I’m not entirely sure whether what the title says is what I believe, but the fact is that El Presidente Macron El Primero wants to make France a big name in AI, and its presidency has organized a big event in Paris. Were you aware of it? Fat chances that you weren’t.

Chapters: 1 ● 2 ● 3 ● 4 ● 5 ● 6 ● 7 ● 8 ● 9.

It all starts with a name

Let me tell you why this mega-event is little known: because it doesn’t have a catchy name. In fact, it doesn’t have a name at all!

First of all, on the site of the French Presidency, this event is called “Sommet pour l’action sur l’Intelligence Artificielle” in French and “Artificial Intelligence Action Summit” in English. These are not names to be used. Proper names are, or were: CeBIT, Mobile World Congress (MWC), CES (Consumer Electronics Show), Google I/O, Apple WWDC, Microsoft Build, DEF CON, <city_name>Auto Show, etc. And the “World Economic Forum Annual Meeting <year>” is typically called “Davos <year>”; but one couldn’t say “Paris 2025” or “Paris AI 2025”!

What’s even worse, this event is a concatenation of three completely different things:

I never thought the French to be that incompetent in PR. They could have called it “AIAS 2025” (from “Artificial Intelligence Action Summit”), but they didn’t!

OK, Élysée’s English-version official page did use this logo, but there was no official acronym or initialism (depending on how “AIAS” would have been pronounced):

The French press called it “Sommet de l’IA” (here) or “Sommet sur l’IA” (here, here). Not only they were confused, but they were überdumb: they never gave the URL to any official site of this event!

Here’s the official program of the week:

Section 2 of the summit

What does “Cultural Weekend” mean? French culture? AI culture? What is AI culture? The dedicated site is only in French, and almost non-informative. (Mais bon, vu qu’il s’agit de Rachida Dati, on peut comprendre.)

Section 4 of the summit

The “side events” page is generic, and the information is utterly non-informative. That’s because the real information is in a PDF that the Présidence de la République française couldn’t integrate in the web page. There are 6 categories, but you need to read the PDF; Global AI Governance; Future of Work; Public Interest AI; Trust in AI; Innovation and Culture; Multi Themes. Are they not important, these themes? Really? The side events might be more interesting than the main ones!

The PDF is mostly images, but there are links that work (“Visit the website: click here”). It would have been rocket science to have this information in the web page:

  • Global AI Governance: 9 events, but only 7 links. Plebeians need not know how to reach the event organized by UNESCO’s Working Group for Information Accessibility (WGIA) and the one by the Atlantic Council.
  • Future of Work: 5 events, 4 links. Of interest: “IA by @Porsche, organized by Porsche Consulting France. An event dedicated to AI use cases.” In engineering, I reckon?
  • Public Interest AI: 11 events, 10 links. Smart cities, AI in healthcare, etc.
  • Trust in AI: 13 events, 12 links. Impossible to know how to reach “Protecting information integrity in the age of AI.”
  • Innovation and Culture: 3 events and links.
  • Multiple themes: 31+1 events (because one on Feb. 13-15 at Cannes), only 21 links. You don’t deserve more. Just google it. A few select organizers: London Stock Exchange Group and Eurasia Group; INNOV8 Research Center and École Normale Supérieure (ENS); UNESCO; the French Ministry of Armed Forces; Project Liberty Institute; INRIA; OpenAI, Hugging Face, and H Company, at Station F (a startup incubator), supported by AMD and SAP.

Section 1 of the summit

The “Science Days” aka “AI, Science and Society” of Feb. 6-7 is the place where the glitterati (la jet-set) are supposed to be. Here’s a poorly sorted list of speakers (ordered by the given name, because it was easier):

