this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2025
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further details:

Meanwhile, the French financing will include commitments from the United Arab Emirates, American and Canadian investments funds and French companies like telecommunications firms Iliad and Orange, and aerospace and defense group Thales

A few days before France’s AI Action Summit, which kicked off on Monday, the UAE said it would invest between 30 billion euros and 50 billion euros in the construction of a one-gigawatt AI data center in France as part of a campus focused on the technology’s development.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/10/frances-answer-to-stargate-macron-announces-ai-investment.html

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[–] apfelwoiSchoppen@lemmy.world 62 points 2 months ago
[–] seven_phone@lemmy.world 40 points 2 months ago

See that bandwagon over there, I am going to jump on it.

But everyone already is on it.

Merde.

[–] heavydust@sh.itjust.works 31 points 2 months ago (1 children)

My taxes at work to fund shitty generators. People around me will cheer for this since they are not working in the programming industry and don’t know how it’s yet another way to lower the quality of all that we’ve done so far. We’re fucked.

[–] Eyekaytee@aussie.zone 12 points 2 months ago (5 children)

People around me will cheer for this since they are not working in the programming industry

I don't know how you can say this when programming is one of the best uses for AI

[–] Badabinski@kbin.earth 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

As a senior dev, I have no use for it in my workflow. The only purpose it would serve for me is to reduce the amount of typing I do. I spend about 5-10% of my time actually writing code. The rest of my dev time is spent in architecting, debugging, testing, or documenting. LLMs aren't really good at most of those things once you move past the most superficial levels of complexity. Besides, I don't actually want something to reduce the amount I'm typing. If I'm typing too much and I'm getting annoyed then it's a sure sign that I've done something bad. If I'm writing boilerplate then it's time to write an abstraction to eliminate that. If I'm writing repetitive tests then it's a sign I need to move to a property based testing framework like Hypothesis. If the LLM spits all of this out for me, I will end up writing code that is harder to understand and maintain.

LLMs are fine for learning and junior positions where you'll have more experienced folks reviewing code, but it just is not that helpful past a certain point.

Also, this is probably a small thing, but I have yet to find an LLM that writes anything other than shitty, terrible shell scripts. Please for the love of God don't use an LLM to write shell scripts. If you must, then please pass the results through shellcheck and fix all of the issues there.

[–] Eyekaytee@aussie.zone 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I've seen it mainly used to assist with python scripts which work well not sure on how well it does shell scripts

[–] Badabinski@kbin.earth 5 points 2 months ago

Python is my primary language. For the way I write code and solve problems, it's the language where I need the least help from an LLM. Python lets you write code that is incredibly concise while still being easy to read. There's more of a case to be made for something like Go, since it seems like every single god damned function call ends up being variable, err := someFuckingShit() and then a if err!=nil and manually handling it instead of having nice exception handling. Even there, my IDE does that for me without requiring a computationally expensive LLM to do the work.

Like, some people have a more conversational development style and I guess LLMs work well for them. I end up constantly context switching between code review mode and writing code mode which is incredibly disruptive.

[–] jonne@infosec.pub 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Eh, copilot is still more miss than hit whenever I use it. It's probably equally dogshit for other uses as well unless your goal is to just generate bullshit and you need to hit a specific word count.

[–] independantiste@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Heh for me even the newest models like the new Claude are only really useful when I did the thinking and the initial code writing, and i ask it to simplify it or to make it use more efficient libraries/features. Because when asking it to do my work it produces shit, and im very junior level

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[–] Enoril@jlai.lu 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Sorry but no.

It’s good when what you are trying to do has been done in the past by thousand of people (thanks to the free training data). But it’s really bad for new use case. After all it's a glorified and expensive auto-complete tool trained on code they parsed. It’s not magic, it’s math.

But you don’t get intelligence, creativity from these tools. It’s math! Math is the least creative domain on earth. Since when being a programmer is just typing portion of code from boilerplate / examples from internet?

It’s the logical thinking, taking into account all the parameters and constraints, breaking problems into piece of code, checking it, testing it, deploying it, supporting it.

Ok, programming goal is to solve a problem. But usually not all the parameters of the problem can be reduced to its mathematical form.

IA are far from being able to do that and the ratio gain/cost is not proven at all. These companies are so committed to AI (in term of money invested) that THEY MUST make you use their AI products, whatever its quality. They even use a marketing term to hide their product bad answer: hallucinations. Hallucination is just a fancy word to not say: totally wrong.

Do you find normal to buy a solution that never produces 100% good results (more around 20% of failure)?

In my industry, this IA trend (pushed mainly from managers not knowing what really is programming and of course "AI") generate a lot of bad quality code from our junior devs. And it's not something i want to push in production.

In fact, a lot of PoC around ML never goes from the R&D phase to the real production. It’s too risky for the business (as human life could be impacted).

[–] heavydust@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Every time I try to use it it hallucinates bugs. It’s a waste of time for me.

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[–] qyron@sopuli.xyz 28 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Will this be done through funding colleges and universities, doctorates and other publicly funded projects and initiatives?

