Designed with the support of the Government, the French artificial intelligence Lucie closed just days after its launch due to multiple errors. The developers point out that it is in the experimental phase.
If France thought it could compete with ChatGPT, Gemini or even Perplexity, we will have to wait a little longer. In the war that developers around the world are waging, generative AI has taken an important place in recent years. Each new AI launched on the market hopes to at least be functional and why not compete with the behemoths in the sector (ChatGPT, Midjourney, Dall-E, etc.). But sometimes it happens that the machine does not work, makes mistakes in its answers or its calculation lines and simply does not find its audience.
This is exactly what is happening to Lucy. This new generative AI was launched last Thursday January 23 and was temporarily closed on Saturday 25, after only two days of use. A forced interruption following multiple errors from Lucie who does not seem to have successfully completed her test phase. Users wanted to ask her simple questions which she was unable to answer correctly. For example, when asked how much is “5(3+2)”, she answers 17 then finally 50, when the correct answer is 25. Likewise, she seems inexhaustible when we talk to her about cow’s eggs.
Lucie: an AI “Made in France” still in the development phase
These errors provoked the reaction of many users on social networks who did not hesitate to criticize this AI by comparing it to other, more developed and therefore more successful tools. But you should know that Lucie is still in “initial phase” as its creators claim. In a press release published on the project websiteit is recalled that “LUCIE is above all an academic research project” and that in view of its test phase “the responses generated by LUCIE are therefore not guaranteed and some contain biases and errors”.
Born from the collaboration between Linagora, a company specializing in free software and CNRS researchers, Lucy is a French AI project registered as part of the plan France 2030 which aims to invest massively in industry and innovative technologies. Faced with criticism, the creators of Lucy have assumed responsibility for putting it online.premature” but “necessary“in order to reveal a first version of the project to the general public. They also ask users”to respect the work of researchers and engineers who work to develop trustworthy, more ethical and more transparent AI systems.”
The release on the market of Lucy is therefore not planned for immediately. While waiting for a new testing phase, these creators point out that it does not “should not be used in educational or production contexts in its current version“. For now Lucy via its service lucie.chat is considered a “language model” and not knowledge, which can in particular explain errors in calculation or response to certain questions from users. In any case, the objective announced by Linagora and the CNRS is to release Lucie during the year 2025 and make it an open source AI that respects “European values“.