France is making a major push to position itself as Europe’s hub for artificial intelligence, throwing its weight behind the fast-growing and much-hyped technology.
Countries are looking to position themselves as AI hubs, because the technology is seen as revolutionary and therefore of strategic importance to governments around the world. AI is viewed as impacting industries from finance to healthcare.
Hype around AI has been partly sparked by the viral nature of US firm OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot.
AI was the phrase on everyone’s lips at France’s annual technology conference Viva Tech, from startups to established technology firms, along with companies from industries as diverse as cosmetics and banking.
Emmanuel Macron, French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire and Digital Minister Jean-Noel Barrot attended the event, adding the government’s backing to France’s tech push.
While the U.S is seen as the leader in AI by many measures, France hopes to catch up.
Macron said, “believe me this is clear that the U.S. is number one, for good reason because it is a huge domestic market. I want us to clearly bridge the gap and invest much more, develop much more and accelerate much more.”
Paris’ ambitions face tough competition even within the European Union. UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak recently made his pitch for Britain to become a global AI center.
France doesn’t have an AI giant, but wants to create two or three big global players in the technology. It is banking on its startups to grow quickly. Underscoring the potential and hype of AI developments, four-week-old French startup Mistral AI raised 105 million euros to fund the company. A number of other local startups were showing off their wares at Viva Tech.
Part of France’s pitch to be an AI hub leads on regulation around the technology.
The European Parliament greenlit the EU AI Act, a wide-sweeping first-of-its-kind regulation on artificial intelligence. It is not yet law, but, if passed, would bring a risk-based approach to regulation across the EU.
France has typically been seen as a proponent of strong regulation on technology — but it has taken issue with parts of the EU AI Act related to generative AI, the type of technology that underpins OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which it sees as too stringent.
Barrot, France’s digital minister, said on the provisions around generative AI, “my worry is that in the recent past few weeks, the EU Parliament has taken a very sort of strong stance on AI regulation, using, in some sense, this AI act as a way to try and solve too many problems at once.”
France desires a global regulation on AI, which it hopes to achieve through the G7 group that includes the US and Britain, as well as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
Source: CNBC
