Paris (AFP) – President Emmanuel Macron on Monday said France would slash through red tape to build artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, aiming to keep Europe in the running for the technology’s hoped-for benefits at a global summit in Paris. Co-hosted with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Paris summit aims to lay the groundwork for governing the nascent sector, as global powers race to play leading roles in the fast-developing technology.
On AI projects, “we will adopt the Notre Dame de Paris strategy” that saw France rebuild the landmark cathedral within five years of its devastation in a 2019 fire, Macron told attendees including tech industry bosses and political leaders. “We showed the rest of the world that when we commit to a clear timeline we can deliver,” he said in remarks delivered entirely in English at the opulent Grand Palais in the French capital. “You decide, you streamline all the procedures, somebody is in charge,” he added, saying the scheme would apply to data centres, authorisations to bring AI products to market, and business “attractiveness.”
High-profile attendees had earlier said that while AI could massively boost global trade in the future, it is already sharpening gender pay disparities. World Trade Organization chief Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said her staff had calculated that “near universal adoption of AI…could increase trade by up to 14 percentage points” from its current trend. But global “fragmentation” of regulations on the technology and data flows could see both trade and output contract, she added. In the workplace, AI is mostly replacing humans in clerical jobs disproportionately held by women, International Labour Organization head Gilbert Houngbo told the audience. That risks widening the gender pay gap even though more jobs are being created than destroyed by AI on current evidence, he added.
Political leaders, including US Vice President JD Vance and Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Guoqing, are set to rub shoulders in Paris with the likes of Google chief Sundar Pichai and OpenAI boss Sam Altman. Technology’s shift to AI was set to be “the biggest of our lifetimes,” Google chief Sundar Pichai told the audience. He added that “we have the chance to democratise access (to a new technology) from the start.”
Macron’s push to highlight French competitiveness saw him repeatedly trumpet 109 billion euros ($113 billion) to be invested in French AI in the coming years. He has also hailed France’s decades-old fleet of nuclear plants as a key advantage providing clean, scalable energy supply for AI’s vast processing needs. “I have a good friend in the other part of the ocean saying ‘drill, baby, drill’,” Macron said in an apparent dig at US President Donald Trump’s pro-fossil fuels policy. “Here there is no need to drill, it’s plug, baby, plug!” he added.
The $500-billion US “Stargate” programme led by ChatGPT maker OpenAI and the emergence of high-performing, low-cost Chinese startup DeepSeek have made clearer the technical challenges and price of entry for nations hoping to keep abreast. European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen is expected to make further announcements on EU competitiveness Tuesday.
But Macron’s business-focused boosterism has been criticised by observers, especially as a claimed leaked draft of the summit’s final communique made no mention of the potential dangers of AI. The supposed draft “fails to even mention these risks, or provide any concrete proposals to ensure these powerful systems remain controllable and beneficial,” said Max Tegmark, head of the US-based Future of Life Institute that has warned of AI’s “existential risk.” “This alarming omission demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the science, and is a recipe for disaster,” he added.
More immediately, media reports suggest that neither Britain nor the United States plan to sign the final statement as it stands. The results of France’s AI diplomacy will become clear on Tuesday, when political leaders from around 100 countries will hold a plenary session, with notable attendees including Modi, Vance, Zhang, and von der Leyen. France hopes that governments will make voluntary commitments to make AI sustainable and environmentally friendly. But any agreement may prove elusive between blocs as diverse as the European Union, United States, China, and India, each with different priorities in tech development and regulation.
© 2024 AFP
