Exclusive: It's time for "concrete action," says Macron's AI expert

Driving the news: In an interview on the Washington AI Network podcast — shared first with Axios — Bouverot said the 2025 AI Action Summit, planned for Feb. 11 in France, will focus on hard policy commitments.

• Bouverot also emphasized the importance of involving all countries in the AI innovation economy.
• "We really want to make sure this is not only a conversation for the happy few, but a conversation for all of us ... all the people who want to participate in AI," Bouverot told podcast host Tammy Haddad.

The big picture: In the nearly two years since the launch of ChatGPT, global leaders have met repeatedly to discuss and agree on global AI safety and privacy policies.

• Voluntary agreements announced at these summits have often lacked clear benchmarks to judge whether companies have met their pledges.
• "After two summits, you do want to tell people that you're not just meeting to meet," Bouverot said.

Between the lines: Bouverot also stressed that global participation in AI requires access and training, and urged policymakers not to see these as merely buzzwords.

• She told Haddad that taking concrete action means offering "access to compute, access to data, training, and not theoretical training, but training into how does that work and what do you want to do in your country."

Context: Bouverot is an engineer, tech company adviser and educator who earned a Ph.D. in AI "way before the hype," she writes in her LinkedIn profile.

Yes, but: Global AI regulation and policy is challenging in part because of what's known as the alignment problem.

• Every step in training, tuning and deploying AI models forces its creators to make choices about whose values the system will respect, whose point of view it will present and what limits it will observe.