  1. Agnes Delaborde – Head of department – Evaluation of Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity, LNE
  2. Alice Albizzati – Founding Partner at Revaia
  3. Alison Noble – Technikos Professor of Biomedical Engineering, University of Oxford
  4. Ann Nowé – Professor at Free University Brussels – VUB
  5. Anne Bouverot – French President’s special envoy for the AI Action Summit
  6. Asuman Özdağlar – Mathworks Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Department Head, EECS, Deputy Dean of Academics, Schwarzman College of Computing, MIT
  7. Aymeric Dieuleveut – Professorat École Polytechnique – IP Paris
  8. Bernhard Schölkopf – Scientific Director at ELLIS Institute and Max Planck Tuebingen, Professor at ETH Zurich
  9. Carlos Mougan – Technology Specialist (AI Office)
  10. Caroline de Condé – Chief standardization officer à Naa.ia
  11. Chris Meserole – Executive Director, Frontier Model Forum
  12. Christophe Zimmer – Professor at University of Würzburg and Institut Pasteur
  13. Clara Chappaz – French Minister in charge of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Affairs
  14. Cédric Auliac – Head of the Artificial Intelligence Program at CEA
  15. Dame Wendy Hall – Regius Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton.
  16. Daniel Cremers – Director of the Munich Center for Machine Learning & Chair of Computer Vision and AI, TU Munich
  17. Danielle Allen – James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University; Director of GETTING Plurality Research Network
  18. David D. Cox – VP for AI models at IBM Research
  19. David D. Cox – VP for AI models at IBM Research
  20. Dawn Song – Professor in Computer Science at UC Berkeley
  21. Ece Kamar – VP and Managing Director, AI Frontiers, Microsoft Research
  22. Edith Heard – Geneticist, Professor at the Collège de France, Managing Director of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL)
  23. Emmanuel Candès – The Barnum-Simons Chair in Mathematics and Statistics, Stanford University
  24. Eric Xing – President of the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at GenBio AI
  25. Erik Brynjolfsson – Professor, Stanford Institute for Human-Center AI and Director, Stanford Digital Economy Lab
  26. Florence d’Alché-Buc – Professor at Télécom Paris – IP Paris
  27. Francis Bach – Research Director at Inria, ENS – PSL
  28. Franck Lebeugle – Directeur normalisation à l’AFNOR
  29. Gabriel Peyré – CNRS Research Director and professor at ENS – PSL
  30. Gaël Varoquaux – Research Director at Inria
  31. Gersende Fort – CNRS Research Director
  32. Gilles Louppe – Professor at the University of Liège
  33. Guillaume Avrin – National Coordinator for AI, France
  34. Guillaume Klossa – President of T-Life
  35. Hjalmar Wijk – Member of Technical Staff, METR
  36. Iryna Gurevych – Professor at the Technical University of Darmstadt
  37. Isabelle Bloch – Professor at Sorbonne Université, LIP6; Invited Professor at Télécom Paris – IP Paris
  38. Jade Leung – Chief Technical Officer, UK AI Safety Institute
  39. Jalal Fadili – Professor at ENSICAEN
  40. Jamal Atif – Professor at Université Paris-Dauphine – PSL
  41. Jan Brauner – Founding member of AI Safety Unit at European AI Office
  42. Jean Ponce – Professor at ENS – PSL and New York University
  43. Jean-Michel Loubes – Research Director at Inria
  44. Jean-Philippe Vert – Chief R&D Officer at Owkin and Co-founder at Bioptimus
  45. Joëlle Barral – Senior Director of Research & Engineering at Google DeepMind
  46. Julie Josse – Research Director at Inria
  47. Justine Cassell – Research Director at Inria and Professor at Carnegie Mellon University
  48. Karim Beguir – Co-founder and CEO of Instadeep
  49. Karine Perset – Head, OECD AI and Emerging Digital Technologies Division
  50. Karteek Alahari – Research Director at Inria
  51. Laura Chaubard – Director General and Acting President of École Polytechnique
  52. Leonie Koessler – Seconded Expert, EU AI Office
  53. Lewis Ho – Research Scientist, Google DeepMind
  54. Lingpeng Kong – Professor at the University of Hong Kong
  55. Lynn Kaack – Professor at the Hertie School
  56. Malcolm Murray – Head of Research, Safer AI
  57. Marius Hobbhahn – CO-Founder & Chief Science Officer, apollo Research
  58. Mia Cha – Scientific Director of Max Plank Institute for Security and Privacy and Professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)
  59. Michael Chen – AI Policy at METR
  60. Michael Jordan – Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley / Inria
  61. Michael Krajecki – Research Director at Agence ministérielle de l’intelligence artificielle de défense (AMIAD
  62. Michal Valko – Entrepreneur – Ex GenAI Meta and Google Deepmind
  63. Moritz Hardt – Director at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems
  64. Mélanie Gornet – Technology specialist at the AI Office de la Commission européenne
  65. Nicholas Ayache – Research Director at Inria
  66. Nicolas Miailhe – Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer, PRISM Eval
  67. Nuria Oliver – Director and Cofounder of ELLIS Alicante
  68. Owen Larter – Senior Director for Global Public Policy, Microsoft
  69. Patrick Pérez – CEO at Kyutai
  70. Philippe Aghion – Professor at the Collège de France and INSEAD, Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics and Fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
  71. Philippe Baptiste – French Minister for Higher Education and Research
  72. Pierre Peigné – CO-Founder & Chief Science Officer, PRISM Eval
  73. Pierre-Yves Oudeyer – Research director at Inria
  74. Quentin Feuillade Montixi – Co-Founder & Chief Technical Officer, PRISM Eval
  75. Ricardo Vinuesa – Professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology
  76. Robert Trager – Director, Oxford Martin AI Governance Initiative
  77. Rumman Chowdhury – US science envoy AI, CEO at Human Intelligence
  78. Sasha Luccioni – Artificial Intelligence Researcher & Climate Lead, Hugging Face
  79. Stéphane Mallat – Professor at the Collège de France
  80. Sébastien Meyer – AI Project Manager at the French Ministry of Ecology
  81. Thierry Coulhon – President of Institut Polytechnique de Paris
  82. Thomas Le Goff – Associate Professor at Télécom Paris – IP Paris
  83. Tom David – Co-Founder & Director of Governance and Standardization, PRISM Eval
  84. Touradj Ebrahimi – Professor at EPFL and convenor of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC29/WG 1 on JPEG normalization
  85. Vianney Perchet – Professor at the Centre de recherche en économie et statistique (CREST) – ENSAE – IP Paris
  86. Vicky Kalogeiton – Professor at École Polytechnique – IP Paris
  87. Vincent Strubel – Directeur général de l’ANSSI
  88. Véronique Rouyer – Head, NEA Division of Nuclear Safety Technology and Regulation
  89. Wei Peng – Associate Professor, George Washington University
  90. Yann Le Cun – Chief AI Scientist, Meta
  91. Yi Zeng – Professor of Brain-inspired AI, and AI Governance, Chinese Academy of Sciences; Member of UN Advisory Body on AI
  92. Yoshua Bengio – Full professor at Université de Montréal, Founder and Scientific Director at Mila

