“It’s essential to raise salaries”: Gabriel Attal considers the lack of space given to AI in the presidential campaign “staggering”

Five months before the presidential election, is the national debate missing the key issue of our time? Gabriel Attal on Sunday judged the lack of space given to artificial intelligence in the presidential campaign to be “staggering”, seeing it as “the key” to “gain productivity” and “raise the salaries of the French”. “This subject completely takes a back seat and it’s totally astonishing. I don't understand. It’s as if at the time of the invention of electricity there was a presidential campaign and we had not debated electricity,” explained the Renaissance candidate at the Rencontres de l’avenir in Saint-Raphaël (Var).

“There are two battles being fought today. There is the battle to have the best models, it is rather the Americans who are winning it. And there is the battle to have the greatest diffusion of AI in society in the economy, it is rather the Chinese who are very ahead,” explained Gabriel Attal. This second part is “essential, because it is what will allow us to gain in productivity and therefore increase the wages of the French. For me, the key is there,” explained the former prime minister.

He recalled his proposals to establish “a productivity tax credit” to help finance “the adoption of AI solutions” in companies, and to “train 20 million French people in three years”. On the models, “I think it is not too late but I think that in five years it will be too late”. And “if I am a candidate, it is because I think that there are essential elements that are at stake in this election. If we don't take the right turn, particularly on the subject of innovation and artificial intelligence, in five years it will be too late. We will be colonized by the Americans and the Chinese. And some say “it’s not very serious, we will have access to their models and we will be able to use them”, but they will extort us,” explained Gabriel Attal.

“We have to make fairly radical decisions and (...) if we want to succeed, it is particularly at the European level that we will get there,” he said, recalling his desire to create a “United States of Europe” so “that a restricted circle of European countries launches to create a real economic, technological and ecological federation”.