The objective is to bring out future talents in this booming sector, but in which France has fallen behind.
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Today, France invests in Artificial Intelligence three times less than the Americans, in proportion to GDP (the wealth produced by the country). We saw this in particular with the very rapid emergence of the American conversational robot ChatGPT. That said, with the company Mistral AI, founded just a year ago, which develops language models, France has a champion in this area. The State would like him to have babies.
This call for tenders from the Ministry of the Economy responds in part to the report submitted in mid-March by a team of economists led in particular by Philippe Aghion, professor at the Collège de France. This work shows that France should invest five billion euros per year, over five years, if it wants to stay in the race against the United States and China.
How much for the projects
The precise amount is not communicated but the State will put several tens of millions of euros on the table. All for the attention of ingenious creators but also collaborative projects, primarily in the fields of law, health, encryption and computer programming. Through this plan, the executive wants to ensure that the tools developed thanks to the various funding can be replicated among other users in the same sector or other branches. We must optimize the investment of this public money.
The question is whether “a few tens” of millions of euros are enough, while the Aghion report speaks of five billion per year for five years. It’s a primer. If we go into details, the Ministry of the Economy indicates that the projects must present a work base of between one and five million euros each. The idea being to bring out specialized, exportable sovereign technologies, such as medical assistant language protocols, for legal documentation, etc. These subjects, which are of interest to both the private sector and the public, will not fail to be discussed at Viva Technologies, the major European tech show, which is to be held from May 22 to 25 in Paris.