OMFG. 92 names! Add 6 names for the OECD’s round table and the unspecified speakers for the UN’s Independent Scientific Panel on AI. Cool, but who are these people supposed to speak to? Who is the public?

Oh, and I would particularly trust this Vicky Kalogeiton, Professor at École Polytechnique: chicks with a lip ring or a nose ring look particularly smart to me. Like a pig with a hook in the snout.

The acme of the summit—the real summit!

And now, The Summit! February 10-11, with streams for the world to watch everything LIVE on the YouTube account of the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs! (YouTube and the GDPR, hum.)

This is a global meeting, but the LIVE streaming has a French voice-over, so even when people speak in English, they can’t be heard in English. Fucking stupid Frenchies. 😡 Les machines et les puces… La dernière pièce du peuh-zzeuhle… Non, mais.

This summit per se had two previous editions, in the UK (2023) and South Korea (2024). I never heard about them.

I didn’t notice this on the official site (was this information even there?), but this summit is co-presided by India and in the presence of its Prime Minister Narendra Modi. WTF?! What has France to do with India?!

The participants? Big kahunas! Emmanuel Macron has invited Donald Trump and Elon Musk, but of course they won’t be there. Who will participate:

  • J.D. Vance to represent the US;
  • Chinese First Vice Premier, Ding Xuexiang;
  • our beloved Ursula von der Leyen;
  • and Olaf Scholz (who cares about this guy?!).

On the technical side, attendees at the summit will include:

  • Sam Altman, head of OpenAI;
  • Google’s boss Sundar Pichai;
  • Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind Technologies and Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry;
  • Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic (Claude);
  • Arthur Mensch, founder of Mistral, the French AI.

