It’s a stone in Thierry Breton’s garden. While the European Commissioner for the Internal Market welcomed on Friday the “historic” agreement to regulate artificial intelligence (AI), and which should encourage its innovation in Europe, while limiting their possible abuses, the President of the Republic seriously denounced this text. “It’s not a good idea,” he said this Monday, when announcing the new development axes for the France 2030 investment plan dedicated to innovation in Toulouse.
Emmanuel Macron indicated, on this occasion, that, if the European agreement will “consolidate a French model of regulation”, this means “that we will be the first place in the world where on the so-called foundational models of AI, we are going to regulate much more than the others.” The Head of State therefore called for “evaluating” the implementation of this agreement in the coming months. “If we lose leaders or pioneers because of that, we will have to come back to it,” he warned.
Before recalling his skepticism: “On AI, France is undoubtedly the leading country in terms of AI, neck and neck with the British. They will not have this regulation on the foundational models. We are very far from the Chinese and the Americans,” he said again. For Emmanuel Macron, regulation comes too soon: “We can decide to regulate much faster and much stronger than our major competitors. But we will regulate things that we will no longer produce or invent.” “It’s never a good idea and so we always have to be at the right speed and in any case at the right rhythm.”