This is a linkpost for https://aelerinya.substack.com/p/france-is-ready-to-stand-alone
France is ready to stand alone
28exmateriae
3Lucie Philippon
4Gordon Seidoh Worley
3Lucie Philippon
3lilkim2025
1Lucie Philippon
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Thanks, France is a great country which had lot of successes and the myth of the white flag is very boring. It does stand on its own.
That said, I very much doubt France (I'm French, like you it seems) will have a significant role to play in AI. It has not been a country looking towards innovation in a positive light for at least 40 if not 50 years. We were by far the elite in nuclear capabilities with both military use and an insane civilian usage but then the greens came in and we killed our ace. Minitel was the last time we actually tried to do something relevant on the tech/communication side. When everyone is heralding Doctolib as a technological prowess, you know everything you have to know about our tech. (if you don't know, it's a 6B$ company making google calendar for doctors, I'm not exaggerating) It's a great service but if this is the peak of what you can do... And it's not because French people are not capable, (I'm actually regularly surprised at the number of French people in tpotw) it's because the wealth and investments they can reach by going to the US can't even be compared. Even the BPI (national investment bank) does not try, it's mostly giving money to people with contacts from business schools.
Also, the current political landscape refusing to make any concession on our social model and trying to tax everyone more and more every day instead of cutting spending just does not cut it to be innovative. And it's fine to decide to go another way honestly, France has many other good things to do and sell but France being a significant part of AI in the next 10 years looks unlikely to me.
1Strong agree on not expecting France to be a significant player in AI development. However, I expect that France seeing itself as in the race is a big part of the current AI investment push. Also, France might not be in the race, but it could still actually matter whether they have national compute resources and expertise. France only developed nuclear weapons fourth, but it still matters for its sovereignty to have them.
Also agree on the lameness of the tech scene in France. I was working in a world leading crypto startup started in France, and the founder still ended up moving from Paris to London, to get closer to a proper financial district.
While it may key its usual alignment with US positions, it will not accept a US hegemony over the AI era. France has proved time and time again that it will stand alone if it needs to.
This seems wrong to me. France was able to "stand alone" for a long time thanks to a relatively large population (less true now) and lots of farm land and other key resources. But that hardly means it has or can choose not to accept US hegemony. I mean, it can say it will reject it, but it has little real power to do anything about it other than try to opt out (and be left behind), and it seems clear that France will continue to backslide in relevance unless it manages to grab more real power instead of simply trying to maintain a level of autonomy that it imagines it deserves based on stories about the past.
(If this seems mean, I think I have equally mean critiques about how every other country is screwing up. I'm just calling out France here because the claims in the post are about France.)
Its population advantage had vastly reduced by the end of the 19th century already, as France was the first country to go through a demographic transition in the 18th century. AFAIK its relative population compared to other western countries has been stable since WWII.
(If this seems mean, I think I have equally mean critiques about how every other country is screwing up. I'm just calling out France here because the claims in the post are about France.)
Yeah I realized this post did make me sound like a patriot lol. I'm not convinced of France's relevance, nor its irrelevance. I'm writing those posts for myself to figure out whether France matters, and to help other people working in AI policy to have a good model of France's motivations in the AI race.
I lean skeptical here, so I'll play devil's advocate. As much as I would like to see a more multipolar AI landscape, I don't see how Mistral can realistically come to parity with American or Chinese competitors. America is established enough that many of the best minds in Europe are willing to go there in spite of political turmoil, and has a strong culture of young people eager to prove themselves who went to college surrounded by very valuable resources that don't exist elsewhere at comparable scale. Both France and America are playing catch-up industrially, having to reshore after a long period in which offshoring was believed to be the future, amidst a regulatory environment that can be a major obstacle, but in America, all of the financial power that depends on their superpower status is willing to push for success in that difficult undertaking. The EU, as far as I've seen, treats AI as more of a novelty, and is starting with a much shorter stock of resources and experienced personnel on top of that. All of these advantages compound, and are supplemented further by the fact that anyone with something major to contribute and broadly Western interests in mind is likely to consider supplementing America's present advantage to be the stronger play.
