The governor of the Banque de France pleads for the development of French and European AI

The development of French and European artificial intelligence (AI) models is “at the top of my wish list,” declared Monday in Basel the governor of the Bank of France, François Villeroy de Galhau. “Making national AI platforms available on the market... would be very beneficial... given the sensitivity of some of the data we process, and so it is high on my list of wishes,” he said during a speech at the Innovation Summit of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), which he chairs, and whose headquarters are in Basel, Switzerland.

“The more AI providers we have, the less risky our use of this AI will be - diversification is an effective risk management tool,” the governor continued in this speech, detailing the “doctrine” of the French central bank in matter of artificial intelligence. “In France and Europe, we have the expertise and resources necessary to be able to compete with the major players already in place,” such as the Americans OpenAI and its generative AI ChatGPT or Meta and its Llama model, said François. Villeroy de Galhau.

Also readChat GPT, Bard: are you worried about the development of artificial intelligence?

With the start-up Mistral AI, France already has one of the most advanced European companies in AI. In addition to “understanding and mastering” AI, the first pillar of the “doctrine” of the Banque de France, the central bank advocates “appropriation” of the technology by its agents and “cooperation” between different regulators (banks central offices, financial supervisors, etc.). “Today, at the Banque de France, we have already deployed AI in several different areas,” insisted the governor.

“We use machine learning to facilitate fraud detection in operations with the French Treasury (…); “neural networks” allow teams to analyze the default probabilities of non-financial companies within our rating system,” he explained.