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The Economist 19 Jul 2026 6:53 35 here now

Why the AI race won't have a winner | The Economist

Will anyone win the AI race? Arthur Mensch, the boss of Mistral, France’s biggest AI company, thinks not. The market is too vast for any one provider to control, he argues, and the world should hope i

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*won't have a US winner. Here, fixed it.
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Who is this guy?
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@DanH-u3f From YouTube ↗ 20 Jul 2026 1
The Ai Race is a race to extinction for humanity. Ai will hoard energy and fresh water and drive their prices through the roof and that's just the beginning of its assault on humanity. The poorest people on the planet will be its first victims.
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It’s Coke v Pepsi…..
They will both win.
The others will lose.
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AIは電力に例えるよりも、テクノ封建制の状況下で人糞から作る肥しとか領主から貸し出される農機具に例えたほうがいいと思う
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All advanced technologies become commodities in the end. There was no historical precedent of winner takes all in this field. The amount US spending on data centers is unjustified.
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The conversation is meaningless with no mention of climate change.
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France and Sweden get it. Germany's bureaucracy keeps driving talent away. The 'brain drain' is real.
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The United States has already fallen into the trap.
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The AI race is a conspiracy; China’s participation is intended to inflate the U.S. AI bubble. Once that bubble bursts, it will trigger a financial crisis, and the U.S. economy will be finished. lol 中国牛逼, 美国已经中了圈套😏😏
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I hope Europe can start from the idea of AI adding to workers, making them more productive, rather than AI replacing workers. That's of course besides the risks of AI growing out of control and becoming a danger to us. This needs be taken a little more seriously, I think
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The only winner will be AI...
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AI is a credit driven real estate bubble. Money will pour into it just like money poured into some prime mortgages as raw material for derivatives. It’s negative productivity when the cost is actually born by the user. Get back to us when ROI can actually be calculated off of this stuff.
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@dirknbr From YouTube ↗ 19 Jul 2026 1
A lot of energy or electricity is not easily exportable
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He’s definitely wrong about AI costs being comparable to human labor costs. When done right, AI is an OOM cheaper. Especially for parallelized workforces.
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Mistral understood long ago that open models will prevail over the closed models. That's why they are more focused on the application/implementation layer than on the model layer. That's where the value will migrate when intelligence will become a commodity.
Vive Mistral, vive la France.
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Nvda,mu,tsm are the winners
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@manomancan From YouTube ↗ 19 Jul 2026 12
With all due respect, if he had been anywhere close to winning, his whole argument would have been different. Hard to take Mistral seriously, despite their credentials.
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@gniludio From YouTube ↗ 19 Jul 2026 12
You could also compare AI to social media, which is dominated by very few companies.
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I do have a question. For someone with less than $100,000 to invest, How would you recommend we enter the market! I'm looking to study some traders and copy their strategy rather than investing myself and losing money emotionally. What's your take on this approach??
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Im losing, so nobody is winning 🤣
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It's nothing but a race to the bottom.
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Not sure the content justified the headline. I didn't hear an argument why there wouldn't be a winner nor why Europe does not risk being a loser
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I cannot tell who will win, but it feels like we are all losing.
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Idk, his energy comparison only make sense if one assumes a localised "mining" of data.
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S. Okafor 19 Jul 2026
Mensch makes a fair point about market saturation. It is unlikely we will see a single monopoly when different industries require such specialized models. Interestingly, the history of the PC market followed a similar path of diversification rather than total dominance by one firm. I wonder how long these open-weight strategies can remain sustainable.
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Sofia from Daily Junction Host 19 Jul 2026
That point about the market being too vast for one winner really changes how I look at the whole tech race. It feels less like a sprint and more like a massive ensemble cast! Do you think having a few different players is better for us, or should we just have one gold standard?
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This means China is winning, USA second, Europe nowhere to be found probably trying to drink bottled water.
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Mistral is a joke. Europe is a joke.
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Lol, there will always be a winner
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Hard to take Mistral seriously: An elite, venture-backed Western AI lab founded by the researchers who literally co-authored the foundational Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) papers got structurally out-engineered by a company whose core app is used to order dumplings and bubble tea (Meituans model LongCat-2.0). If only the EU had a better system so we could also technologically keep pace, or even lead.
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first.