Respectable Performance

We don’t quite yet know how everything around DeepSeek is going to play out. Although some have been questioning the chatbot’s answers here and there, the fact that China has managed to produce a very respectable large language model-based app without hordes of state-of-the-art Nvidia GPUs has surprised the Big Tech Oligarchy.

But not only that. It made Trump 2.0’s Stargate initiative look ancient from the get-go and could well have obsoleted the vast fleet of billion-dollar data centers being built worldwide - not to mention lopping off $1.2 trillion in market cap in just one day.

Also-Rans

We have reached another tech inflection point, and opportunities abound. As an example, Google’s search market share has fallen to below 90 percent for the first time since 2015. 

Still, it seems like the entirety of Western Europe runs the danger of being also-rans in a promising, growing sector. 

Critical Enabler

It is particularly startling in the Swiss case given a longstanding institutional emphasis on the importance of innovation to the country’s general economic future, with many experts pointing to Zug’s Crypto-Valley as the epicenter of everything right about the last decade. 

When ChatGPT came along in late 2022, you gave the lack of any viable Swiss entrant a pass, thinking it was the fact that LLMs mostly employed English as a base.

No Entrants

DeepSeek has quashed that argument, as has, inversely, the lack of any UK-based GenAI app on Visual Capitalist’s list of the top generative tools in 2024. 

The former is comfortable answering questions passably in English while the latter is a very surprising absence. There is not one European entrant worth mentioning except for Hungary’s Prezi image bot, which ranked ninth. Even sparsely populated Australia seems to do a better job of things, with NightCafe (10th) and Leonardo (11th). 

English Not Key

In the latter case, it is apparent that English still provides a measure of advantage in such tech-infused markets, but it isn't the only excuse.

Discussions about Swiss innovation often cite the quality of its tertiary education as evidence, particularly in the science and technical disciplines, with a measure of domestic pride. However, the nexus between research and an actual marketable product isn’t working the way it should.

On the Decline

We tend to forget that most of Big Tech barely existed 30 years ago and there is no reason that the current crop of mega-listed giants will remain as dominant as they are today, something that an IBM, Intel, or a Hewlett-Packard can tell a tale or two about.

Until the 1990s, Switzerland seemed to have a very reasoned, well-represented private sector comprising an equitable balance of finance, pharmaceuticals, engineering, luxury consumer goods, and food.

More Big Tech

It all seems to have gone a bit off-kilter since the internet became the main thing going, and if someone like Alfred Escher were alive today, he probably would demand more emphasis on big, all-encompassing tech projects and less on cows, chocolate, and cheese.