China, meanwhile, has scale of its own, and the implicit support of everyone that would prefer to see America unseated as the sole superpower. They also have a large population, a rapidly-scaling higher education system that is increasingly competitive internationally, and a willingness to approach America's present advantages pragmatically, leveraging an international presence in the U.S. university system well to close gaps where they exist. They also have a much safer supply chain, less dependent on foreign trade, which could rapidly become decisive if the world's political situation deteriorates.
I realize the LLM leaderboard isn't the be-all-end-all, but it does generally line up with how different LLMs have performed when I've used them, or stress-tested them when writing a paper. Of the 25 top models, 16 are from a variety of American companies (8 for OpenAI, 3 for XAI and Anthropic, 2 for Google), and the remaining 9 are from a wide array of Chinese startups. Mistral's first appearance is in the 27th position, with a score of 52 on their evaluation, relative to 68 for OpenAI's top model, 67 for the top Chinese model, and 65 for XAI's top model, with Anthropic receiving a score of 63. Gaps like these are self-reinforcing, especially without China's vast population of students to draw on (with a natural degree of exclusivity) or America's frighteningly-efficient talent pipeline of schools, startups, VCs, and headline-making compensation packages.
Yeah, agree with most of this. I added a not saying that it's the narrative that I think is shaping France actions, rather than my view of the situation.
I agree that Mistral cannot come to parity on technical prowess. I think that from the sovereignty angle, it still can be a success if they make models that are actually useful for industry and are trusted by French national security agencies, which seems to be more like Mistral's goal lately.
Curated and popular this week
First part of a series of article on French AI Policy that I’m currently writing as part of the Inkhaven Residency.
EDIT: Those are my views of how French government and tech elites see the world. I am personally skeptical that France can stay relevant. I'm offering here a lens through which to understand the motivation behind France's AI strategy.
For three centuries, France has stood among the great powers of the world, and there it wants to stay. Now, far from the heyday of La Belle Époque, where the French Empire stood shoulder to shoulder with the British Empire, France has resisted the pressures to align too closely with the world superpowers, lest it become just a vassal state. French pride mandates that French sovereignty must be preserved.
As World War II came to an end, the two blocs of the Cold War emerged. Despite the pressures to align, France was not willing to trust the US security guarantees. It needed a seat at the table. France secured its own permanent seat at the UN security council in 1945, its own nuclear weapons in 1960, and its energy independence through nuclear power in the 70s, even withdrawing from part of NATO in 1966. It seems that history may have proven them right; as Trump hints that the US might not come to defend Europe, France stands secure with its own nuclear deterrence force, even suggesting France might become Europe’s nuclear umbrella.
This independence from the US gave France the freedom to pursue its national interests, even when they conflicted with US priorities. The most prominent case being the 2003 Iraq war, where France decided to not support the US proposal at the UN Security Council, to the stupefaction of American foreign policy experts. Even this year, France went against the US position and decided to recognize the Palestinian State ahead of the UN General Assembly. Closer to home, France has regularly contested proposed EU policies that would put its sovereignty at risk, like the proposed EU-wide arms procurement, which allow spending EU money on US weapons.
The importance of sovereignty is key to understanding France’s positions on AI. French elites have correctly understood that AI is becoming one of the most strategically important resources of this century, and they have seen how the US has already started weaponizing its dominance of the AI supply chain for its policy objectives.
This has led France to invest heavily into securing its access to compute, both through building a sovereign semiconductor supply chain in Europe, and through €100B+ of investment in AI datacenters build-out, including a partnership with the UAE to build a 1GW datacenter.
On the algorithmic side, France has chosen Mistral as its national champion, which it has supported both through direct investments, and through attacking the provisions of the EU AI Act targeting systemic risks from general purpose AI. The open-source strategy is not a whim, it’s a key part of Mistral’s value proposition, an AI provider that is European, sovereign, and taking a stand against the power centralization of American Big Tech.
Through continuous investment into its sovereignty, France has remained a strong and independent live player. While it may key its usual alignment with US positions, it will not accept a US hegemony over the AI era. France has proved time and time again that it will stand alone if it needs to.