So far as I know the two places where people have successfully launched social networks are Silicon Valley and China, and I'd say other parts of the US are exc

So far as I know the two places where people have successfully launched social networks are Silicon Valley and China, and I'd say other parts of the US are excluded -- like Cambridge VCs just didn't want to have any part of Facebook at all and the trauma of being rejected by them is part of Zuckerberg's origin story and why he won't listen to anybody else about anything. In Europe you could point to various forms of fecklessness of which the GDPR popups are probably the worst contemporary example but Europe saw that similar fecklessness was going to shut it out of the aviation industry and after the false start of Concorde created the very successful Airbus. So if you are imagining Europe being successful at anything today you have to imagine they are creating an "Airbus of ..." Europe invested heavily in the semantic web because they were worried about the "tower of babel" problem that affects commerce, that could be a goal for LLM development even though LLMs are already pretty good at that. One thing I found out in my market research was that people in the rest of EMEA (namely Africa and the Middle East) feel "too many languages" are a barrier to development and wanted that semantic revolution even more than the Europeans but didn't have the resources to spend on R&D.