The depressing reality is there are so many ways this could be happening. Is it unaccounted for methane in melting permafrost? Is it the fact carbon dioxide emissions are still increasing, thanks to India and China. Or perhaps some feedback mechanism we don't know about?
Considering how more damaging it is, I wonder does the world have a handle on how much methane is being released? Especially from thawing permafrost land. Climate change keeps seeming to happen quicker than we expect.
It is confusingly written, though my interpretation of this is that they are talking about a future variant of Ariane 6. I could be wrong, there are plans for something called Ariane Next in the 2030s, that will also be fully reusable, but this sounds like they intend it to happen this decade for the upper stage at least.
As with everything European there's a bewildering number of acronyms, national, and pan-national agencies involved. The French space agency CNES is leading this, though all ESA member states pool resources, and the Ariane rockets.
Confusingly, there is another ESA reusable rocket initiative centered around building a brand new rocket with a new type of engine, though it doesn't start launch testing until 2026.
Europe is behind the US and China on reusable rockets, but its space program will benefit from the world's move towards protectionist economic policies. It has always been helped by the 'buy European' policies of European governments, & geo-political changes make this approach likely to become stronger.
The American Big Tech companies are sowing the seeds of their own downfall by embracing the current US administration's Orwellian agenda. Much of the world will turn against them and their technology - Europe already explicitly is - and at home when times change, they will be remembered as Vichy-like collaborators for their betrayal of democracy.
I agree, in a sea of bad news, this is some very good news.
I hope it continues and robs Musk, Thiel and the other Big Tech hobgoblins of the power they were dreaming AI would give them.
Yes, but GPT-4 was at 7% and regarded as world best only months ago.
The true significance here, is that they've replicated the industry leader so easily and so quickly.
And it's a great idea to pump another $500 billion into these people, why? ...
Why not just put the money into Mistral?
Because they are not, as Silicon Valley/American thinking would have it, trying to "win" some AI Arms Race measured in stock market valuations.
This is so European governments & their civil service, educational institutions, the EU itself has an AI untainted by either American or Chinese values, and also independent of either of them.
There's a huge amount of humanoid robots in development, this list though long, I'm sure is missing some.
The €60 million in funding isn't much, though ten times more than what DeepSeek said they needed.
I suspect we're on a path where more and more American AI, as it embraces Orwellian police state/autocratic tendencies at home, will be outlawed in Europe.
People often talk about the profound first-mover advantages that might come to a nation that first develops AGI, but what about the one who develops workable fusion power first?
We are already seeing the decay of the fossil fuel age, and all the economic and political structures that go with it. The creation of fusion power would speed that up. China seems to be in a positive-feedback loop, where being the world's biggest industrial and manufacturing power is making it the technological leader too. A fusion power breakthrough might be a shot in the arm for that process.