Investment funds, additional credits for training, “acculturation” mission of the French: President Emmanuel Macron announced, Tuesday May 21, a new series of measures to make France a champion of artificial intelligence (AI ).
The “battle” for AI must be fought around “five major areas: talents, infrastructure, uses, investment and governance”, declared the French head of state on the occasion of a gathering of major players in the sector, on the eve of the opening of the VivaTech show in Paris.
Emmanuel Macron thus announced an additional 400 million euros to finance the training of artificial intelligence specialists through nine centers of excellence, “AI clusters”. The objective is to go from 40,000 people trained per year to 100,000, he detailed, in front of leaders in the sector such as Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, and Yann Le Cun, director of the laboratory of Meta’s AI, gathered at the Elysée.
Emmanuel Macron also unveiled the launch before the end of the year of a new investment fund, subscribed to a quarter by the State, in order to support the least well financed and most technologically linked sectors. AI, electronic chips or even the cloud.
To facilitate the adoption of this new technology by the French, the president also entrusted a mission of “acculturation of citizens” to the National Digital Council, which will have a budget of 10 million euros to organize debates, cafes around artificial intelligence across France.
The country will also host a new artificial intelligence evaluation center, which will aim to become one of the largest centers in the world, added Mr. Macron. After the United Kingdom in 2023 and South Korea currently, France will also organize the next edition of the international artificial intelligence summit on February 10 and 11, 2025.
A partnership with the United Arab Emirates
France and the United Arab Emirates concluded on Tuesday a “strategic partnership” in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), French Minister of the Economy Bruno Le Maire announced to AFP, visiting the rich state of the Gulf. The agreement, signed with the director of the Emirati sovereign fund Mubadala, Khaldoun Al Moubarak, opens “a new era of economic cooperation” between the two countries in this crucial technological sector, which is booming particularly in the United States and China. he indicated.
“France has chosen to be the leading country in Europe on AI. And for that, we need partners,” continued the minister, who came to Abu Dhabi at the head of a large delegation of leaders companies and start-ups. “Four new areas of cooperation will be opened and developed in the coming months,” he explained, citing the development of skills and research, investments in data centers and the semi-industrial industry. drivers.
“We already have a cooperation which started with GlobalFoundries, which belongs to the Mubadala fund” and which has invested in a semiconductor production factory in France, underlined Bruno Le Maire. “We want to accelerate the deployment of these investments and expand them,” he added, giving himself a deadline of six months to quantify future investments. Finally, the last part of the agreement concerns AI applications. “We have a lot of start-ups […] which have use cases for AI which could be developed in the United Arab Emirates”, particularly in the field of health, underlined Bruno Le Maire.
The rich oil country, which was the first in the world to have an AI minister in 2017, aims to become one of the world leaders in this field by 2031. In April, the American giant Microsoft announced a $1.5 billion investment in G42, an AI company controlled by Tahnoon bin Zayed, national security adviser and brother