Artificial intelligence, at the center of all attention and speculation since the prodigious rise of generative AI, will transform our society. It will become a key component of products and services across the economy, from drug and materials discovery to solutions to climate change. A technological race between large nations has thus begun on so-called “frontier” models, of large size and whose capacities exceed those of the most advanced models marketed in 2023. It is stimulated by the new economic and progress perspectives social offered by this development. France has assets and intends to come out of this race in the leading pack.
What are these assets? First, talents and determined companies capable of producing state-of-the-art generative models, particularly for text generation, such as Mistral, LigthOn or OpenLLM France. As well as in image generation (PhotoRoom), video generation (Aive) and applications (Poolside, Nabla, Bioptimus, Comand.ai, Dust and many others). Beyond that, there is an entire national ecosystem that is busy with its more than 600 AI start-ups, including around ten unicorns.
Our policy must be to support these initiatives and make them champions by ensuring them access to resources and infrastructure that will enable them to successfully carry out their developments. Their competitiveness will depend on the competition of talents in mathematics, computing infrastructures, a significant source of carbon-free energy, exhaustive and quality databases, without forgetting French cultural specificities, and means of testing and dissemination. representative and independent assessment.
In this regard, I welcome the work accomplished by public actors, and particularly that of our elders: there already exists a sector of fundamental and applied mathematics, in direct contact with industry, probably the most selective and most sought after in the world. . We also benefit from a supercomputer integrator Eviden, clouders like Scaleway and OVHCloud, a nuclear sector, via EDF, the leading European electrician and its ability to prepare for the future through Small modular reactors (SMR) and Power Purchase Agreement (PPA), an institutional network of information and data in all professional and cultural fields.
Guillaume Avrin, national coordinator for artificial intelligence
© / Guillaume Avrin /
Open source, pillar of the French strategy
On generative AI, the part of the National Strategy for AI devoted to this technology was launched by the President of the Republic in June 2023 at VivaTech, with the financing of computing infrastructure to the tune of 550 million euros. and a call for projects dedicated to the digital commons of generative AI. We are aware that quality public research is an essential driver of our capacity for innovation. We are thus continuing, in parallel, the massive support of an organized, articulated, optimized and independent network of laboratories with the establishment of IA Clusters in relation to the structuring projects of our national research organizations Inria, CEA and CNRS within of PEPR AI. These research activities are also intended to position us on the next disruptive innovations, on “post-generative AI”. Intranational mechanisms, such as France 2030, the Bpifrance and TIBI 2 funds, the CIR, tax reforms (flat tax, BSPCE, etc.), or intra-European, such as Horizon Europe and Digital Europe, also contribute to occasionally supporting R & D of our AI companies.
One of the pillars of our strategy is open source. This movement embodies the fundamental principles of collaboration, accessibility and shared innovation. It contributes to the democratization of AI, to driving disruption, to preventing the concentration of know-how by a few dominant players. By encouraging the sharing of source codes and data, open source allows a multitude of talents, whether from academic research, industry or civil society, to contribute to enriching AI through their own areas of expertise and to disseminate it in our economy. This approach helps to strengthen a sovereign ecosystem. Well aware of this issue, France was a pioneer in the development of an open source model with Bloom. Here again, several private initiatives (Kyutai, Mistral, Hugging Face, OpenLLM France, etc.) have supported the nation’s ambition to be the standard bearer of open source AI in the world.
“As with nuclear power, AI will offer countries that adopt it great power status.”
France therefore has numerous resources in this AI race. So that they can be better known to all in an approach of attractiveness, and to direct innovations towards our challenges and our needs, we plan to launch in 2024 a major challenge on general-use AI. Its objective will be to lead international consortia and thus promote a rapid rise in maturity of general-use AI technologies on applications identified as priorities for France and Europe. In this context, our national champions will have the opportunity to distinguish themselves, learn from other participants and benefit from evaluation tools adapted to the most advanced AI models. The country will have a leading role in the establishment of international governance of artificial intelligence, in continuity with the AI Act and in connection with the Global Partnership for Artificial Intelligence and the OECD. The AI summit which will be held in France by the end of January 2025 and which follows the Safety Summit organized in November 2023 by the United Kingdom, will be a great opportunity to make progress on these subjects.
Finally, progress remains to be made. If we have everything to stand out in the technological competition, we will still need to strengthen ourselves in the integration of technologies into finalized and widely deployable solutions meeting the needs of our companies in all areas. We are calling on our large groups, in particular the AI Manifesto and the Trusted Digital Sector Strategic Committee, to build complementarities with our start-ups and thus access the upper level, of an integrated national industrial sector.
If the French and European economic models do not allow comparison with the strategy of other world leaders, based on colossal private investments, they nevertheless create talents and exceptional discipline, offering us a unique competitive advantage. As with nuclear power, AI will offer countries that adopt it a great power status, a position of authority on the international scene, and will help to protect future generations.
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