and during that hot summer....
Across Europe, the calendar softens in July and August. Beaches and mountain trails fill, inboxes slow to a humane pace, and many leaders finally find the untidy, generative space to connect ideas that have been jostling for attention since spring. Out of that quiet comes a different kind of energy: not the brittle rush of deadlines, but the steadier conviction that follows perspective. It’s often in these warm weeks that AI stops being a headline and starts to look like something you can actually touch, shape, and put to work. Back under the sun, speculation also matures. Will we see IPOs from OpenAI and Anthropic, and what would public markets demand in return—clearer governance, more predictable unit economics, sharper answers on the compute supply chain? Or will a new player, perhaps from an unexpected European lab or an open-source coalition, announce something smaller yet smarter: a model that sips power, understands context, and nestles into actual workflows rather than chasi...