one is quite unlikely.
The most insightful researchers and founders and leaders of the few AI companies in the US competing for Superintelligence believe it will arrive in about ten years.
So in a few years, the US and China can begin making products that the EU could never produce despite having had a competitive advantage in those areas for decades. Just to name two examples: medicine and car making. The examples could go on and on.
Think about all the critical companies — absolutely essential when it comes to creating jobs and wealth on our continent. How would the EU look without the great industrial and knowledge companies?
This economically existential — how else can one describe it — risk is not discussed at all in the EU amongst accountable politicians. This especially goes for those at the highest level in the EU. Newspapers that influence opinions should focus on this challenge too.
There is only one AI company in the EU with some AI potential. Future AI potential — how intelligent a company’s AI will become — is demonstrated by how the market values this AI company. It looks at future profits.
US OpenAI, with ChatGPT, is valued at 500 billion dollars (October 2025), according to its latest sale of shares. It is the most valued private company in the world. Anthropic, with Claude, is valued at 183 billion dollars (September 2025).
French AI company Mistral is probably the only European with potential to create some sort of highly intelligent AI, and Mistral is valued at 14 billion dollars (September 2025). That says everything about how the market appraises Mistral’s chances of succeeding in achieving even very intelligent AI: zero chance.
Under present circumstances, it will be impossible for Mistral to match OpenAI and Anthropic in aiding France in developing new revolutionary medical and industrial products that can compete with the US and Chinese ones in only a few years when Superintelligence arrives. Such as new medicines to treat different cancer forms or creating clean energy that hardly costs anything. And so on.
What is to come is illustrated by what has already happened. We only have to study what happens when a new technological disrupter occurs. Now, enter probably the Mother of all disruptors.
The most prominent scientific innovation thanks to AI is probably Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold. It is a good example of how Superintelligence will be used to gain a competitive advantage.
The Nobel prize in medicine in 2024 ought to really have been shared with AI. Only because of AI, it was possible for Demis Hassabis, founder of leading AI company DeepMind, and his team to create AlphaFold.
AlphaFold will help improve old medicines for diseases, invent better new ones for those diseases, but most impactful will be new ones for still untreatable diseases. DeepMind explains AlphaFold:
”Proteins underpin every biological process, in every living thing. Made from long chains of amino acids, each has a unique complex 3D structure. But figuring out just one of these can take several years, and hundreds of thousands of dollars. In 2020, AlphaFold solved this problem, with the ability to predict protein structures in minutes, to a remarkable degree of accuracy.
That’s helping researchers understand what individual proteins do and how they interact with other molecules. So valuable time and resources can be redirected into advancing research that could help solve society’s biggest medical and environmental challenges.”
About 200 million proteins have been predicted by AlphaFold.
Superintelligence will as time goes by be many times more intelligent than Albert Einstein or the best medical researchers that have ever lived and live today. No one knows how much more. Maybe 10 or 100 times? Think 10 or 20 years.
Now, AI researchers are developing AI agents where one AI agent equals one researcher (one can describe it this way) kind of is set free to achieve a goal decided by a human being — soon, very soon, an AI can decide the exact goal itself. The not long from now superintelligent AI agent decides how to achieve the goal — it is kind of given its own free will because otherwise it is difficult to create magic.
That is how Superintelligence will solve the climate crisis and invent free energy. So goes the theory. Yet, this brave new future has only begun to take its first few steps.
Imagine 1,000 such agents, each equivalent of a human researcher, developing one medicine and them working individually next to each other and as a team.
This is an intelligence that can come up with its own theories and hypotheses, conducting its own analyses from an amount of new and old data totally impossible for humans to find and process, in unimaginable creative ways. Superintelligence will see connections between data that no scientist could ever imagine. Therefore, revolutionary scientific breakthroughs and new products.
Still, there is a need to test those new developments, but in a not too distant future AI can do it virtually. Such is the theory. Imagine new medicines that can be evaluated just by computers. And since it is possible to test if medicines work and do not cause harm, the problems of AI hallucinations can greatly be avoided.
