The paper of record, 20 February 2023

I don’t know if you saw it go by, but I recommend reading this article published online in Le Monde.

The minister interviewed is Jean-Noël Barrot, minister delegate for digital affairs in the current government, and the interview is about the minister’s comments on ChatGPT.

Before you read what follows, I want to be clear that I don’t have the verbatim of the interview. There is a non-negligible chance the remarks were distorted (the rare times I’ve dealt with a journalist, half the transcriptions meant the opposite of what I’d said). Still, watching this interview with the minister, that chance gets smaller.

But I come back to the article, because the remarks are very interesting, and they say a lot about the state of France, the state of our political class, and our challenges.

Parrot

So what does the Minister have to say?

1/ “ChatGPT is nothing but an approximate parrot”

We’ll pass over the quote the journalist picked in order to build a nice clickbait title. Still, the exact line shows up in the video interview cited above, so the minister did prepare this punchline. We’ll note the arrogance of it all the same. The Minister can’t have used it much, to come out with a howler like that.

An approximate parrot whose answers you can put in context, frame, and steer until it gives you the right information, in the shape you want. Yes, the answers aren’t sourced, some are false, others are imprecise. The model’s training data stopping in 2021, the answers can be incomplete. But the quality of the rendering, the quality of the exchange! What’s crazy is realizing this is only the beginning. Personally, I now develop with a chatGPT tab open, and it has replaced searching on Stackoverflow in a lot of cases.

What was approximate, on the other hand, was the minister’s concentration, either while testing ChatGPT or while reading his adviser’s note. I would have preferred a complaint on his part, or a question about why our industry has no equivalent product on offer. Instead of the arrogance of a politician landing a bon mot, I would have preferred the start of a diagnosis of our inability to produce such a product in France (I mean a “product”, not a POC or an algo running in a jupyter notebook).

2/ “risks of discrimination, manipulation, and dehumanization […] so we have to act”

There. The politician has at hand the tool that lets a society capable of producing an equivalent product emerge: the tax system. We have the schools, the training, the engineers, and companies of the size required. The minister could have aimed his remarks at a warning, or at recognizing how far behind we are.

But no. In France we concentrate on what we do best: a law, which will certainly carry the name of the minister in charge, for posterity. And of course, behind it, we’ll produce a tax, because the nasty foreign AIs are stealing French people’s jobs.

It’s frankly despairing. French politicians, from every side, have only one line: protect, protect, and protect. Infantilizing and populist.

I’m not saying these AI models are perfect, but, to use the minister’s own words, the risks of discrimination, of manipulation, and of dehumanization already exist with TV, the written press, and everything around us. Even the article quoting the minister is to be taken with a grain of salt!

Here, try this. Go into a FNAC. €20 says you’ll find a meter of counter on esotericism, and books in the medicine section explaining that to treat a cancer you’re better off drinking fruit juice. And I’ll give you €100 if you find a classical liberal (a real one — say Bastiat or Hayek) in the politics section.

You really want to fight manipulation? Put everything you’ve got into education and into building critical thinking. That’s true for using a tool like ChatGPT, and it’s just as true for a flat-earther’s blog.

3/ “training 400,000 digital experts by 2030 […] so that France doesn’t miss this new wave”

France has already missed this “new wave”.

It already has, the way it has already (almost) missed the cloud one, armed drones, or next-generation nuclear.

For cloud I say “almost”, because with the “state sponsored at €500M” fiascos Numergy and CloudWatt, it’s the private players who are fighting and holding their own: Ovh, Scaleway, Clever, Outscale, …

That leaves quantum computing, but the colossal amounts of money required mean it will be hard.

Back to training 400,000 digital experts. What could we do better? We already train engineers and researchers of real talent. But the best leave for abroad: better projects, better salaries. And what we need in 2023 is not courses of the “become a data scientist in 6 months” kind (no worries, the professional-training outfits are already rubbing their hands). A push like that should have been launched 15 years ago.

4/ “Digital companies must be able to « recruit in the best conditions »”

Oh really? Isn’t that already the case? You want to help digital companies?

We can’t pull out of the ground the thousands of engineers we’re short of, so I see 3 levers: salaries, to keep the best; bringing people in; and the talk.

How do you raise salaries? Cut the payroll charges: at an equivalent cost (the super-gross), we’ll be able to pay better. We’ll be able to fight almost on equal terms, so the best stay.

Simplify the procedures for bringing in qualified foreign staff: you have to have been to the Nanterre prefecture, or talked to someone at the Direccte at least once in your life, to understand. It takes a crazy amount of time, and energy, nothing is clear, and there’s a fat uncertainty hanging over it. [A little story: we had hired an impressive dev from Madagascar. First interview in April 2018, arrival on French soil in July 2019. Maybe we were unlucky — or incompetent on our side, because getting a clear answer out of the administration was impossible. The funniest part is that the amount of the OFFI tax we had to pay showed up in 2021]

And on the talk, I’ll lean on the end of the article, with a fine return of French arrogance:

« Open AI, the artificial intelligence company behind ChatGPT, would however have “done better to wait until it had filters” that could detect use of its software “before publishing it”, he regretted. »

Instead of setting himself up to hand out lessons, the minister would have done better to deplore how far behind we are in the field. We live in the shadow of our past and of the innovations we produced. A few years ago, the state put out a “promotional” film of our industry (around 2018). On the poster: the TGV, Concorde, nuclear plants & the Rafale. Nothing but past glories. I had a pin of the white demo Rafale in 1988, the last French plant dates from 2002, which is the year Concorde was retired, and the TGV… anyway, you get it.

Jean-Noël Barrot’s remarks remind me of a friend who saw me after I’d finished my first marathon — 1 year after I quit smoking — and who let this drop, a beer in his hand and a cigarette in his mouth: “Yeah, a marathon is just training and I could do it, but since it’s a pain, I won’t. But you still could have done 20 minutes better.”

When I see this kind of article and, at the same time, our politicians congratulate themselves with great pomp on opening a night-train line… I dream of a state, of “elites” who acknowledge our downgrading in every field of tomorrow and breathe a wind that comes with acts.