DeepSeek’s founder, Liang Wenfeng, won’t probably take part (or will he?).

There are many more smaller names in the program, and here’s a quick sampler: Guillaume Faury, CEO of Airbus; Pascal Daloz, CEO of DASSAULT Systems; Denis Machuel, CEO of Adecco (nobody will have jobs anymore); Justin Trudeau, Prime minister of Canada; Alar Karis, President of Estonia; Edgars Rinkēvičs, President Latvia; Petteri Orpo, Prime minister of Finland; Petr Pavel, President of the Czech Republic; Faure Gnassingbe, President of Togo; Mathias Cormann, Secretary general of the OECD; Nighat Dad, Founder of the Digital Rights Foundation; Marie-Laure Denis, President of the French Privacy Authority (CNIL); Mauro Vieira, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Brazil; Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Director General of the WTO; Joe Tsai, Chairman of Alibaba; Anna Tumadóttir, CEO of Creative Commons; Aiman Ezzat, CEO of Capgemini (OK, now even the jobs in Bengaluru, Chennai, Pune, Mumbai and Hyderabad are gone); Lisa Su, CEO of AMD; Clément Delangue, Co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face; Reid Hoffman, Co-Founder and Board Member of Inflection AI and Co-Founder of LinkedIn; Nabiha Syed, Executive Director of Mozilla Foundation; James Manyika, SVP Research Technology & Society at Google; Natasha Crampton, VP Chief Responsible AI at Microsoft; Ryan Beiermeister, Vice-President for Product Policy at OpenAI.

Nobody from Nvidia, yay! But Justin Trudeau, eh. And, most important, Airbus and Dassault, for real engineering applications of the AI!

Some big news

And guess what?

Invited on France 2 this Sunday, February 9, Emmanuel Macron announced “109 billion in investment in artificial intelligence over the next few years.”

He compared this investment to that of the United States for its “Stargate” artificial intelligence project, for which Donald Trump has announced an investment of $500 billion.

…

Emmanuel Macron called on France to seize this “new era of progress,” believing that artificial intelligence will enable us to “live better, learn better and treat better.”

…

For Emmanuel Macron, the “challenge for Europeans” faced with the development of artificial intelligence is to avoid the risk of “regulating before innovating.” “Otherwise, we’ll cut ourselves off from innovation, and we won’t have any players in the sector,” he said.

The French president did, however, deem it necessary to regulate artificial intelligence, comparing it to “the battle being waged on social networks.” … According to Emmanuel Macron, this work needs to be done “on a global scale,” with “global regulation” and “governments around the world committed to it.”

…

Emmanuel Macron described artificial intelligence as a means of avoiding “very repetitive tasks” in certain professions. “It’s an artificial intelligence assistant that’s going to do it for them: it’s going to give more time to supervise the robot, to be more present humanly, and to give space to do better,” he said.

Atta money… This amount of €109bn most likely includes the two other announced financing instances: a giant data center financed by the United Arab Emirates as part of an AI campus worth €30bn to €50bn, and €20bn from the Canadian fund Brookfield for new data centers in France.

Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, President of the UAE, and French President Emmanuel Macron react as France’s Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs Jean-Noël Barrot and CEO of Mubadala Investment Company Khaldoon Al Mubarak sign an agreement on AI in Paris, on February 6, 2025. Ludovic Marin/Pool via REUTERS

Also, “all your data belongs to us.” However, OpenAI made a big announcement:

We’re announcing data residency in Europe for ChatGPT Enterprise, ChatGPT Edu, and the API Platform.

Your data, humble plebeians users of the free ChatGPT, still belongs to the US!

In other news, while Clara Chappaz, French Minister in charge of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Affairs, has announced 35 sites in France for new data centers dedicated to AI (“35 sites prêts à l’emploi pour installer des capacités de calcul”), Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the eternal trotskyist, believes that “Emmanuel Macron turns France into a digital colony” with this AI summit.

Speaking of data centers, Mistral is to build its first data center in France, announced its CEO. “We chose France for its energy efficiency and the quality of its energy mix in terms of carbon emissions,” he added. FFS, then where is Mistral’s data stored today if not in France?

