We haven’t heard too much from France lately, other than in the context of ball-kicking matches. The country is out of the World Cup, but how is France doing more generally?
A photo of the French World Cup team doesn’t suggest economic greatness. The players wore jerseys with the logos of an American company (Uber) and a Hitler-founded German company (VW):
Trump-hating neural network guru Yann LeCun was born in France, but has worked “primarily at Bell Labs, New York University and Meta Platforms, Inc.” (Wikipedia). He shifted back towards his homeland in late 2025 with Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs, which claims to be doing everything better than the American and Chinese LLM companies, but doesn’t seem to have anything to show yet. Can a country where it is illegal to work more than 35 hours per week compete in the only arena that matters anymore? Given France’s prowess at building nuclear power plants, one might imagine that the country would be a natural habitat for data centers. Unfortunately, France seems to have lost its mojo in nuclear power, with recent projects subject to massive time and cost overruns (China is the superstar now, according to the geniuses at Harvard). At the rate that France and the US are going, it would be cheaper to melt Earth with CO2 and buy a new planet than to stay on the current nuclear plant construction trajectory.
The French don’t have anything like Dutch ASML that can pick up some crumbs from the NVIDIA/TSMC table.
Who wants to predict the next significant innovation from a culture that was one of the world’s most innovative? Or maybe that culture doesn’t exist anymore because the legacy French are being bred out of existence? Foreign-born women in France have a total fertility of 3, far above the 1.56 average for all of France that includes the immigrants and children of recent immigrants (with some statistical magic, France officially says that the TFR for immigrant women is only 2.37 despite the standard calculation coming up with 3). The most successful residents of France, as measured by genetics, are those from Africa outside of the Magreb (TFR over 3) and those from North Africa (TFR just under 3). In the long run, therefore, we’d expect France to be as innovative as Algeria, Côte d’Ivoire, and Congo have been.
Separately, how about some music to celebrate our brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters across the Atlantic? In order to honor Brigitte Macron, a strong independent woman not afraid to smack a wimpy man whenever necessary, I’ll pick Louise Farrenc (1804-1875): “In the 1830s, Farrenc gained considerable fame as a performer and her reputation was such that in 1842 she was appointed to the permanent position of Professor of Piano at the Paris Conservatory, a position she held for thirty years and one which was among the most prestigious in Europe. Farrenc was the only woman to hold the esteemed position and rank at the Paris Conservatory throughout the 19th century.”
Loosely related, who enjoyed the World Cup this year? Never having played soccer, I’m not in love with watching. It feels random and chaotic. I don’t like the flopping or the shirt-pulling (an NFL player who did either would be called a “sissy”?).
Only slightly related to France, but definitely related to Florida (Lionel Messi featured):
It’s great to have Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Ken Griffin, Larry Page, et al., as taxpaying neighbors, but I wonder how many Floridians would give all of them back to their respective Lands of the Righteous in order to keep Messi.
Straight Outta Fort Lauderdale…
Finally, an EU perspective:
Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs is not working on LLMs, it is working to develop AI systems that can solve dynamic spacial problems, something LLMs are not good at, since forecasting output by parsing and learning from a lot of text is not the same as forecasting next spacial position. ASML is not picking up crumbs from NVIDIA and TSMC, it is their major equipment supplier. Somehow tooling companies always make less money then their retail market facing clients, see Apple/Foxconn and Tesla/host of its supplier.
Western Europe seems to be declining, but it looks like that Germanic countries better manage their third world migrants; probably due more hierarchical organization based on respect of rules and of seniority and bureaucratic hierarchy build on merit, and not on populism or personal freedoms.
I think it is hard to appreciate a sport you have never played since you will not understand the skills required. So baseball is just hitting a ball with a stick. And basketball is throwing a ball in a hoop. I never had much interest in soccer till my kid played for a few years. The coach had played college ball at Penn. and knew what he was doing. So he could explain the game & had the parents who wanted participate in the practices so we could start to understand the skills required. Soccer is pretty much nonstop action with lots of strategy and high level athleticism. There is a randomness element that requires close attention – by both the spectators and participants. Unlike American sports, the athletes are not jumbo sized freaks, if anything the opposite. The international competition is more tribal than say Ohio State playing Michigan. I think it is a great sport for kids because it requires fitness (no flabby soccer players) & can be played through middle age.
I had played soccer and call it a dull game. The only fan in soccer is attending games in person and experiencing small post-game riots, a novelty in former Soviet Block.
I also had played baseball with my kids and participated in my kids American football competitions. Baseball is much more intelligent and skill – based game. It definitely can be played till age of 60. American football is much tougher, a lot more physical and require more strategy.
There are no chubby athletes, period. Sumo wrestlers and highest weight division weight lifters and wrestlers excluded. Soccer is not a healthy game. It leads to regular leg hematomas and knee/ankle damage that haunt former athletes. It also can lead to brain damage as soccer ball head hits and strikes are common. Best players also abuse enhancement drugs. See Diego Maradonna, who died at the ripe old age of 60, seven years before US Social Security age for his age cohort, and his autopsy
(Regarding fat athletes) What, Bartolo Colon and Dan Vogelbach and no doubt others were just an evil dream? Why is Cal Raleigh nicknamed ‘Big Dumper’? And having a slim o-line is no recipe for success.
Soccer is healthy at least in the sense that each game you run approximately a 10k with intervals, which should be good for the body. However, my soccer-playing acquaintances all got out of the beautiful game in their early 30s because of various leg injuries, meniscus surgeries, achilles tendons, etc. Maradona on the other hand probably died fairly young because he was an enthusiastic cocaine-enjoyer.
The NFL used to be a lot harder. I’m sure we can all recall a number of gruesome injuries and practices. Would Tom Brady have won seven superbowls if he had started out a decade earlier?
Paul Seixas is the 19 year old French cyclist who appears to be the latest French phenom and hope. He’s the youngest rider since 1937 to enter the Tour de France. Even Macron has gotten involved, intervening to make sure that Seixas stays with a French team. Macron even showed up at one of the Stages of the Tour to meet/praise Seixas. The last French rider to win the Tour was Bernard Hinault in 1985. Seixas is currently in 4th (!) place, astounding for the hardest bike race in the world, and one of the toughest of all sporting events.
> Trump-hating neural network guru Yann LeCun was born in France, but has worked “primarily at Bell Labs, New York University and Meta Platforms, Inc.” (Wikipedia). He shifted back towards his homeland in late 2025 with Advanced […]
Name one software company like Google from Europe? All companies there are from some intersection of banking/industrial engineering/accounting/defence/game etc. Nothing like Google or Microsoft. My experience there was that they don’t know how to write software like the Silicon Valley folks, but they can’t accept it. The folks who do work in the States.
As soon as the likes of Google/MS go into other markets like automobiles they will kill it. I actually would like to know why they haven’t.
> Name one software company like Google from Europe?
SAP? $200B market cap, though it’s business is closer to Oracle than Google.
When it comes to computing, Europe has traditionally been seen as the farmer’s league of the US.
I seem to recall that dominance in computing has been a US strategic goal, though I can’t find the reference. But if nothing else, the Americans are willing to spend a lot more than Europe on the field.
Regarding cars, seems more like the West is getting killed by China. Only mega-tariffs can save us!
“A Frenchman comes here to make money, and that is about all that need be said of him. He is only a Frenchman. He neither learns our language nor loves our country. His hand is on our pocket and his eye on Paris. He gets what he wants and, like a sensible Frenchman, returns to France to spend it.”
Frederick Douglass
https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/our-composite-nationality/
In retrospect, I’m not sure the EU was a good idea.