Honorable Prime Minister Narendra Modi, President Macron, your excellencies, distinguished ministers, ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon everyone. It's an honor for me to stand before you. I'm the co-founder of Mistral, but I'm also someone who believes that AI should be a tool for empowerment and not for dominance. While others may speak about scale or speed, I want to talk about something a bit more fundamental, which is who is in control of AI deployment, who benefits from it, and how can we ensure that it serves the many and not the few. So we believe that the future belongs to the people that are building the AI, that are deploying the AI, and that actually own it. In a world where multiple digits of the GDP are going to be produced by AI in the coming two years, we need to ensure that everyone that runs AI workloads actually has access to the turn on and turn off button and can actually make sure that there is business continuity and that they are not dependent on external providers that can actually turn off that button. The global AI landscape is evolving rapidly, but too often the narrative is shaped by a focus on control, surveillance, and geopolitical leverage. There should be another path. At Mistral, we believe in a different future, in a future where openness builds trust and where autonomy is a fundamental right. Countries and regions must own their AI destiny. It's not a privilege, but it's a necessity for preserving digital autonomy and for shaping their own futures. So we need to decentralize AI deployment, and the first brick for that is open source. Human advancement has always been built on top of sharing knowledge, on openly collaborating on science, on transparency, and on collective work. Open source is not a radical idea. It is what has actually allowed us to build the cloud infrastructure that today we rely on. It is what has allowed us to build a secure internet. Today in AI, we are facing a dichotomy between open source technology, where a few companies like Mistral are working on making the world's knowledge compressed into models that can be used as the basis for creating applications and for serving the enterprise, the states, education, healthcare, and another world where these models are actually controlled by a few large private corporations that actually use them as leverage against their users. The second brick that we believe in is empowering other regions directly through deep collaboration. So open source is the tool, and if you want to make better open source models, we need to collaborate, and that's what we do with multiple states. We collaborate with their local ecosystems, we collaborate with research institutes to make sure that languages make their way onto our models. Mistral models have always focused on making rare languages more usable, and it's especially the case for Indian languages, which have this 22-language diversity. We like to collaborate with companies and with research labs that are working on acquiring the content that is needed to make the models better, and that is what is making us wake up every day. Beyond that, and beyond the open source that should become the foundation of artificial intelligence if we want to make sure that every company and every state actually owns their destiny in the coming economy, which is going to be mostly driven by AI, we need to go beyond the hype and look at what AI can actually do for our daily lives. AI is not about replacing humans. It's about giving them a way to delegate many of their tasks. It's about enhancing what serves them, and it's about solving real problems. So at Mistral, we work with public services, we work with healthcare, we work on making sure that citizens can access information in an easier way, in a faster way. We work on making sure that unemployed people, for instance in France, are actually able to find a job faster thanks to AI assistance. AI should be a tool that empowers people, that empowers businesses, and that ensures that governments can improve the quality of their services, can improve the lives of their citizens, and can improve the quality of life of communities. However, it only works if everybody can access it and if everybody understands how to use it. That's why multilingual AI is actually a very strong necessity. That's also why we need to focus on training people and on bringing them the technology at an affordable price. To do so, we work as a model provider and as a software provider. We work with infrastructure providers across the world to deploy and modify our technology so that it is amenable to large communities, so that our small models can actually be deployed to create products that are cheap to serve and therefore are affordable by the masses. We're not waiting for the future. We're trying to build practical and impactful solutions on top of the open source models that we're creating. We are creating the enterprise layer on top, which allows to customize systems, to make small models that serve specific purposes, to automate tasks in enterprises so that people can focus on the things that matter and on the creative aspect that is going to be the most important quality in human life thanks to artificial intelligence. And we focus on making impactful solutions. I would say that we are at risk today in the world. We're facing too much concentration of power in artificial intelligence. We don't want to be in a world where three or four enormous companies actually own the deployment and the making of AI, actually own access to information, because really artificial intelligence is the way we are accessing information today, and actually own the infrastructure itself. So the entire network that is converting energy into intelligence. We need to