Welcome back. The main thing happening today is the launch of the Rhine Group, a new coalition to rebuild European competitiveness. Live 12–3 BST. Here's your Order of Play.
WHAT’S HAPPENING TODAY
Europe's decline isn't inevitable, according to a new group of its most influential economists and founders, but the clock is ticking.
Mario Draghi, the former ECB chief and Italian prime minister, and Patrick Collison, co-founder of Stripe, have launched the Rhine Group. The forum will bring together policymakers, economists, entrepreneurs and business leaders to turn ideas into reforms. It grows directly out of Draghi's landmark 2024 report on European competitiveness.
Only four of the world's fifty largest technology companies are European, and the group argues the continent is starting from behind in almost every technology set to define the coming decades. Left unchecked, it warns, stagnation would erode Europe's ability to fund defence, healthcare, pensions, education and climate investment. As the manifesto puts it, "decline is not inevitable, but it is the direction we are heading" without urgent action.
The group points to the highest US tariffs since the 1930s, a more aggressive China competing inside Europe's own market, and strategic dependencies that no longer look safe. The old cushions, open trade and American security guarantees, can't be relied on as they once were.
Alongside Draghi and Collison, the membership runs from Shopify's Tobi Lütke and Economist editor Zanny Minton Beddoes to AI investor Leopold Aschenbrenner, with Spanish economist Luis Garicano running it day to day. It won't replace the EU or national governments, it's a closed-door, Chatham House Rule talking shop, but the bet is that getting these people in one room might produce reforms the political system hasn't managed on its own.
We're diving into all of it on today's show at 12 BST.
YESTERDAY’S MOMENT
Factory co-founder and CTO Eno Reyes came into the studio to explain why the AI benchmarks everyone quotes are getting harder to trust.
"Ultimately the public benchmarks are so gamed it's really hard to know, is this actually better?" Feed a lab the whole test, he argued, and the result is almost meaningless: "If you give them the whole benchmark, then I can guarantee you they'll get better at it. But that doesn't mean that the model's good at all the tasks." His fix is a hard private evaluation which he says makes a far better north star for judging what actually works.
Reyes also argued that no single lab is best at everything, "There is no model lab that actually has the best model for every task", which is why he thinks companies will increasingly want to pick and choose, and even own their models outright.
Watch the full clip below.
YESTERDAY’S BANGER OF THE DAY
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