A few weeks ago, Dragon LLM, a French startup born from Lingua Custodia, stunned the AI community by unveiling the first European-designed large language model (LLM) architecture. Unlike the ubiquitous Transformer framework that underpins ChatGPT and most modern AI systems, Dragon LLM’s new approach is leaner, faster, and far less energy-hungry. This scientific achievement could eventually allow AI models to run locally, on SME servers or even on a simple smartphone. We met with Olivier Debeugny, founder of Dragon LLM, who envisions the creation of a true “Airbus of European generative AI.”