The future of France is also taking shape in the lines of code and the algorithms. Faced with the dominance of American and Chinese giants in artificial intelligence (AI), Europe, and France in particular, has a crucial card to play. It’s time for France to take the lead and equip itself with trusted AI to strengthen its digital sovereignty and support its national players.
It is essential to understand that AI is much more than just a technological tool. It is the engine of innovation, a propelling force for the economy of the future. It is a strategic resource that requires national control to guarantee our independence. Sovereign AI is essential to ensure its acceptability and thus become a powerful lever to stimulate our economy, by creating quality jobs and supporting strategic industries.
Failing to guarantee a fully sovereign (self-sufficient) value chain, the major challenge is to secure a “chain or network of trust” to achieve a degree of strategic autonomy deemed satisfactory. This trusted infrastructure must therefore lower the barriers to entry by pooling development efforts via digital commons, Open Source, governed by a multitude of InfraTech players.
In addition, by adopting an Open Source approach, we would promote open innovation and transparency, fundamental values of the responsible, sustainable, ethical 3rd Digital Way and respectful of European values.
Today, we are calling on the French State to quickly implement an ambitious plan for a truly Open Source sovereign AI, based on public and open training data corpora, documented algorithms to ensuring explainability and offering a free, non-restrictive license to use.
This plan must include several components, starting with massive support for French AI players. We have an incredible pool of talent and skills both in the academic world and among industrialists in this field, who are just waiting to be encouraged and valued.
This plan must allow the creation and training of Broad Language Models (LLM) called “foundation”, like GPT, an essential tool for the implementation of an effective conversational AI. This requires a joint and coordinated effort between French AI players for the collection and creation of open data corpus respecting copyright and our regulatory framework (notably the GDPR), a fundamental step to train such a model. .
In addition, we must collectively invest in the development of tools allowing the deployment of conversational AI on a large scale within French companies. This is not only a competitiveness issue, but also a question of digital accessibility, inclusion and equity. The “Trust. AI”, piloted by France 2030, seems the ideal vehicle for these investments.
This large-scale deployment requires significant hardware resources (GPU in particular) gathered within a sovereign InfraTech accessible and allowing to obtain results as soon as possible so that France can appear at the top of the world ranking of Open Large. Language Model (LLM).
This plan must also include massive support for the establishment of a hosting and service infrastructure capable of supporting the needs of our AI ecosystem, to enable the deployment and operation of sovereign applications at scale. .
This national hosting and service infrastructure will play a vital role in supporting open source AI, ensuring not only its performance and efficiency, but also enabling the transparency and openness needed for wide adoption.
Finally, to guarantee the promotion of this know-how, it is imperative to create a platform for the promotion of French and European skills. The Hugging Face platform, whose success is well established, should not be the only place for AI innovation! For obvious reasons of independence and autonomy, digital biodiversity must be the rule. Thus, the establishment of an open innovation platform around generative, sovereign and trusted AIs mastered at the national level is essential.
It is imperative for the French State to initiate this ambition and to invest massively in this plan. This is our digital future: whoever masters AI will master their strategic, political and economic destiny.
* Alexander Zapolsky, founder of Linagora; Michel Levy Provençal, founder of Brightness and TEDxParis; Arno Pons, general delegate of the Digital New Deal think tank; Leïla Mörch, General Delegate of the Francophone Federation of the Future; Quentin Adam, President of Clever Cloud; Jean-Marie Cavada, president of the iDFRights institute.