If so, good. AI might be a good tool, after a long, curated, legally directed and supervised, period of investigation, to create safe tools for public use.

If not, and this money is to be thrown out to private companies, with little to no oversight, it is pure waste of resources, badly needed to fund other social sectors.

[–] Eyekaytee@aussie.zone 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Looks like it is comparable to the US Stargate announcement, the money is coming from private companies and going into private investment, which is amazing, I wish France24 had been a bit more specific:

Meanwhile, the French financing will include commitments from the United Arab Emirates, American and Canadian investments funds and French companies like telecommunications firms Iliad and Orange, and aerospace and defense group Thales

A few days before France’s AI Action Summit, which kicked off on Monday, the UAE said it would invest between 30 billion euros and 50 billion euros in the construction of a one-gigawatt AI data center in France as part of a campus focused on the technology’s development.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/10/frances-answer-to-stargate-macron-announces-ai-investment.html

European companies investing in Europe AND into leading edge technologies? Crazy

[–] DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 22 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (3 children)

Macron, you stupid slut, there's been nothing but news for the past month about how cheap you can build a competitor to the former top models.

[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Heheh, but reportedly, the hedge fund that owns Deepseek has 1.6 billion worth of servers. Plus they need to pay electricity, employees... and researchers and computer people often get a decent salary. That makes me think at least a few billions is the correct amount... If we want to do research on the level Deepseek does.

[–] Eyekaytee@aussie.zone 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

Building a cheaper model that's not as good as the top AI models is not the best way to build AI models, cheaper yes, but Deepseek isn't the best AI model out there, it still gets beat by Googles/Claudes/OpenAI etc

A better way would be to combine the Deepseek training optimisations with raw power of Americas/nvidias hardware

We're still at an early stage with AI, there's nothing to suggest we're anywhere near the end of Jevons paradox

[–] JustJack23@slrpnk.net 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Are you blind? There are so many things suggesting AI is a past thing already.

Most importantly there is no good use for it.

Just like Bitcoin all companies are trying to shoehorn it in shit products and making them shittier.

Eu should not built AI but try to regulate it and protect the environment from it.

[–] Eyekaytee@aussie.zone 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Heya!

Are you blind? There are so many things suggesting AI is a past thing already.

?? Really like what? I must be blind, Deepseek just made GLOBAL headlines, like my own local logan radio station mentioned it on its news the other day!

The Paris AI summit is happening right now:

On 10 and 11 February 2025, France will host the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Action Summit, gathering at the Grand Palais, Heads of State and Government, leaders of international organizations, CEOs of small and large companies, representatives of academia, non-governmental organizations, artists and members of civil society.

https://www.elysee.fr/en/sommet-pour-l-action-sur-l-ia

It's being held at the Grand Palais which is very fancy :)

If you're seeing something to suggest AI "is a past thing already" feel free to let me know

[–] Enoril@jlai.lu 6 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Making headlines is not a proof of quality. It’s just the latest buzz word. You should be less influenced by trends but more by real results.

Btw, I’ve participated to this kind of summit, even as speaker. These events are more a marketing and lobbying tool for consultant firms than being a real breakthrough event on the technology.

They did the same for the sovereign cloud years ago. Lot of money (our taxes) given, fancy events, fancy speeches. Concrete results: still waiting.

And yes, this ML training already show it's limitations (hence the thing of the past remark). Until recently, you could improve the quality of the answer by providing more training data. But now, they’ve reached the limit as no more data can be given.

It’s just a matter of time before the bubble explode.

[–] Eyekaytee@aussie.zone 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (3 children)

You should be less influenced by trends but more by real results.

I just used it 30 seconds ago for comparing export data: https://aussie.zone/post/17570399/14730920

and last night for French language practice with https://morpheem.org/fr-en

and https://chat.mistral.ai/chat earlier today for putting together a bunch of keyalgo's and macs into an SSH command to get into my router

and https://lmstudio.ai/ with any one of these for javascript practice:

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[–] obbeel@lemmy.eco.br 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Sometimes Claude Haiku (which has few billion parameters) knows things that ChatGPT doesn't.

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[–] the_swagmaster@lemmy.zip 4 points 2 months ago

Deepseak did show it could be done cheaply but imagine if you could take their optimisations and throw more power behind it (ie: buy a fuck tone of GPUs that the Chinese dont officially have access to)

Could work, the EU should pursue AI independence else it will continue its slide into irrelevance. Glad France is stepping up to the plate on this

[–] vsis@feddit.cl 20 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Investing money in ways to lower the retirement age, or at least stopping it to get higher.

Or give money to nvidia.

The choice is clear for this great leader.

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[–] RageAgainstTheRich@lemmy.world 18 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Cool...cool... can't wait to ask the 100 billion euro ai to write me a funny.. Now do a 100 billion to fight against climate change please 💔

[–] TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Serious question and not trying to be funny, but how is AI going to solve climate change? We already know the answer, but the world is too greedy to do anything about it. As a matter of fact, AI will worsen climate change since more power is needed for it to write couple of sentences.

[–] ZombieMantis@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago

I think you misread their comment, they're asking for a separate €100 billion in climate spending.

