On the second day of the OW2 con 2024 trade show at the Orange Gardens Innovation Center in Châtillon, Michel-Marie Maudet, CEO of LINAGORA, once again took the floor to present the advances and challenges of Open Source Generative Artificial Intelligence. For some twenty years, LINAGORA has been committed to developing a 'digital third way' to offer an alternative to the American and Chinese technology giants. This initiative now extends to the field of AI, illustrating a desire to create local solutions that are independent of the large centralised infrastructures.

"Over the last 25 years, we have begun to develop the idea that in Europe we are capable of developing what we call a digital third way."

This is an ambition that he shares with the entire OpenLLM Europe community, which aims to strengthen Europe's digital sovereignty when it comes to AI. In response to the dominance of non-European AI models, this initiative focuses on the development of local linguistic models. The first model, CLAIRE, published in October 2023, demonstrates France's ability to use supercomputers, such as Jean-Zay at the GENCI laboratory, to train large-scale models. LINAGORA's CEO also took the opportunity to announce the development of LUCIE, the new pre-trained language model, which complies with the conditions and requirements of Open Source. 

"The main thing is to be able to publish all the datasets used to train our models under a public and Open Source licence."

This initiative is not just about technology, but also about transforming society and promoting digital biodiversity. We must insist on the need to diversify the sources of data used to train models, so that each AI model perfectly reflects the current state of our society. 

"The current situation is as follows: less than 10% of the learning data for LLMs currently on the market comes from Europe."

Michel-Marie therefore reiterates the importance of maintaining total transparency in data management. The aim is to correct this imbalance and build models that embody European and French values and culture. This is a crucial condition in the construction of an AI capable of maintaining the knowledge of all cultures.

"AI is not just about technology. It's also about transforming our society and digital biodiversity."

Michel-Marie highlighted his points with concrete demonstrations using OpenAI's Whisper text-to-speech technology. He demonstrated, live, how to transcribe and translate videos, highlighting the power and flexibility of Open Source AI solutions, on a par with the proprietary models of the GAFAMs.

LINAGORA and Michel-Marie Maudet's efforts in the field of Open Source, and particularly in AI, illustrate an ambitious vision for Europe. By developing local and transparent technologies, they are seeking to offer viable alternatives to proprietary solutions, while promoting ethical and responsible use through Open Source. A real example to follow for the future development of Europe and our societies.