This rooster is not in France, but in Abridge, Essex, UK. WIKIMEDIA

Some bad news

Otherwise, and not strictly part of this summit, here’s how stupid the French authorities can be:

Laurent Marcangeli, France’s Minister for Public Action, the Civil Service and Simplification, announced on Thursday that conversational software similar to ChatGPT would soon be made available to France’s 5.7 million civil servants.

“All of them will be able to use a conversational agent to carry out searches, prepare letters, summaries or reports, sometimes also provide translations,” said Laurent Marcangeli on the occasion of the presentation of a government roadmap on artificial intelligence in public services, alongside the French minister in charge of AI, Clara Chappaz.

You fucking retard, France has Mistral and his Le Chat Mistral since February 2024! Why on the fucking Earth are you looking elsewhere?!

OK, this guy had added:

“In certain public services, we already have cooperative ventures with major companies, such as Mistral to name just one, which are now operational and enable us to carry out high-quality work,” said Marcangeli, without confirming the French start-up’s involvement in the project. Mistral has recently announced a number of partnerships, notably with France Travail and the French Ministry of the Armed Forces.

But this doesn’t mean that Mistral will be used in this case, and not just because this official didn’t specifically confirm Mistral’s possible involvement in this project. They looked elsewhere before, and they created the mentally retarded Lucie!

Parce qu’elle est débile, connard !

Otherwise, there is French support for the French Le Chat Mistral, just not from the government!

Free Mobile, a French telecom operator with more than 15 million customers, has announced it will offer a complimentary 1-year subscription to Le Chart Mistral Pro to all its customers!

The sudden success in France of Mistral “2.0”—not of the Mistral Large 2 model, but of the 2nd birth of Mistral AI on Feb. 6, 2025—isn’t entirely without hiccups, and the trump cards they play don’t all make sense to me. I especially decry their d Flash Answers: I don’t want an answer that’s spitted at me at 1,000 words/second; I prefer a good answer instead! But hey, ADHD people can’t wait. I’d rather use normal, slow answers from any of the 3 AI assistants I prefer from a set of 7, and on occasions I could even wait up to 30 seconds until Copilot’s “Think Deeper” (which uses OpenAI’s GPT-o1 reasoning model) gives an answer, rather than accepting a high-speed diarrhea of hallucinations and poorly written code! But some Frenchies have bet on a feature meant for a majority of stupid sheeple. Maybe they’re right, from a commercial standpoint.

Not to mention (yet I’m just mentioning it) that the answering speed shown here, in tokens/s, is irrelevant, as the compared systems run on different hardware, and their load is variable in time. Well, numbers and charts, for the stupid accountants who’ll decide on the subscription plans for their company…

It’s even worse here:

There are legitimate use cases for real AI, not chatbots: in engineering, in health care.

Most specialized AI solutions have nothing to do with the AI chatbots!

And yet, a planet of Idiocracy values the speed of diarrhea!

I hope I won’t be forced to abandon Mistral the same way I’m no longer using ChatGPT and DeepSeek…

A side note from J. P. Morgan

No wonder the same planet doesn’t understand that AI means more than the “Magnificent Seven” (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Tesla), which J. P. Morgan themselves considered back in November to be only a temporary monopoly in the AI field that’s “more broadening than bubble”:

The valuation gap between the biggest stocks (the megacaps) and the rest is unlikely to persist indefinitely. If the broad AI ecosystem generates sufficient revenues to justify the earnings expectations already assumed for a handful of companies, the “rest” should catch up over time. If instead, the broader corporate universe does not see the clear use case of these technologies and are unwilling to pay for them, then a “catch down” scenario is more likely.

The strong fundamentals of the megacaps, both relative to other parts of the S&P 500 today, as well as relative to the 2000s tech bubble, provide some comfort that a major “catch down” is unlikely. Collectively, the Magnificent Seven have cash on their balance sheets to the tune of around $460 billion, according to their most recent set of earnings reports. The current spread of just over 10 basis points on Apple’s corporate bonds maturing in 2032 is one example of how the market perceives the company’s quality.

