France Creates $400 Million Foundation For Public Interest AI

The French government is set to announce the creation of a new foundation dedicated to developing AI “public goods” at the AI Action Summit in Paris.

French President Emmanuel Macron and India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the AI Action Summit in Paris. I Photo: Narendra Modi Facebook

Named Current AI, the organization will be officially established with an initial endowment of $400 million from the French government, Jeremy Kahn reported for Fortune’s Data Sheet.

The AI Collaborative, an initiative under eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s philanthropy, the Omidyar Network, will join forces with a coalition of countries, technology companies, and philanthropic organizations to support the foundation.

Current AI aims to raise $2.5 billion over five years to fund public-interest AI projects.

Among the companies backing the initiative are Google and Salesforce as “core partners,” while Hugging Face, Instacart, and AI startup Sakana AI are listed as “supporters,” indicating a lower financial commitment.

Martin Tisné, CEO of the AI Collaborative and France’s special envoy for public interest AI, told Fortune that many of the funded projects will focus on creating new public datasets to develop AI models for the public good.

In addition to France, the initiative has secured support from eight other countries, including Germany, Finland, Switzerland, Chile, Kenya, and Nigeria.

“If you are not the U.S. and not China, you are more in the same boat with every other country than you think,” Tisné said.