The nuanced version I've heard in other tech industries (bio/agri-tech) is this:
a) Europe organisations and gov't does all the deep research;
b) US private companies turns it into products and reap the PR and money.
In fact, I know of a huge company that does all their research in the EU, where they can get gov't funding, but then the process to turn them into products is in the US (less regulation, larger market).
Other comments highlighted some aspects, but one thing that should not be underestimated is that German hacker culture has strong anarchistic tendencies and there just is no place to be creative in cs and make money, at least not in the same way as in the us.
So lots of highly talented people just do open source in their free time or work at universities.
> As mentioned earlier,[MIR](Sec. 21) when only consulting surveys from the Anglosphere, it is not always clear[DLC] that Deep Learning was first conceived outside of it. It started in 1965 in the Ukraine (back then the USSR) with the first nets of arbitrary depth that really learned.[DEEP1-2][R8] Soon afterwards, multilayer perceptrons learned internal representations through stochastic gradient descent in Japan.[GD1-2a] A few years later, modern backpropagation was published in Finland (1970).[BP1] The basic deep convolutional NN architecture (now widely used) was invented in the 1970s in Japan[CNN1] where NNs with convolutions were later (1987) also combined with "weight sharing" and backpropagation.[CNN1a]
In this case they were actually the first to the punch(along with openAI)!