Research in AI, France and Germany side by side

Germany nevertheless intends to strengthen its investments. As with semiconductors, international competition is intensifying. The government of Olaf Scholz has announced a two-year plan of nearly one billion euros for the benefit of research on artificial intelligence.

The German state will practically double its budget in this sector. This envelope will allow it to finance the creation of 150 new university laboratories for research on AI.

But according to Reuters, the plan will also finance the development of data centers and the provision of the complex public data set. Applied to this data heritage, AI should make it possible to generate new information, Germany aims.

Officially, the country is not racing with France, but with the two world leaders, including the United States, which devoted 3.3 billion dollars to AI research in 2022. For the Minister of Research, the Europe has assets other than spending.

Explainable AI to compete against the US

“We have an explainable, trustworthy and transparent AI. It’s a competitive advantage,” says Bettina Stark-Watzinger in reference to the AI ​​Act – despite opposition from leading European entrepreneurs.

And what about France? Between 2018 and 2022, the French State executed its national strategy for AI, endowed with a budget of public funds of 1.5 billion euros for five years. This strategy pursued two major ambitions.

It was a question of permanently establishing France in the top 5 expert countries in AI on a global scale, but also of making it the European leader in AI research – because Union or not, the rivalry remains within from Europe.

As Inria points out, Germany remains a privileged partner despite everything. Thus, a memorandum of understanding containing 5 projects between Inria and the DFKI was concluded. In addition, European neighbors share two calls for AI projects.

Jean Zay, a French asset?

To serve its ambitions in artificial intelligence, France also relies on its own forces, including its Jean Zay supercomputer. Inria recalls that this is the “first French supercomputer converged between supercomputing and AI.”

“Jean Zay has already enabled more than 1,200 projects to be carried out, including BLOOM, the largest multilingual open science model, with 46 languages ​​including 20 African languages ​​and 176 billion parameters,” the institute mentions.

Nevertheless, as the co-director of the French AI player, LightOn, declared, the supercomputer does not allow it to compete with the Americans in terms of computing power, in particular for lack of GPUs in sufficient numbers.