Another key difference relative to 2000 is how delivered earnings growth has supported much of the move in stock prices (Exhibit 10). Take Amazon, whose P/E ratio has declined from 48x to 35x over the past 12 months, but where huge earnings growth has resulted in a 46% one-year return. Or Nvidia, the poster child of AI, whose multiples have risen over the past 12 months, but where a 145% change in 12-month forward earnings has played a major part in the stock’s 207% return.

In other words, what we are seeing today is reality over hope, rather than the hope over reality that prevailed during the dotcom bubble (Exhibits 11 and 12).

The AI value chain is complex, and I don’t fully trust J. P. Morgan’s quick analysis.

Despite the huge array of companies that will at some point find themselves in one (or more) of these AI buckets, only a handful of megacap companies are viewed as winners today based on current earnings expectations, with the flow of capital expenditure (capex) across this small number of megacaps creating a virtuous earnings cycle over the past two years.

According to data from S&P Global, just five AI hyperscalers are currently projected to spend more than $1 trillion in capex collectively from 2024 to 2027, which in turn is driving massive revenue expectations for AI hardware names. Nvidia is the prime beneficiary, where annual revenues have increased from $4bn in 2014 to an expected $61bn in 2024. At the same time, the top 10 stocks in the S&P 500 are now responsible for over 40% of research and development (R&D) expense, despite only representing 13% of the S&P’s revenues (Exhibit 14).

…

The substantial gap between the revenue expectations of hardware companies and the revenue growth that can be generated by the AI ecosystem is an issue that has already attracted significant attention. If the developers and the integrators can’t generate sufficient profit, this weakness will eventually spread up the value chain. As the initial hype around AI starts to cool, the question investors are posing is a simple one: “show me the money?”

The good news for technology bulls is that AI adoption appears to be increasing. McKinsey’s Global Survey on AI from earlier this year, for example, showed that the proportion of companies that have adopted AI in at least one business function had jumped from 55% in 2023 to 72% in 2024, with an even greater jump in the proportion of businesses using generative AI.

Quantifying the revenue benefit, however, is much more challenging. For the hardware providers, while forecasts are still uncertain, a large proportion of AI-related revenues are coming from a small number of hyperscalers. But for the developers, whether they’re selling software to a law firm in a bid to reduce headcount, or new technology to a pharmaceutical company to enable accelerated drug testing, these increased revenues are going to be scattered right across the economy. Crucially, this makes it far harder for analysts to gauge the outlook for earnings.

After all this “it’s not like the dotcom bubble,” the ending is surprisingly lucid:

Conclusion: Look beyond megacap tech stocks for AI opportunities

In our view the gap between the valuation of mega-cap tech and the broader S&P 500 is unsustainable. However, unlike 2000, we see a ‘catch up’ scenario as more likely than a ‘catch down’ scenario. From here, investors should focus on opportunities that will prevail right along the AI value chain. Investors need to weigh future potential earnings against what is already embedded in the price. Cheaper valuations and less demanding earnings expectations outside of megacap tech stocks suggest that even AI bulls should be positioned for further broadening across sectors in 2025.

Indeed, look beyond the big bulls!

And some considerations from yours truly

Now, an expression of skepticism from me. I even watched the opening speech in the morning of Feb. 10.

And it still looks to me that almost everyone is looking at the AI as if it were mostly about AI assistants, understood as chatbots, plus image and video generation. This is beyond dumb. If so much money is poured in to this purpose, this bubble is going to crash more dramatically than the dotcom bubble.

It doesn’t matter that there are differences to the dotcom bubble. All those companies went down back then, but this doesn’t mean we don’t have today an even stronger Internet, with almost everything in the Cloud. It’s just different. There aren’t the same companies today.

The CEO of Airbus: “We’ve been using the AI for 30 years already in the development of products.” This is the true AI, the true evolution of Deep Learning! Not frivolous chatbots and silly pictures!

But I’m really not sure that the participants at this summit on the AI, being they heads of major international organizations, really know what the AI is supposed to mean. The ChatGPT mania made too many people believe that this is the manifestation of the AI in our lives.

I’ve also read readers’ comments on a couple of articles about this event in Le Figaro.

