Just before flying to New Caledonia in the midst of the crisis, Emmanuel Macron advanced onto more established territory: the President of the Republic spoke, Tuesday, May 21, on one of his favorite themes – the artificial intelligence (AI) – in front of an audience of engineers and entrepreneurs from the sector invited to the Elysée. “We have the capacity to be one of the champion countries of AI”, he said.
On the eve of the opening of the Vivatech innovation fair in Paris, this speech aimed to take up several of the recommendations of the report delivered in mid-March by the AI commission. And try to place Paris even further in “capital of AI”, with a view to holding an international summit on the subject, on February 10 and 11, 2025, following on from those organized by London in November 2023 and by Seoul this Tuesday, by videoconference.
Like the AI commission, the Elysée wants to present this technology in a light ” positive “. Mastering it is a “existential challenge” for France, said Mr. Macron, which could support growth. “On crucial subjects like health, education, the transformation of the State or the climate, what AI will make it possible to do is a fundamental revolution,” he argued.
A “very significant new fund”
Concretely, Mr. Macron first set the objective of increasing the number of people trained in AI from 40,000 to 100,000 per year (including 20,000 in continuing education). The idea is to “massier” dedicated training in universities and schools and to provide an additional 400 million euros to the nine French AI “clusters”, university centers of excellence.
To have the computing power necessary to train and operate large models capable, for example, of generating text or images, France must “welcome new data centers”also pleaded the Head of State, seeing in “carbon-free and controllable energy” nuclear one “enormous competitive advantage”. He welcomed the infrastructures announced at the Choose France summit by Microsoft, Amazon and Equinix. Paris “also discusses with players in the United States and Taiwan with the desire, within twelve to eighteen months, to produce semiconductors dedicated to AI in France or in Europe”, he explained.
Mr. Macron also hoped that “on AI as on the environment, Europe is not the continent that regulates the most while investing the least”. He pleads for a doubling of European budgets devoted to AI: in France, he announced the creation of a “very significant new fund, a quarter of which is subscribed by the State, to support the least well financed sectors and those most technologically linked to AI”, such as microchips, data centers or large language processing models. The aim is to avoid the use of American structures in very large fundraising for start-ups like Mistral or H, which raised 220 million euros this Tuesday in Paris.
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