Europe… watches a technological revolution begin elsewhere, writes the rules for it, builds the authorities to supervise it, imposes the reporting — and only then wonders why so little of it is happening in Europe.
Meta AI launched in the United States in 2023. Europeans did not receive even a stripped-down chatbot until March 2025. Meta said the delay had lasted longer than it wanted because it had to navigate Europe’s “complex regulatory system.” The European version arrived without image generation, without multimodal features, and without training on European public content — the Irish Data Protection Commission having frozen that plan in 2024.