make sure that every country, every economic community, actually has a strategy to own a part of it. Not all of it. We're always going to be partnering, and that is extremely important to accelerate, but ownership and ensuring that nobody gets excessive leverage is going to be critical if you want to ensure that the world we live in remains stable. AI is going to change pretty profoundly the way the economy is being run in the next few years. It's going to change the equilibrium in the world, and in order for the equilibrium to remain sustainable and stable, we need to ban excessive leverage. And in that, India is a leader in betting on self-reliance, which is absolutely critical for a country this size. To wrap up, I would say this: the true potential of artificial intelligence is to level the playing field. This is entirely rewriting the way we build software. It is changing all of the previous established dominations, and it's enabling every country to actually accelerate their economies. It's enabling startups to build large and growing businesses that are disrupting the old incumbents that have been increasing their margins way too much. And it's democratizing access to knowledge. It's enabling non-technical people to start building technical tools. The generation of code, which we have been heavy investors on, especially and a leader in releasing open source coding models, is enabling a very large community of people that were not builders before and that are becoming builders. And that is definitely going to change the way people look at their jobs, the way people become entrepreneurs. Becoming an entrepreneur today in every part of the world is made much easier with AI, and we need to accelerate that. To ensure that, on the other hand, the technology we're building is not widening the digital divide, we need to ensure that no language and no culture are left behind. We need to ensure that the technology that we're building is affordable, and therefore our focus on open source is, I believe, a very important aspect. And it's an aspect that requires a community of people that believes in this model, and this model has already proven its benefits in the course of technology in the last 30 years. We believe in partnerships over dependency. So when we work with states, we actually transfer some knowledge on how to build the technology, on how to run it, and we ensure that we can disappear. We ensure that once we have shipped the technology, this is in the hands of our customers, this is in the hands of the partners that we work with. Whether it's collaborating with local governments, whether it's collaborating with businesses or academic institutions, we're committing to transferring that knowledge. We believe that India's opportunity is extremely large. In that, its talent, a quarter of our researchers are actually Indians, its diversity of culture, and its ambition, and the size of the market and the size of its industry is giving it immense leverage when it comes to building artificial intelligence that will be differentiated, that will be a major product of export, and that will provide them with even more leverage on the international scene by controlling its own AI. India can become a global hub for innovation, and it can also lead the way for the entire world. A call to action, I would say: we need to seize the moment. This is really an acceleration moment. We've gone from a place where chatbots were actually pretty amusing two years ago to a world where now we can delegate tasks over multiple hours and actually have an army of AI delegates that can do a lot of things on our behalf. And so it's enabling anyone to build much faster. But what that also means is that the people that are not catching that wave are going to be left behind. And so to governments, I would say: you need to invest in AI infrastructure that you own, that you make sure to distribute to local and regional providers. You need to prioritize investment on local talent. You need to make all of your engineers and everyone better at using AI. You need to invest on content. We're all about compressing knowledge. This is something that humanity has always been doing. And to compress knowledge and to make sure that your language and your culture is represented, the aggregation of content and the usage of those contents to make open source assets is absolutely critical. And the time is really now. We need to not miss that. To businesses, I would say: adopting AI is going to take some time, but it's going to bring immense leverage. And you have unique assets in your companies. You have IP, you have knowledge, you have full domain knowledge. The way you're operating your business is different from the way your competitors are operating it. And what that means is that you need to build your own AI systems. The same way you train unique employees, you will need to train unique AI agents. And that will only happen if you take a meaningful part of the value chain and you make it internal. Finally, I would say the future is ours to shape. The AI revolution is here. The path that it can take is really, there are multiple paths it will take. Will it be a tool of dominance or will it be a force for empowering people? Will it deepen divides or will it bridge them? Will it allow certain countries to leapfrog? We believe it can happen, but we believe it only happens if we work as partners, if we work with a commitment to transparency and openness, and if we choose to look at AI as a next vector of autonomy and a way to ensure that every country remains self-reliant. So we choose a future where AI is built for the many and by the many and for the many, and India and the world deserves nothing less. So I would say let's build it together. Thank you.
