It is not a secret: if Emmanuel Macron takes the trouble to meet the American billionaire Elon Musk this Friday, June 16 on the sidelines of VivaTech, the Parisian fair dedicated to new technologies, his ambitions are above all economic. The President of the Republic will try to convince the boss of Tesla to choose France to install his car mega-factory project.
“Talking about automobiles and batteries”
“We are going to talk about artificial intelligence where it is involved, social networks, regulatory frameworks”, assured the French president in the aisles of VivaTech on Wednesday, the day of his visit to the show, which is signing its seventh edition. “I will also talk to him about cars, batteries, this sector, to praise the attractiveness of France and Europe,” he added.
Because Elon Musk dreams of a new Gigafactory to manufacture his electric vehicles, which would be added to those already installed in the United States, Germany and China. The goal is therefore to persuade the tech manitou that “France is the best possible place in Europe to set up the next Tesla factory”, in the words of the Minister Delegate for Digital, Jean-Noël Barrot, on Wednesday on CNBC.
This will be the third time that Emmanuel Macron has met the whimsical founder of Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink or even the biotechnology company Neuralink. No doubt these two champions of tech entrepreneurship will discuss advances in artificial intelligence. Co-founder of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, Elon Musk founded in mid-April a new startup specializing in AI, named X.AI… in parallel with his call for a moratorium on this technology which he says he fears.
For his part, Emmanuel Macron announced Thursday that France would invest an additional 500 million euros to support the French artificial intelligence sector, in order to compete with the efforts of the Americans and the Chinese in this field.
digital wild west
Emmanuel Macron will probably seek guarantees on the regulation of platforms. A subject that particularly concerns Twitter, taken up in pain by Elon Musk last October. Since then, the billionaire has relieved him of a large part of his staff, transformed into a virtual battlefield devoid of an effective moderation team… before abandoning its management.
However, the social network is in the sights of the Ministry of Digital which threatens to banish it from the European Union if it does not comply with the new community rules which will come into force on August 25, and which concern in particular the moderation of content.
In the aisles of VivaTech, Emmanuel Macron said he hoped for a “cooperative approach in this sector” and “social networks more respectful of our democratic life, which remove violence, better protect our children”.
Surprise guest of the last summit Choose France last month, Elon Musk dangled Tesla’s “significant investments” in the country in the future. Promises that will probably be enough to ignore the controversial words of the tech guru, pinned on several occasions.