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0In this session of Innovator Coffee podcast featuring the guest Steven Wang, who is based in Milan, Italy, and hosts his own podcast, "Steven Data Talk."
The discussion focuses heavily on the AI ecosystem in Europe, contrasting it with the United States . Key topics addressed include the perceived "AI bubble,"challenges related to infrastructure shortages and the difficulty for European startups to secure funding, and the general cultural emphasis on work-life balance in Europe. Steven Wang also provides specific examples of interesting European AI startups and stresses the importance of education and risk control within the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence.
Podcast Timestamps:
00:00 – Introduction: Meeting Steven Wang
Background in finance, Milan, and his bilingual AI podcasting journey.
01:23 – How Europe Sees AI
Public perception, mixed sentiment, and regional AI maturity differences.
06:47 – European Work Culture & Innovation Pace
Work–life balance, labor regulations, and cultural impact on startups.
09:35 – Is AI a Bubble?
Different angles from model layer, application layer, and enterprise adoption.
17:56 – AI Infrastructure & Data Center Shortages
Why Europe struggles with compute availability and how it affects founders.
21:00 – Interesting AI Startups in Europe
Workflow orchestration agents, Excel–LLM bridges, and AI-powered 3D printing.
23:43 – What Drives (or Limits) European AI Innovation
Funding scale, government incentives, bureaucracy, and talent flow.
29:51 – The Startup Reality: Taxes, Cost, and Bureaucracy
Why founders often struggle financially despite funding.
35:19 – Global Community Building (Vansa & Beyond)
European–US ecosystem connections and emerging cross-border collaboration.
51:01 – The Next 5 Years of AI
Transformer limits, world models, small models on edge devices, and paradigm shifts.
Special thanks to Hannah Wang who did the wonderful job to assist to complete this podcast. www.linkedin.com
and Vicky who helps editing the podcast vickylan0004@gmail.com
Hosts:
Tom Kong
*Stanford EE alumni,
*Founder@ Stanford AGI Adventist Community (10K+ members so far from top VC, Engineers, startups from Silicon Valley )
*AI Lecturer, a serial entrepreneur in media and data. Advisor @ techtimes.com
*AI deployment for 8 years, with NLP and recent LLMs (RAG, Agent, Diffusion)
Wickey Wang
*IT Security Compliance Leader & University Faculty
*Growth fund VC advisor, VC fellow and Angel Investor with cybersecurity and AI focus
*GAI Security book co-author
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