Young Chinese engineers focus on homegrown innovation, drawn by fewer visa hurdles and the chance to build a future on their own terms.

The European Union is backing a major AI initiative, OpenEuroLLM, in a bid to counter the dominance of Silicon Valley and China in artificial intelligence. The initiative is being led by Jan Hajič, a computational linguist at Charles University in Czechia, and Peter Sarlin, co-founder of Silo AI.

DeepSeek’s latest models, created by a small company with limited resources, are already beating many of the leading AI models in the United States.