[–] killingspark@feddit.org 2 points 2 months ago

Or just 10 billion into the school system? Please? Anything?

[–] ekZepp@lemmy.world 15 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I'm not a big fan of Macron, but in all honesty, "the genie's out of the bottle" and we need some way to protect ourselves and the news media from ANY "foreign AI" influences.

As long as the European countries stay true to their guidelines, this should just be considered as a necessity.

[–] iii@mander.xyz 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Ah yes, politics as a driving force for technological innovation. This time it'll work. 😒

[–] Eyekaytee@aussie.zone 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I think the saddest thing here is that Europe has no capital markets union where it's own private companies should be putting this money in

Europe will always be behind while it's more difficult to raise funds and do business

This AI is just the latest thing, who knows what else Europe will soon fall behind in

[–] iii@mander.xyz 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

That, I think, is a symptom not a cause.

The cause is societal: the EU thinks that innovation should come top down. By giving established corporations subsidies, and a large administration that steers everyone every step of the way. To make sure nobody does anything out of the ordinary.

That works if you want to improve car crash safety by 5%. But, ofcourse, that doesn't work for true, novel ideas. Concensus being antagonistic to novelty.

And it's not solely a "bad politicians" problem. A majority of Europeans are simply afraid of change, want their 9-to-5 job to look exactly the same for their whole life. The elected reflect their electorate.

Too bad the world changes regardless of you participating.

[–] Canigou@jlai.lu 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

That is why Europe also has to be on the forefront of wellfair and social protection : there is a lot less risk into innovating if losing your job is less of an issue and if it preserves your ability to spend thus avoiding a hard recession. That's something EU countries are better at than the US and on which it should capitalise (no pun intended).

[–] iii@mander.xyz 1 points 2 months ago (4 children)

That's something EU countries are better at than the US and on which it should capitalise

What does that look like?

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[–] rottingleaf@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

The cause is societal: the EU thinks that innovation should come top down. By giving established corporations subsidies, and a large administration that steers everyone every step of the way. To make sure nobody does anything out of the ordinary.

The EU doesn't think. A cell of the organism doesn't think in organ matters, an organ doesn't think in cell matters.

The EU is just built this way, it's a union of national governments against anything too mobile or evolutionary in their populations. It's a confederation designed so that there'll never be a federation of the same countries. Evolutionary mechanisms devour bureaucracies. But bureaucracies can strangle them.

[–] riodoro1@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago

This world is hella fucking retarded

[–] Mihies@programming.dev 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

And on what EU hardware it will run?

[–] Eyekaytee@aussie.zone 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

In the AI FACTORIES!

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/ai-factories

...In terms of actual chips probably nvidia...

[–] Mihies@programming.dev 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yep, and that's a biggly problem. If EU AI becomes a threat (or perceived threat) to US economic and other interests (and especially when orange is in charge), they would slap tariffs at those at least. If not forbid export.

[–] Eyekaytee@aussie.zone 3 points 2 months ago (3 children)

100% agreed, it's funny because Europe has ARM and ASML, Taiwan is cool with the west and can produce chips, you even technically have a GlobalFoundries fabrication plants in Dresden so you can design and produce the chips, design the underlying instruction set but for some reason Europe just can't put the whole thing together into a competitive product

[–] Mihies@programming.dev 4 points 2 months ago

I'd certainly hope for RISC-V. Perhaps now that we have a little bit more of an incentive, we will make some progress.

[–] the_swagmaster@lemmy.zip 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The EU just doesn't have any companies that can put together something that can compete. CPUs and GPUs have been around for a while and the technical knowledge and patents these companies have gathered is basically insurmountable.

Graphcore is a startup in the UK that has been trying to get into the ai processor market for a few years but even though they got a load of money their chips have not been competitive (if they were able to get any out the door).

Arm could feasibly do it (given they already make the CPU/GPU designs) but their business model is selling the base designs to other companies. If they started to make their own chips then those that buy from ARM (Qualcomm, mediatech...) might look to developing their own risk-V chips

Imo, I think the EU should try and make a company similar in style to what happened with Airbus. Combine a bunch of companies together across the union, give them money and contracts and let them cook. Seems to me the only way to enter this kind of market.

[–] Eyekaytee@aussie.zone 3 points 2 months ago

An Airbus style company would be awesome, I'm absolutely certain after Trumps latest round of insanity there's a lot of countries that would like some supply chain diversity with EU chips to ensure China or USA can't rattle them too hard

[–] Enoril@jlai.lu 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

Because the chips in question for AI are made in Taiwan and nowhere else. The fabs you see on US or EU soils are few generation behind. It will takes decades to be back (if possible) at the same level than Taiwan. And it cost a lot of investment. Ask Intel, they started that many years ago and still constructing the Fab as we speak. And it’s not even the latest generation Fab.

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[–] ZombieMantis@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago

Ah, so this is why they can't afford the old, more generous pensions? Got it.

[–] Hadriscus@lemm.ee 4 points 2 months ago

macron is exhausting

[–] NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Then they can ask the chatbot how to get the country out of debt.

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