From Bloomberg, February 14:
AI adoption is seen as an urgent path to productivity gains for France as Trump tariffs loom.
AI Optimism
Emmanuel Macron’s AI Action Summit this week was a lot like the Olympics: Big on spectacle, big on spending and big on prodding tycoons and firms to channel investments for the national interest. (And, yes, big on police presence and QR code-related frustrations.)Among the highlights: Sam Altman responding in real time to Elon Musk’s talk of an OpenAI bid, Mistral AI’s Arthur Mensch unveiling plans for a new data center near Paris and Xavier Niel giving a glimpse of how his own strategy is unfolding. Even if the US and China are clearly out in front in this tech race, there’s a renewed determination to win the long game as large-language models and capital spending become more efficient and do more with less.
You could call it a €109 billion “adieu” to AI doomerism, with Macron beaming live into French homes on the eve of the summit to excitedly show off robotic exoskeletons rather than warn about deepfakes. It’s a sign of the geopolitical times. AI adoption is seen as an urgent path to productivity gains for France as Trump tariffs loom. Paris has also led the charge against too much AI regulation from Brussels, seen as a threat to the likes of Mistral.
Startups and VC funds will be happy to hear politicians talk about speeding up rather than slowing down. In fact, it was hard to find many skeptics on-site at the summit: From the International Labor Organization to the French government, nobody was panicked about mass unemployment or existential risks to humanity. AI safety felt almost a dirty word at this point: The US and UK wouldn’t sign even the vaguest of pledges to make AI trustworthy.
This may not seem such an issue now, but it’s important not to swing from one extreme to another as AI models proliferate at rapid pace. Max Tegmark, physics professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, reckons binding safety standards are still needed. Speaking to me in a café near the Champs Elysees, Tegmark pointed to the bar and said it had more rules and licences than OpenAI.
Finally, a small hypothetical: If the AI summit had been run by AI, would it have been any better? For some things, maybe. But as I negotiated my way through the crowds, cordons, heavy-handed security and pesky broken QR codes on the second and final day of the summit, I had to conclude that the only thing worse might have been deferring to a relentlessly cheery chatbot blocking my path. Techno-optimism is good; techno-complacency probably isn’t.
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