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| French President Emmanuel Macron |
France will invest 1.5 billion euros of public money into artificial intelligence research by 2022 in a bid to catch up with the United States and China and reverse a brain drain.
The investment is part of an AI strategy laid out by President Emmanuel Macron at the elite College de France research institute in Paris, the French presidency said.
The goal is to make better use of the French higher education system that trains computer engineers and mathematicians only to see them leave for jobs at top U.S. tech companies.
Some of them have secured high-level positions at Alphabet , the parent company of search engine Google, and Facebook, which opened an AI research centre in Paris in 2015.
Macronโs AI plan was inspired by a government-commissioned report by Cedric Villani, the self-styled โLady Gaga of Mathematicsโ and winner of the mathematics equivalent of the Nobel Prize.
Villani, who is also a lawmaker in Macronโs party, said in the report the brain drain to Silicon Valley companies showed the excellence of French schools.
However, it also points to the need for greater collaboration between government research centres and private companies to keep the best minds at home.
โWhat a waste,โ said Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire earlier on Thursday. โFrance pays for the training of doctoral students who then head to the United States.โ
In a sign Macronโs efforts to woo top scientists and businesses may be starting to bear fruit, Samsung Electronics , Japanโs Fujitsu and London-based Google-owned Deepmind announced plans to beef up their operations in Paris earlier. (Reporting by Mathieu Rosemain and Michel Rose; Editing by Richard Lough and Leigh Thomas)
