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A year after the plan announced to develop artificial intelligence, France today in Toulouse its strategy of resources on the research component, amounting to 1 billion euros.
France has been active for nearly a year now to establish itself in the field of artificial intelligence. Last March, President Emmanuel Macron posted the ambition to establish the country as "leader of artificial intelligence", and mandated the mathematician and MP Cédric Villani to produce a report and strategic recommendations in the field. Three strategic axes have emerged, among which the objective of spreading French innovation among private and public actors, to bring out the voice of France in the ethical debate around artificial intelligence and finally, to value the national expertise in world rank.
It is on this last part that the government unveils this November 28 strategy means. The Minister of Higher Education and Research Frédérique Vidal and the Secretary of State for Digital Mounir Mahjoubi present in Toulouse this afternoon the main orientations of the national research strategy in artificial intelligence. This amounts to 665 million euros of State Budget expenditures up to 2022, plus private sector investments which will bring the total budget to 1 billion euros, estimated on the government side. Six main orientations have been planned to "ensure, with Germany and the European Union, that France is able to compete with China and the United States".
petaflop
One of the most important components of the plan is the "3IAs", interdisciplinary centers that bring together public and private research and be the "flagship" IA plan. Four university centers are candidates, in Paris, Toulouse, Grenoble and Nice. They will know at the end of January 2019 if the label "3IA" is granted to them and opens them financing estimated at 300 million euros per center. A hundred million more euros will come from companies.
In addition to these clusters, the government plans to open 40 new artificial intelligence chairs in French universities. INRIA will be in charge of coordinating this national program. The funding of 300 new doctoral students per year is also planned by 2022. Basic research and applied research will be encouraged in the same way, but some topics such as algorithmic biases or health and mobility are of priority interest. The technological research institutes (IRT) will have a budget of 130 million euros.
Finally, the government also plans to provide 200 million euros by 2022 to increase access to computing resources for researchers. Without this, it is impossible to replicate experiences and make new scientific advances. The CNRS Idris laboratory in Saclay in the Paris region will see the start of a new supercomputer in 2019, part of which will be reserved for artificial intelligence. The machine will have a total computing capacity of 10 petaflops (10 million billion operations per second).
The plan presented by the government also provides 115 million to support cooperation, particularly with Germany, and 100 million euros for the "Grand Challenges", targeted research programs.
Talent War
If the government engages in such means, it is also because artificial intelligence has emerged as an issue of power. This field of research, born in the 1950s on the side of Alan Turing and fathers of cybernetics, is now associated with military power (autonomous weapons) or economic, because it is on artificial intelligence that will rest tomorrow industries and businesses. States and companies compete with declarations of ambition and means to win the race. At the point where some researchers in geopolitics perceive an effect of overbidding close to the "Sputnik moment" of the cold war: "each outbid to surpass the advances on the other side. The United States is confronting China on AI, as formerly they opposed to the USSR on the ground of the space conquest ", explains Charles Thibout, researcher at the Institute of international and strategic relations (Iris), specialist in geopolitical issues of emerging technologies.
READ ALSO: US – China: a merciless technological war
Despite a late awakening in the development of coordinated strategy, France remains one of the leading countries in research. Its engineers, PhDs, and professors attract large global corporations, who are leveraging these talents for their own artificial intelligence research labs. Several big names in technology have installed their centers in France, such as Google, Samsung, IBM, Fujitsu, Huawei or Facebook.
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