Anne Bouverot is French President Emmanuel Macron’s special envoy to the Summit for Action on Artificial Intelligence (AI), scheduled to take place in Paris on February 10 and 11, 2025 (with events spread over six days from February 6), 18 months after a first edition in London. The engineer is chairwoman of the board of directors and holder of a PhD in AI from the Ecole Normale Supérieure. She has lived in the US and has had a career in technology companies such as Orange. She has already co-chaired the AI commission responsible for a report on developing the technology in France.
In an interview wiht Le Monde, Bouverot explains the focus of the summit, which, despite political instability in France, is set to welcome AI companies, NGOs and representatives from 100 countries, including the US, China, India and African nations, to the Grand Palais in Paris. She highlights three “markers”: a foundation to create digital “commons,” a coalition for sustainable AI and an initiative to “clarify” global AI governance.
After the London summit, which focused on the safety and risks associated with AI, you want to highlight the “opportunities.” Are the conversations surrounding this technology too negative?
Around the world, the main thing I hear on my travels is a fear of seeing AI made by others, and of not being able to make it their own. This fear is different from the fear of the end of the world.
More broadly, in the global conversation, there’s a bit of everything: science-fiction-style alarmist rhetoric as well as speeches promising that AI will solve everything. AI, like all technologies, entails risks, but also opportunities. The ambition of our “for action” summit on AI is to act against the risks and, above all, to act to maximize the shared benefits. We want to create AI “commons.”
One of the five themes of the summit is devoted to “AI for the general good,” and aims to produce these “commons.” What does that mean in concrete terms?
It responds to the fear that AI will be developed mainly by large private companies, in English and with a certain worldview. There’s an expectation of something more shared and less concentrated.
In concrete terms, the “commons” are, for example, scientific databases. The generation of new 3D protein structures − studied by 2024 Nobel Prize winners in Chemistry Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, heads of Google subsidiary DeepMind − was made possible by AI. But also, by the protein database that had already been decoded and fed by Europe, Japan and the United States.
You have 78.52% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.