Another revolutionary milestone of what AI can do, a trait that will shoot right up into the sky with Superintelligence: DeepMind developed AlphaGo to master the ancient (more than 2500 years) Chinese board game Go where two players try to conquer the most territory on a board by moving around stones that positioned right remove the stones of the opponent.
Usually each player has 180 stones in either white or black and the board is a plain grid of 19 horizontal and 19 vertical lines. It is kind of like chess.
This was game two of five, where South Korean Go master Lee Se-dol lost against AlphaGo. Se-dol won one game. It took place in 2016.
AlphaGo played what is now a symbolic move that shows how AI works, how Superintelligence will think. Move 37 is the move that no other of the world’s greatest living players had made. Probably no player ever.
Probably, no human could ever see its strategic potential. It demanded such foresightedness. One commentator, also one of the world’s greatest Go players, thought it was a miserable mistake. Afterwards, he explained it was beautiful beyond imagination.
Move 37 illustrates AI’s possibility to think differently than man, how AI can develop a strategy with subgoals, how it can work backwards from the primary goal and anticipate the moves of an opponent from early on, how it by tactical measures can ”force” the opponent to play in a way so a move like move 37 causes victory.
So how did AlphaGo get so good at it? Well, AlphaGo played Go thousands of times, training, learning from and memorising every move and game it played, against itself. But first it studied games played by humans, to learn how you play the game.
By trial and error it got better and better. This is called ”reinforcement learning”, and is also used to train humanlike robots. This is why progress in robotics, research on creating humanlike robots, have been so fast lately. With ”reinforcement learning” it is possible to start out with a robot that cannot even stand up to develop into a robot that after countless trial-and-error episodes almost can move like a human. It does all this on its own.
So far, it cannot really do household chores, but we will not have to wait long. It can already handle eggs delicately and fold shirts neatly. Many robot researchers believe it will need another 3-5 years to be able to make a good dinner and clean even the precious parts of your home.
This example shows how competitive a country with access to superintelligent AI will be compared to countries without.
In September 2025, Danish Novo Nordisk let go of 9000 employees and that was 9 percent of all employees.
Novo Nordisk’s sales have been incredible since the launch of weight loss drug Ozempic (Semaglutide) that is a peptide similar to the hormone glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1). It was originally developed to treat diabetes 2 and was approved by FDA (the US department that approves drugs for specific uses) for diabetes 2 in 2017. But soon it was also used for weight loss.
Until this day, FDA has not approved Ozempic for weight loss. However, Wegovy, also made by Novo Nordisk, is identical to Ozempic and was approved for weight loss by FDA in June of 2021. In March 2022 the European equivalent — European Medicines Agency (EMA) — followed suit with Wegovy.
In 2023, Ozempic was the nineteenth most commonly prescribed medication in the United States, with more than 25 million prescriptions.
Sales are still very strong. But the price of the company — the market cap — has fallen drastically. The share price has fallen from 1545 dollars on June 28, 2024, to 580 dollars on 3 October, 2025. Now, Novo Nordisk is worth 1/3 of what it was worth at its peak.
What happened?
US Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro happened. They released Mounjaro (Tirzepatide), which works by activating two receptors, GLP-1 (Ozempic only activates this one) and GIP, to increase the level of incretins – hormones – in the body. US FDA approved Mounjaro for weight loss in November 2023.
The impact of a string of research papers showing the superiority of Mounjaro to treat obesity knocked Ozempic off the throne. The winner grabbed a huge part of the market.
One important study was published in July 2024 and it showed Mounjaro is much more effective than Ozempic. In the study, at a year, those on Mounjaro had lost on average 15 percent of their body weight, compared with 8 percent for those on Ozempic.
