>More seriously: what is the benefit for the citizens of Europe to chase trends?

If you sit out the trend, somebody else will have more money (or bigger army, or just an army that can actually shoot at things and people) and you will not be able to choose what trends to chase.

Exactly. Also, whatever those AI leaders invent, two months later the whole world has it.

I mean when GPT 3.5 came out it seemed amazing, but requiring a 8x Nvidia N100 or whatever guaranteed that id never have it at home. A year or so later llama 3.1 accomplished similar results on pc at home. It's a race but the winners are only slightly ahead and wasting a lot of money doing it.