France and the EU will reduce regulatory oversight of artificial intelligence (AI) to fuel investment and innovation in the field, French president Emmanuel Macron told the AI Action Summit on Monday.
Earlier international AI events focused on safety, amidst widespread concern that the technology could replace human jobs and create societal disruption, and Macron affirmed that it was critical to develop AI that was “at the service of humanity”.
But he also said Europe must cut red tape, invest in AI infrastructure and foster more start-ups.
Notre-Dame strategy
“We will simplify,” he said.
“At the national and European scale, it is very clear that we have to resynchronise with the rest of the world.”
The EU passed the landmark AI Act last year that regulates the technology, but the new US administration has made it clear it plans to dismantle any barriers to the sectors growth.
He spoke of the rapid rebuilding of Notre Dame cathedral as an example of specialised regulation that allowed a critical project to proceed at a record pace.
“The Notre-Dame approach will be adopted for data centres, for authorisation to go to the market, for AI and attractiveness,” he said.
“We want to take advantage of this summit to leverage and go faster… We showed the rest of the world that, when we commit to a clear timeline, we can deliver.”
Macron also touted France as an ideal location for power-hungry AI data centres due to its predominant use of nuclear power, which he described as being more environmentally friendly than oil.
“I have a good friend on the other side of the ocean saying ‘drill, baby, drill.’ Here, there is no need to drill. It’s plug, baby, plug,” he said.
Fei-Fei Li, a pioneering AI researcher at Stanford University, spoke at the event’s opening remarks of continued fears of social harm.
‘Find the balance’
“So much of the last decade has been a story of technology tearing us apart. AI is at another fork in this road,” she said.
But Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, who is attending the conference, said in an opinion piece in Le Monde on Saturday that the need for growth, jobs and progress meant that “we have to allow innovators to innovate, builders to build and developers to develop”.
EU digital chief Henna Virkkunen said she wanted to “find the balance between encouraging AI innovation in the EU and mitigating the most serious risks”.
One of the announcements at the summit was the launch of Current AI, a partnership of countries including France and Germany with industry players such as Google and Salesforce to develop projects with a public-interest focus.
The venture, with an initial $400 million (£323m) in investment, is aiming for $2.5bn in capital over the next five years for projects such as making available high-quality data for AI and investing in open source tools.