In December 2021, Novo Nordisk’s obesity drugs drove Danish growth as well as record profits as the company became the second-most valuable in Europe. In September 2024, Novo Nordisk’s 570 billion dollar valuation was greater than Denmark’s GDP.
This shows how exposed pharmaceutical companies are when competitors come up with more advanced scientific breakthroughs and products.
And this, of course, applies to all types of products.
Moreover, Superintelligence makes it possible to develop processes to build products much more cheaply than competitors do.
Conclusion:
There is only one way the EU can remain competitive with China and the US, if they are to compete in the same market, the EU needs Superintelligence too. If Europe is to compete with the US and China in the same market. Let us say safe Superintelligence can be achieved.
The EU started late. Now, it is investing in data centers too. The first stage: to build Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), when AI has the same cognitive skills as a human in every field. Then, Superintelligence, that takes this AGI to an intelligence level we cannot imagine. These humongous data centers are needed for that.
In October of 2025, the EU and individual member states announced another investment of 500 million Euros into data compute, training and technical expertise. It is to be used by start-ups and scientists. In total, the investment committed to building this infrastructure amounts to 2.6 billion Euros. It should increase as time goes by.
This is of course nothing compared to what the US labs are investing. Not to mention that they have this impossible lead. (The efficiency of data centers is measured in power consumption.) Getting enough GPUs — the processors that make AI possible — is only half the challenge. The other is finding enough energy.
These are a few of the US labs’ investments in data centers: OpenAI will invest 500 billion dollars, with a capacity of close to 10 GW, over the next few years in their Stargate project. While Meta, with Facebook, is to invest 600 billion dollars the next few years. One normal-sized nuclear plant produces 1 GW per year.
In 2025, Meta bought almost 1.5 million GPUs. If my research has been successful, Mistral should have close to 20,000 GPUs by 2026. It shows how the EU is not lagging but has declared walk over in probably the most important race in history.
Could the EU jointly afford to invest on the same level and achieve Superintelligence that results in these scientific breakthroughs?
Today, Europe produces a lot of compute. But those data centers belong to US companies and support US data centers.
One option is to make Mistral part of a common EU project. France ought to be interested, because alone they cannot afford building the data centers, and there is a lot of talent in the rest of the EU.
Otherwise, if France refuses, the rest of the EU could maybe do it by itself. There are open-source AI models — anyone can use them — and maybe it is possible to create safe Superintelligence by building on them. Mistral has open-source Large language models.
As does Chinese with, for instance, DeepSeek. It is considered excellent. Despite being run on a fraction of GPUs compared to what OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and Google use for their Large language models. This means, it does not have anything close to the energy need of the US ones.
Elon Musk managed to quickly build his highly plausible contender — xAI — to be first to reach Superintelligence in 2.5 years. It was founded in March of 2023.
If Europe cannot catch up, there might be another option. Yet, it is quite far-fetched.
All countries, without their own Superintelligence, could keep on like they have been doing since industrialisation. Creating their own secluded economy apart from and shutting out China and the US. Probably, only they have the real know-how to achieve true Superintelligence.
The economy outside those two countries is gigantic. The quality of products made by and consumed by Europe would be practically infinitely less advanced. Consequence: China and the US would only have each other to trade with.
In addition, this is plenty of leverage to make China and the US halt developing Superintelligence, that probably never ever can be 100 percent safe. (That is another article.) Imagine a superintelligent ransomware that can shut down a country’s entire banking system. Sweden is supposed to be the world’s first country to not use cash.
Together, the EU and the rest of the world, can keep their economies more or less Superintelligence free and with luck avoid extreme mass unemployment and the subsequent economic and social convulsions and tragedies.
The economic and social unrest caused by the consequences of Superintelligence ought to make the countries of Europe, with its past revolutions and their effects, very prudent. Or: it should.
If they manage to construct safe Superintelligence that eliminates existential threats to Europe. Otherwise, for instance, it would include cutting off the Internet connection to the US and China, and building a separate EU Internet.
However, all this does not sound very plausible.
