The French companies bashing a national sport ?
I’m getting more and more annoyed by the trend of generalized denigration about the supposed weaknesses of the French digital ecosystem! And in a general way on the French industrial and entrepreneurial capacities.
The new episode that made my blood boil, concerns the media buzz around Chat-GPT… Everybody is fascinated by the advances of this technology, hammering that once again the Americans are ahead, they are the best and the most beautiful!
When a program like C’dans l’air takes part in this denigration in its program of last April 4th, in particular by the voice of an influential economist in the media world, Mr Dessertine, it is more than painful.
The experts who intervene on these TV shows should work more on their subject. Indeed, if there is no French or European Chat-GHPT open to the general public, it is perhaps because our actors of generative Artificial Intelligence focus on use cases with concrete added value and turned towards professional uses.
When you look a little, you realize that there are 590 start-ups in France, 60% of which are located in the Paris region, as shown by an analysis of France Digitale. Indeed, these French companies or start-ups do not have the financial scale to launch a marketing communication operation with the random effects of the Open AI Chat-GPT operation invested by Microsoft. It should be remembered that the development surrounding Chat-GPT now 4, raises a number of questions as we have seen:
Ethical problems in applying a layer of political correctness that is ideologically marked…
Problems of direct bias included in the development of the algorithms themselves, what methodologies are used to minimize them? It remains a black box and this lack of transparency is a real problem.
Use of the web as a whole as a learning base, while we know that the content disseminated on the web is not necessarily verified, sourced, or even consistent. How is learning done with what safeguards and rules?
Confidentiality problems, as shown by some cases of uncontrolled use of the tool in the professional world (Samsung case – FrAndroid 6 April 23)
Faced with these questions, is it not more relevant to have a French player like Lexistems, which I take as an example, but which is far from being the only player, which focuses on the B to B, i.e. for companies. This approach allows the development of efficient tools based on a restricted and controlled information base, in a technical architecture dedicated to the final customer, ensuring the latter a complete control of data confidentiality and security aspects.
Why I react so strongly and epidermically to this systematic denigration of the capabilities of our French digital players (but digital is not the only sector affected), is that we have observed the same phenomenon in past years on the cloud, implying that outside of American solutions, there is no salvation, and the same goes for collaborative solutions.
This denigration, skilfully orchestrated by important personalities in the media, TV, written press, etc., makes our political and/or administrative decision-makers under the influence of these preconceived ideas with disastrous consequences, when they are not active accomplices.
The economic consequences are significant, especially in systematically favoring major American companies in public procurement, despite the risks of security and independence that cannot be denied! Since they cannot access, or only access with difficulty, these public markets, this slows down the growth of our French nuggets, leaving them with the choice of often being bought by these American players. It’s funny to think that if our nuggets were as bad as claimed by (ir)managers probably under monetary perfusion from these same foreign players, the latter would not bother to buy them…
I can only deplore this American vassalization of our media, educational, cultural and political elites, which adds a lot of weight to the feet of our entrepreneurs, diminishing their chances in all types of economic competitions they face. Maybe it’s time to wake up?
