Macron and the 2025 AI Summit in Paris
It was exactly a week ago, I woke up to an absurd YouTube short of a series of Macron deepfakes.
Lo and behold, it was Macron’s cheeky response to the deepfakes that run rampant online, entertaining and shocking us netizens. But in true social media bait-and-switch form, he pulled our attention to the importance of AI and the revolutionary opportunities it can unlock to improve society.
Shortly after that, it was a non-stop barrage of posts, interviews, panels and articles in French and international media. Not only did France host the AI Action Summit:
- Macron announced €109 billion of private investment will be invested into France for AI innovation, the largest investment in AI to date.
- UAE is injecting up to €50 billion into a 1GW AI datacenter in France.
- France, India and China along with 68 other countries signed a declaration for an open, inclusive and ethical artifical intelligenc without the United States and the UK.
France’s open source AI darling Mistral AI as in tow with several major milestones as well:
- Mistral released their OpenAI competitor Le Chat on Android and iOS
- In a recent code racing challenge Le Chat is 10x faster than Anthropic’s Claude and 13x faster than OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
- Announcing a partner deal with Microsoft to use their supercomputers to train their AI models
- Cost of development was under $22 million versus OpenAI’s $100 million.
Maybe it was the French pride or maybe it is all the chaos, regulation and infighting around AI that we’re witnessing around the world, but I was extremely proud to call myself French this past week. It finally hit me what I felt was missing during the hockey stick progress we’re experiencing in tech: a leading voice pushing for net positive applications of AI and real, impactful investment to support it. Macron was the first world leader who pushed extremely hard on AI being used to innovate in medicine, science and ecological sustainability.
There are plenty of critiques on how the summit fell short on critical topics like ethics and security. I agree with that sentiment and would also say that political leaders’ words more often than not ring hollow. BUT, I believe the most important thing to come out of this is a collective agreement from most of the world to be open, inclusive and ethical.
We’ll see if they honor this commitment but it’s officially coming from the top. The intention is now out there in the universe. This will push all of us to look toward that bright future that could benefit us all.