The French approach to Artificial Intelligence: how Paris is safeguarding its technological sovereignty through the Nvidia-Mistral partnership - Il Sole 24 ORE

'Technological sovereignty' is a lovely phrase, and France has reportedly secured it by entering a partnership with Nvidia, a Californian chip company that every sovereign AI programme in Europe is presently queuing outside, cap in hand. Mistral AI has marked the occasion with Large 4, the fourth instalment in a model family whose numbering now serves as a running tally of how much sovereignty has already been delivered. Paris, we are told, is 'safeguarding' something. On the evidence, it is safeguarding its place in the queue.

The Nvidia-Mistral partnership is offered as the engine of the French approach, which is a bold reading of the word 'partnership': one party supplies the chips the entire industry cannot function without, the other supplies the branding and the press release. Independence secured through a supplier relationship with the single most strategically important hardware company on earth is an ambitious definition of independence, of the sort usually reached by people who have not read the contract. There is a version of this story involving French data centres, French electricity and models trained on French electricity bills; the version actually on offer appears to be French ambition, American silicon, and a satellite.

Speaking of which: Altair-1 was launched this month, and has been drafted in to lend the piece an orbital flourish, presumably on the theory that the only data centre genuinely beyond the reach of foreign jurisdiction is in low Earth orbit. And the story is being told by Il Sole 24 ORE — an Italian newspaper — because the French, on this showing, would rather the achievement were described by a neighbour. Mistral Large 4 will probably be very good. So will Large 5. The queue, the partnership and the satellite will all still be there, which is reassuring, if not quite what sovereignty is supposed to mean.