Dear Sam,

After Paris, Brussels, Dublin and Zurich, you are now coming to Munich. AI Germany is delighted and then quickly ignores the fact that we are only the fifth choice for you and that “only” communicators, lobbyists and a few developers will be sitting in the Isar metropolis for the time being. Politicians can celebrate. We are all hoping for an AI and robotics offensive from you - from Munich. After all, Intrinsic has a few developers in Munich, Kuka is just around the corner, not to mention the Robotik KI Lab and Agile. But you may not be as interested in “traditional” robotics as we all assume or would like. And as LeCun put it so well: developers with an interest in real AI should not concern themselves with LLMs. Phew, we've been lucky again in Germany - haven't we? Robotics is the new megatopic - large action models and that's where we have the domain knowledge. There's that “whistling in the woods” of industry data and our domain knowledge again. Do you know how much longer this will save us?

I think you're interested in that too. Maybe that's why you went to Zurich, because it's the Silicon Valley of robotics. That's what the modest Swiss write on their website and, unfortunately, they're right. Sony, NVIDIA, Apple. Meta, Magic Leap, Alphabet and many more have their labs there - they are practically your neighbors. Then there are the top universities and lots of spin-offs. Anybotics is certainly one of Switzerland's flagships, but so are the many drone start-ups and approaches such as hearing robots from Rocket Science. Phew, it pains me to hear that, because we actually wanted to drive the future of robotics and AI in Germany. We wanted to be the hotspot after Odense. And now you have to read that Apple AI boss Bengio is also going to Switzerland - to Lausanne.

But perhaps this is just a very German discussion and I should think more European - in Paris, cheques worth billions are currently being written, Germany is somehow involved and anyone who knows French industrial policy knows that Paris will make sure that French companies in particular benefit and that the money is invested locally. Does LeChat from Mistral sometimes make you sleep uneasily?

Unfortunately, our industrial companies don't sleep soundly enough. Some are now hoping for DeepSeek instead of working on models themselves and investing money. It's a crisis here in Germany - the AI crisis, the economic crisis and we now prefer to buy cutting-edge technology instead of helping to develop it ourselves. You're a tech star and certainly don't know your way around companies' purchasing processes, but it's called single sourcing - it can end dangerously (we've had it before), but well, that's the way it is. There's a lot of talk and hardly any action. We have elections in Germany in a few weeks. On Sunday, the leading candidates met for a TV duel. They didn't talk about AI and digitalization. We're still whistling in the woods.