Meanwhile, the French financing will include commitments from the United Arab Emirates, American and Canadian investments funds and French companies like telecommunications firms Iliad and Orange, and aerospace and defense group Thales
A few days before France’s AI Action Summit, which kicked off on Monday, the UAE said it would invest between 30 billion euros and 50 billion euros in the construction of a one-gigawatt AI data center in France as part of a campus focused on the technology’s development.
Serious question and not trying to be funny, but how is AI going to solve climate change? We already know the answer, but the world is too greedy to do anything about it. As a matter of fact, AI will worsen climate change since more power is needed for it to write couple of sentences.
Will this be done through funding colleges and universities, doctorates and other publicly funded projects and initiatives?
If so, good. AI might be a good tool, after a long, curated, legally directed and supervised, period of investigation, to create safe tools for public use.
If not, and this money is to be thrown out to private companies, with little to no oversight, it is pure waste of resources, badly needed to fund other social sectors.
Looks like it is comparable to the US Stargate announcement, the money is coming from private companies and going into private investment, which is amazing, I wish France24 had been a bit more specific:
Meanwhile, the French financing will include commitments from the United Arab Emirates, American and Canadian investments funds and French companies like telecommunications firms Iliad and Orange, and aerospace and defense group Thales
A few days before France’s AI Action Summit, which kicked off on Monday, the UAE said it would invest between 30 billion euros and 50 billion euros in the construction of a one-gigawatt AI data center in France as part of a campus focused on the technology’s development.
I'm not a big fan of Macron, but in all honesty, "the genie's out of the bottle" and we need some way to protect ourselves and the news media from ANY "foreign AI" influences.
As long as the European countries stay true to their guidelines, this should just be considered as a necessity.
Heheh, but reportedly, the hedge fund that owns Deepseek has 1.6 billion worth of servers. Plus they need to pay electricity, employees... and researchers and computer people often get a decent salary. That makes me think at least a few billions is the correct amount... If we want to do research on the level Deepseek does.
Deepseak did show it could be done cheaply but imagine if you could take their optimisations and throw more power behind it (ie: buy a fuck tone of GPUs that the Chinese dont officially have access to)
Could work, the EU should pursue AI independence else it will continue its slide into irrelevance. Glad France is stepping up to the plate on this
Building a cheaper model that's not as good as the top AI models is not the best way to build AI models, cheaper yes, but Deepseek isn't the best AI model out there, it still gets beat by Googles/Claudes/OpenAI etc
A better way would be to combine the Deepseek training optimisations with raw power of Americas/nvidias hardware
We're still at an early stage with AI, there's nothing to suggest we're anywhere near the end of Jevons paradox
My taxes at work to fund shitty generators. People around me will cheer for this since they are not working in the programming industry and don’t know how it’s yet another way to lower the quality of all that we’ve done so far. We’re fucked.
Investors will pump 109 billion euros into artificial intelligence (AI) projects in France in the coming years,
It will be private investment, venture capitalists, that provide the money and extract the data and wealth. All Macron is doing is giving it the official seal of approval from the government. He might relax some rules and make it easier to invest but your tax Euros are safe.
Eh, copilot is still more miss than hit whenever I use it. It's probably equally dogshit for other uses as well unless your goal is to just generate bullshit and you need to hit a specific word count.
As a senior dev, I have no use for it in my workflow. The only purpose it would serve for me is to reduce the amount of typing I do. I spend about 5-10% of my time actually writing code. The rest of my dev time is spent in architecting, debugging, testing, or documenting. LLMs aren't really good at most of those things once you move past the most superficial levels of complexity. Besides, I don't actually want something to reduce the amount I'm typing. If I'm typing too much and I'm getting annoyed then it's a sure sign that I've done something bad. If I'm writing boilerplate then it's time to write an abstraction to eliminate that. If I'm writing repetitive tests then it's a sign I need to move to a property based testing framework like Hypothesis. If the LLM spits all of this out for me, I will end up writing code that is harder to understand and maintain.
LLMs are fine for learning and junior positions where you'll have more experienced folks reviewing code, but it just is not that helpful past a certain point.
Also, this is probably a small thing, but I have yet to find an LLM that writes anything other than shitty, terrible shell scripts. Please for the love of God don't use an LLM to write shell scripts. If you must, then please pass the results through shellcheck and fix all of the issues there.
Heh for me even the newest models like the new Claude are only really useful when I did the thinking and the initial code writing, and i ask it to simplify it or to make it use more efficient libraries/features. Because when asking it to do my work it produces shit, and im very junior level
It’s good when what you are trying to do has been done in the past by thousand of people (thanks to the free training data). But it’s really bad for new use case. After all it's a glorified and expensive auto-complete tool trained on code they parsed. It’s not magic, it’s math.
But you don’t get intelligence, creativity from these tools. It’s math! Math is the least creative domain on earth. Since when being a programmer is just typing portion of code from boilerplate / examples from internet?
It’s the logical thinking, taking into account all the parameters and constraints, breaking problems into piece of code, checking it, testing it, deploying it, supporting it.
Ok, programming goal is to solve a problem. But usually not all the parameters of the problem can be reduced to its mathematical form.
IA are far from being able to do that and the ratio gain/cost is not proven at all. These companies are so committed to AI (in term of money invested) that THEY MUST make you use their AI products, whatever its quality. They even use a marketing term to hide their product bad answer: hallucinations. Hallucination is just a fancy word to not say: totally wrong.
Do you find normal to buy a solution that never produces 100% good results (more around 20% of failure)?
In my industry, this IA trend (pushed mainly from managers not knowing what really is programming and of course "AI") generate a lot of bad quality code from our junior devs. And it's not something i want to push in production.
In fact, a lot of PoC around ML never goes from the R&D phase to the real production. It’s too risky for the business (as human life could be impacted).
Yep, and that's a biggly problem. If EU AI becomes a threat (or perceived threat) to US economic and other interests (and especially when orange is in charge), they would slap tariffs at those at least. If not forbid export.
The cause is societal: the EU thinks that innovation should come top down. By giving established corporations subsidies, and a large administration that steers everyone every step of the way. To make sure nobody does anything out of the ordinary.
That works if you want to improve car crash safety by 5%. But, ofcourse, that doesn't work for true, novel ideas. Concensus being antagonistic to novelty.
And it's not solely a "bad politicians" problem. A majority of Europeans are simply afraid of change, want their 9-to-5 job to look exactly the same for their whole life. The elected reflect their electorate.
Too bad the world changes regardless of you participating.