?? Eyes Wide Open ?? AIs Wide Open

The following is a redacted and enhanced for readability transcription of an impromptu closing speech that took place at the European Tech Sovereignty Summit on May 21st 2024.

Moderator:

All right, it's now time for our final committed speech of the evening. The next speaker coming up is the former CEO of Scaleway, also former COO of Snips, and now the current CEO of :probabl. . Please put your hands together for our final committed speech of the evening and welcome Yann Lechelle. Thank you.

Yann Lechelle:

Good evening everyone. This speech was not planned. Fifteen minutes ago, I was across the Seine River attending the AI conference at the Elysée Palace with my peers around Emmanuel Macron’s plea to make France a power player in the field. Maxime Paradis , co-organizer with Ieva Gaigala and Damien GROMIER of the European Tech Sovereignty Summit at Quai d’Orsay, asked me to step in for the closing speech and share my vision for Europe. Here it is.

Eyes Wide Open?

Let's pause on that notion for a moment. What is a vision? It’s about seeing clearly. Do we even share a common vision for Europe? I believe so. That is why I came back to France in 2000 after happily working many years in the US. But when I think about the state of Europe, technology wise, we need to be humble and acknowledge that the vision is blurry. We need to look at the state of our tech ecosystem when we talk about sovereignty. It's important to see sovereignty from the prism of lack of sovereignty to some degree, since this is where we are, or rather where we are not. Humility allows us to set the foundation and a goal for a vision. A first insight I want to share with you today is the need to have our “eyes wide open”. We need to be fully aware of where we are in order to know where we want to go. For the past 25 years, I have been an entrepreneur in Paris. I did okay but I did not manage to create a big tech. I did not create a trillion-dollar company. You would know about it! But France did not create a trillion-dollar company either. And Europe did not create a trillion-dollar company either. So this begs the question: how do we rebalance the equation? How do we become a proper sparring partner with the US and with China?

I did not create a trillion-dollar company. You would know about it! But France did not create a trillion-dollar company either. And Europe did not create a trillion-dollar company either.

We shouldn't be too hard on ourselves, actually, because we are just catching up. In fact, let’s consider Silicon Valley, which was coined as a term in 1971 (my year of birth coincidentally). Silicon Valley has many more decades ahead of us. When I started being an entrepreneur in Paris in 2000, we had literally nothing in terms of tech ecosystem. Today, we have just about everything except perhaps a strong endogenic exit market. In Europe, we don't have trillion-euro massive players that concentrate power. We don't have any yet. So maybe it's just a question of time. VCs have funds that last 10 years. So each generation of VCs returns interests but also create entrepreneurs that in turn give back to the community, as investors but more often, as mentors or simply a more experienced version of themselves. It takes generations of exits for an ecosystem to reach full maturity, so that will take some time, so we need to be patient and deliberate to actually build this up. Silicon Valley gives us a template that we use to actually emulate the system. Unfortunately, that is currently not enough because right now technology is accelerating and AI precisely is an acceleration factor. So how do we deal with that? Schumpeter promised us creative destruction. So we should all be fine right? Disruptive technologies will just kill some jobs and create new ones. Well, not so fast! Schumpeter was born 100 years ago or more. He never experienced exponentials. We live in a time where we have to be fully aware of that exponential, that will cause intra-generational problems if we do not deal with the exponential nature of disruption. We are likely to be caught by surprise if we do not actually keep our eyes wide open, in full awareness. There is a reason why all eyes are now on AI.

Schumpeter was born 100 years ago or more. He never experienced exponentials.

AIs wide open

How do we make sure these AIs are not a black box? Right now, even if we talk about open source large language models (LLMs), they are black boxes. Most providers do not provide the source of the data to recreate the LLMs. Some LLMs claim to be “open source”. They are not, strictly speaking. They are actually open weights. The notion of openness is critical in open innovation. Why? LLMs, but also AI in general, are all about capturing and compressing knowledge, at the current rate we are talking humanity scale knowledge, all of it. Usually, the goal is to use it for productivity gains. That’s fine. But knowledge is also meant to be free. The reverse of knowledge is ignorance. We don’t want that for humanity. We do not want to be ignorant in the face of AI, as a society. It endangers us since this technology swallows knowledge faster than we can safeguard it.

LLMs, but also AI in general, are all about capturing and compressing knowledge, at the current rate we are talking humanity scale knowledge, all of it.

How do we go from where we are, to where we should be, in France, in Europe with regards to what is happening in the US and in China that have different mechanisms to compete with us? This begs the question of sovereignty. A term that is difficult to define actually. Sovereignty is usually linked? to national self determination and control. Now, tech sovereignty for Europe is more fuzzy, because Europe is a construct that is not quite a federation of states. We are struggling in this definition of tech sovereignty so other terms are useful to complete the definition, for example: Strategic Autonomy and European Dynamism. These terms capture where we should be. We need to build this voluntary desire to sustain our European values, regardless of external pressures, dynamically and positively. That is the only driver that matters. Why? Because right now, if you look at AI, only a handful of companies, mostly US companies, have the ability to distribute technology to 5 billion humans on the planet, instantly, overnight, and that includes nearly 100% of Europeans. We do not have an equivalent in Europe. What we have however, is a construct, a super construct called the EU, with dozens of democracies that care for citizens. This is our unique selling point, our USP, this is our moat. How do we preserve and defend that? How do we preserve democracy? How do we preserve the state of peace that we’ve enjoyed for 80 years? It is so fragile! Fundamentally, everything we do should defer to that context. The rest is all mechanics. The driving force to me should be the desire to build a desirable society that we wish to leave to our children and the generations to come. That is it. That is as simple as that. Anything else is accessory to it. We want to make sure technology remains open. We want to make sure things remain competitive on a level playing field to sustain our democracies, to sustain our structures, to sustain our values.

What we have however, is a construct, a super construct called the EU, with dozens of democracies that care for citizens. This is our unique selling point, our USP, this is our moat

To conclude, if you hold an European passport, I wish you all to be a motivated voter on June 9th. But consider that you are also a decision maker, every day. Every choice you make as you select some technology, when you buy a smartphone, download an app, you need to be fully aware of what is going on behind the scenes, because it is a slippery slope if your eyes are not wide open, and if you do not require AIs to be wide open. Each and every single one of you is the maker of tomorrow’s Europe, technological Europe, through the choices you make, if anything to reduce our lack of sovereignty.

But consider that you are also a decision maker, every day. [...] Each and every single one of you is the maker of tomorrow’s Europe, technological Europe, through the choices you make, if anything to reduce our lack of sovereignty

Thank you.?