Emmanuel Macron intends to counter the leadership of the United States in a particular field. And calls on the French to play the Made in France card.
What if Paris became the world capital of AI? This is in any case the wish mentioned by Emmanuel Macron, while France welcomes this week the summit of action on artificial intelligence at the Grand Palais in Paris. In an interview with the France 2 newspaper on Sunday, he undertook to erect France as a competitor of the United States and China. With this in mind, the president has already announced investment in the field of AI, up to “109 billion euros for the next few years”. By way of comparison, Washington plans to invest $ 500 billion over four years, recalls The world.
But is there really a French alternative capable of competing with Chatgpt, Gemini or Deepseek, this new Chinese AI which already gives cold sweats to Silicon Valley? Emmanuel Macron is convinced that France has considerable assets. He takes as an example “Le Cat”, this new French artificial intelligence chatbot, made available in the Apple App Store and in the Play Store on Android since February 6, 2025. “Long live the cat!”, had reacted Emmanuel Macron to this announcement, on his X account (ex-Twitter).
The conversational robot was developed by the French startup Mistral AI, specializing in artificial and competing intelligence of the American giant Openai. “This is an additional, important step, in our career of a scientific team at its beginnings to a team that makes the product,” said Arthur Mensch, co-founder of Mistral a few days ago, in an interview with Figaro. A point of view shared by the French head of state. During his intervention on the public channel, he indeed called all French people to “download” the “Le Chat” application, which he considers a new competitor in the race for the best AI. For the French president, prefer this AI rather than Chatgpt is a strategic character to stay in the race, which Donald Trump is won with hundreds of billions of dollars.
In an interview with the Parisian this Sunday, Arthur Mensch also played on patriotic fiber: “Our model speaks very well French and better understands cultural biases and European values. You will therefore prefer his ‘personality'”, a-t -It said, adding that his AI was “more virtuous in terms of confidentiality and transparency”.
“We need more economic and European patriotism. We must go there, buy French and European artificial intelligence each time it exists,” also urged Emmanuel Macron on Friday in a given interview with several regional press titles, of which The Parisian. “Are we ready to fight to be fully independent, independent, or do we let the competition be reduced to a battle between the United States of America and China? If the Europe seizes this subject, simplifies, accelerates, it has a card to play, “he assured.