The Economist – Is Europe Ready?
Europe is caught between Putin and Trump
Russia is becoming more dangerous, America is less reliable and Europe remains unprepared. The problem is simply put, but the scale of its solution is hard to comprehend. The security arrangements based on NATO that emerged from the Second World War—and have prevented a third—are so much part of Europe’s fabric that remaking them will be an immense task. European leaders urgently need to jettison their post-Soviet complacency. That means raising defence spending to a level not seen in decades, restoring Europe’s neglected military traditions, restructuring its arms industries and preparing for a possible war. The work has barely begun.
The murder of Alexei Navalny, Russia’s main opposition leader, in a penal colony on February 16th ought to have shattered any remaining illusions about the ruthlessness and violence of Vladimir Putin. As the fighting enters its third year, Russia is winning in Ukraine. Having put the economy on a war footing, Russia’s president is spending 7.1% of gdp on defence. Within three to five years, Denmark’s defence minister has said, Mr Putin could be ready to take on nato, perhaps by launching hybrid operations against one of the Baltic states. His aim would be to wreck nato’s pledge that if one country is attacked, the others will be ready to come to its aid.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/02/22/caught-between-putin-and-trump
How Marine Le Pen is preparing for power
It is an annual ritual in France for political leaders to make a new year’s address. Time was that Marine Le Pen, the leader of the hard-right National Rally (rn, formerly the National Front), did so from the back room of a boxy building in Nanterre, on the drab outskirts of Paris. In those days the party she took over in 2011 from her father, Jean-Marie, was more about low-budget protest and fringe provocation than taking power.
This January the job fell to Jordan Bardella, her slick 28-year-old protégé and now president of the rn, whom she watched from the front row. In a dark suit and tie, he spoke from a grand salon on the swanky Avenue Hoche in Paris, a step away from the Champs-Elysées. The symbolism was potent. The shift from the capital’s periphery to the heart of elite Paris encapsulates a political strategy: the rn is preparing for power.
https://www.economist.com/europe/2024/02/25/how-marine-le-pen-is-preparing-for-power
Meet the French startup hoping to take on OpenAI
Some races are over before they really get going. So it can seem in the contest to make the best large language models (llms). These algorithms power generative artificial intelligence that can produce humanlike text and other output. Openai, the American creator of Chatgpt, appears leagues ahead. It has made the world’s most powerful llm, called gpt-4. The company is gobbling up talent, data and computing power to build cleverer models. As a result, it attracts more users, and with them more capital to pour into even more sophisticated models.
But a French startup called Mistral is trying to throw a spanner in this ai flywheel. On February 26th it released a new llm. The model, called Mistral-Large, is smaller than gpt-4, measured by the number of parameters it uses (a common gauge of model power). Even so, it nearly rivals gpt-4 in important aspects of performance, such as reasoning. Mistral also unveiled a Mistral-Large-powered Chatgpt competitor, Le Chat (pronounced le shah, like the French word for cat rather than the English homograph). And it announced a deal with Microsoft, an ai juggernaut which already has a deep partnership with Openai. The tech giant will take a small stake in Mistral and make the French firm’s models available via its Azure cloud.
https://www.economist.com/business/2024/02/26/meet-the-french-startup-hoping-to-take-on-openai
Kharkiv is struggling under Russian rocket attacks
“That is my blood,” says Natalya Popova, showing a video she took on January 2nd in her flat in Kharkiv. When a missile hit nearby she grabbed her six-year-old son and put him in the bathtub, covering him in blankets for protection. A second explosion peppered her with shards of glass. They survived, but Ms Popova is sending her son out of the city. A renewed wave of attacks since December has shaken the confidence of this north-eastern Ukrainian city and region, leaving its people angry and dejected.
Before Vladimir Putin’s invasion in February 2022, almost everyone in Kharkiv dismissed the idea that Russia would attack this predominantly Russian-speaking city, 40km south of the border. “Would your brother attack you? No, he would not!” yelled an angry woman your correspondent spoke to in a market at the time. Ten days later Russian troops entered Kharkiv, only to be beaten back by Ukrainian forces. They then spent six months shelling it from the outskirts.
https://www.economist.com/europe/2024/02/26/kharkiv-is-struggling-under-russian-rocket-attacks