The main topic is, of course, “Will the AI take our jobs, or will it create more jobs?”

In an ideal world, the AI would replace some repetitive, boring, meaningless, bullshit jobs, and create new, meaningful jobs.

In the real world, too many retarded CEOs try to replace people with chatbots, and the AI creates too many bullshit jobs.

“A knowledge society, a society of competence,” said someone at this summit (or something of the kind; I retranslated from the French voiceover, as these tards couldn’t let the original audio track). In your dreams!

These are not entirely meaningful jobs: machine learning engineer (to do what?); Natural Language Processing engineer (OK, that’s cool); edge AI engineer (what’s this even supposed to mean?); chatbot designer (no comment); data scientist (that’s too generic and predates the AI bubble); prompt engineer (the most absurd job, simply because people don’t know how to ask a chatbot to get relevant results!); AI architects (the IT has many more architects than the architecture!); AI integration specialist (it depends); and so on.

The French public is worried (and for good reasons!) that such jobs will be outsourced to India by the more than 3,000 French IT companies members of the Syntec federation, the same way 200,000 software development jobs have been outsourced from France to Morocco and India since 2005.

Others are worried that the AI tsunami will wipe out too many kinds of jobs, and contrast it to the comparatively low impact of the invention of the automobile, when mainly the coachmen and the horse-related people lost their jobs.

Other concerned people notice that there isn’t a single big French name in software; Germany has at least SAP. So the US and even China will likely dominate the AI field.

If I’m not wrong, the IT companies have been complaining for years that they cannot find the qualified workforce that they need. The public education system doesn’t train them. The employers don’t train them. There might be the case that there aren’t enough people able or willing to do that! The same way there’s a shortage of doctors, dentists, but also mechanical engineers, because these aren’t jobs for everyone.

Already, when we made everything dependent on computers and the Cloud, everyone believed that the required specialists would just materialize out of thin air. They didn’t.

The quality of the software is appalling. That’s because too much software is required (or at least someone tells people they need it!) too quickly. The quality of the customer service in all technology companies is atrocious. Sure, you can replace dumb call-center operators with dumb chatbots, but this won’t fix anything.

If we believe the humankind is able to build “intelligent AI” when there is a shortage of natural intelligence, then we’re doomed. Heck, this planet even needs “prompt engineers” because people don’t know to ask questions! Although this might be a case of “another SEO,” in the sense that instead of optimizing a website to have a relevant structure and thus be properly indexed by web search engines, spam websites try to hack Google’s indexing algorithms, and they call this SEO. Maybe prompt engineering is to be hijacked to get the desired answer from an AI assistant, regardless of what the correct answer would be. (“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?”)

At the AI Action Summit 2025, people are only too happy to utter words. Too many words. That’s called logorrhea. Parole, parole, parole. So much time, energy, and money is spent on useless words. We’ll soon be exasperated by this AIcracy.

If the AI kills some jobs and creates some other jobs (some of which will lack the qualified workforce, because AI is magic, just like the blockchain, and advanced mathematics isn’t for everyone!), it will definitely boost the number of clueless C-suites. And their bonuses.

Finally, the concern with the ecology of the big AI names is grotesque. The AI will lead to a several-fold increase in the world’s IT-related electricity consumption.

A manifestation of the Jevons paradox or of the efficiency dilemma, the AI bubble will only increase both the need for a highly specialized workforce, and the electricity consumption. Bonjour, CO2 footprint! We don’t want any fossil fuels anymore—oil, natural gas, coal—but how is the electricity going to be produced? Through magic? We might want to get “nucular”—bar Germany, of course.

Nuclear power plants for data centers and EVs. What a wonderful world it will be!

And I won’t even touch the impact AI already has on the creative arts. It’s depressing to see so many fakes.

Oh, and don’t forget you need many more subscriptions to survive in the new world. First, we had to pay for cell phones; then everything required Internet access; then TV streaming services came along, and streaming music, too; subscription-based software replaced the “buy once, use forever” model in some fields; and now people are paying for several chatbot subscriptions and for 3rd-party apps that use AI services. This won’t end unless the world ends. Count several hundred dollars or euros per month to be a citizen of this world. Fuck it.

No, I cannot be optimistic.