La haute intelligence artificielle

Some robots are more sophisticated than others

Feb 16, 2025

Dear Friend,

I hope the month has been treating you well so far and that you had a good Valentine’s weekend, if it’s a festival you observe!

After a truly grim few days of grey and rain, Paris showed us the first few hints of spring this weekend — though temperatures remained scarf-and-gloves cold, the skies have been resolutely blue and sunny. It’s a relief.

This is not a city best suited to winter: London has cosy pubs and a garish and jolly Christmas season, whereas public life in Paris centres around the café terraces, and Christmas is a short and comparatively low-key affair. This weekend’s glimpse of spring was a reminder of the season to come and all the café-terrace optimism it brings.

Today I listened to Another Spring by Nina Simone (Track 2 on the Pen Friend mixtape), its bitter-sweet tone and words felt very apt:

And then one morning / Another spring is there outside my door/ Things are blooming /Birds are singing/ And suddenly yes well I ain't sad/ Ain't sad no more ain't sad no more
When it's warm and the sun is out/ It's like my heart's restored

I am now going into the third third of being pregnant, so this will be a unique spring for me personally. One thing I have really realised over the last few months is that nine months is a LONG TIME.

The last job I had in London in 2017 had a three-month notice period. After I decided to move back to Paris, I posted my three months’ notice. I remember each stage of the long phase had a distinct feel. In the first month I was thinking ‘oh wow, I’m really leaving this job!’; then by the second month I had sort of forgotten I was leaving and just kept doing my job as normal; and then by the third month of the notice period, I was suddenly aware again I was leaving!

I now feel I am in the stage of pregnancy where after a long wait, it suddenly feels much more real again. This is partially because it’s much more apparent physically and also because we have started attending antenatal information sessions, run by my lovely midwife. The most recent one involved a plastic baby doll, referred to as ‘Rosalie’ by my midwife, and her journey through a plastic pelvis. One soon-to-be father was silent and extremely pale for most of the hour, before pronouncing, “I will be there, but I may need to face the wall.” According to my midwife, I also went pale for much of the session, though I maintain this was down to the high emotion of seeing Rosalie make her journey, rather than pure squeamishness.

I have begun to allay my feelings of unpreparedness in the way our society ordains dealing with any complex emotion: acquiring THINGS. Earlier this week we picked up a crib from our friends Fiona and Joe, and today we bought a Yoyo pushchair from another friend. This is the go-to model for Parisian babies due to its petite size and lightness, making it suitable for narrow metros, busy pavements and unforgiving staircases.

Now that my eyes are open to these buggies, I see them everywhere. Up until now, my mind filed them under ‘baby things that don’t apply to me’, but now I’m suddenly more aware of the people pushing them — appreciating that ‘person pushing baby in pushchair’ has not been their whole life’s immutable role, but something that maybe even a few months ago was as novel to their experience and identity as it is to me now.

Haute intelligence artificielle

This week Paris hosted a global summit on artificial intelligence (AI Action Summit), which was significant for me in large part because it meant a top-notch cousin of mine was in town from New York. But I also thought it was quite interesting to see the president’s bid to position this country as an important player in the development of the new technology.

I wrote a couple of years ago that I thought French culture to be particularly incompatible with machine learning due to its relationship with order and logic — I cited the example of the administration system:

“AI technology runs on reliable data-sets and logical problem-solving. French administration runs on a seemingly ever-changing nexus of paperwork, the mood of the person administering the paperwork, and probably a lot of cigarettes.”

Read: French admin vs. AI: Some things simply defy logic

However, in the opening speech of the conference, Macron framed the country as ‘ready to embrace a new era of progress’. He laid out the conditions that make France apt to be a key player, citing the quality of the education, training and talent, as well as the availability of carbon-free nuclear energy for data centres (he used the phrase: “plug, baby, plug”).

To demonstrate France’s efficacy in delivering on a commitment, Macron said the country would employ the “Notre-Dame approach” to building data centres. Because nothing says technical innovation like a medieval cathedral painstakingly restored using ancestral stained glass and timbering techniques!

Read: The 20th century Silicon Valley

Throughout his speech, the president emphasised that France’s AI would be different — “our conviction is that it must be at the service of humanity, for living better.” In short, la haute AI.

Coinciding with the conference, the TV channel France 2 aired a factual entertainment show called ‘AI: The Great Experiment’ which involved pitting a human against a generative AI chat bot in various scenarios.

One experiment saw four men chat with a real woman and then an AI-generated woman online, before choosing one to date (sidebar: three out of four chose the more acquiescent robot lady). When the AI-generated woman used a racial stereotype, the consultant French engineer on the show was quick to offer an explanation — most of the data the model trains on is from the ‘Anglo-Saxon world’, he explained, and unfortunately American society has a lot of stereotypes and is very 'patriarchal’ (of course not applicable to French society).

Later on, two chefs were asked to prepare a human and AI-generated recipe respectively. When the AI recipe turned out to be a big sloppy mess, the chef testing the two dishes came to a similar sad conclusion about what was at fault — and it wasn’t so much the technology as, well, its education. ‘Unfortunately, the AI was probably trained on American data’, he said, ‘and we know that American food is large portions, it’s burgers.’

It is quite clear. Any weaknesses in the technology are due to the faulty culture of Anglo-Saxons! The only solution for a truly sophisticated AI assistant is evident: it must have a French education! And there is a French AI company, Mistral, which has developed their answer to Chat GPT called ‘Le Chat’. I’m reliably informed it’s a touch more sophisticated.

Thirty-second book club

Oh gosh, how do I tell you that I’m still reading Germinal by Emile Zola? At the moment, we are several hundred metres down a very hot and dangerous mine shaft with some workers who have refused to go on general strike — and I must admit I feel a bit like I’ve taken a deep trip down a mine shaft by embarking on reading this novel, but — like the workers — I am determined to climb my way out eventually. I do believe I will finish this interesting but slightly never-ending book very soon, and consequently write about a different subject in this section!

Thank you for reading this letter about the advent of spring, Rosalie the educational doll and the je-ne-sais-quoi of French AI.

I hope you enjoyed it! If you did, feel free to press the heart below to ‘like’ it, or share it with a friend. Please do also write back in the comments or by email.

I will write very soon! Hope you enjoy February until then.

Yours,

Hannah