Perhaps to give a bit of context. As you know, artificial intelligence is redefining economic and geopolitical balances. The question is not so much whether Europe can compete, but rather how it can do so. Because I think if it doesn't compete, in reality, it completely gives up any form of presence and voice in the concert of nations. So the question is, can it do so without depending on extra-European actors? The answer is obviously no.
A few elements on Mistral AI. It's a company we founded a little over 3 years ago, on April 28, 2023, with the intuition in 2023 that generative artificial intelligence would significantly reshuffle the cards in digital services, would change quite profoundly how the economy works because fundamentally it moves intelligence from labor to capital and machines. We saw in 2023 because my co-founders Guillaume and Timothée and I had a certain experience with the big American players that the world was heading towards a clear oligopoly, and we obviously wanted to counter this oligopoly.
What you need to understand about generative artificial intelligence and fundamentally about what we call artificial intelligence today, is that it's a model that consists of transforming energy into intelligence, into token generation which are then used to delegate tasks, to do mathematical research, to operate logistics chains, to improve tools, to deploy embedded systems in robots, in drones, etc. So we are in a business where we transform electricity into token generation, and it's fundamentally something that needs to be treated more or less like a natural resource. That is to say, we need to think about intelligence as we think about energy. So our goal is to provide intelligence that is cheap, affordable, let's say in English, that is secure in terms of supply, meaning we don't need to get it from Americans for example, and which is also sustainable because it transforms energy that is less carbon-intensive than elsewhere because we use in particular French energy.
I think we don't think about it enough in this way. Intelligence is like electricity, it's like energy. And moreover, we have this tendency, which in my opinion is a rather false tendency, to separate digital services from artificial intelligence. Today, the cloud is artificial intelligence. Cloud growth is artificial intelligence. High value-added services, with high margins that allow R&D, that's artificial intelligence.
The problem that arises is that the total market we're talking about needs to be compared to the payroll. Today, at Mistral, our AI consumption for our employees is 10% of our payroll. Now, we make this technology, so we adopt it a bit faster than elsewhere. But if you extrapolate, within 3 to 4 years, all of Europe uses artificial intelligence for 10% of its payroll. 10% of Europe's payroll is about 1 trillion. 1 trillion, that's digital services because you have to generate the tokens, etc. It's 1 trillion if we use non-European technology, it's 1 trillion of trade deficit to add to our existing trade deficit on digital services. It's a trillion that goes elsewhere to be invested in R&D and is not reinvested in R&D in France or Europe. So that, I think, is a very important point to consider on this sovereignty subject from a macroeconomic perspective. It's an essential macroeconomic subject and I think we don't realize its magnitude.
So that's a first subject. There is obviously a subject of economic security, meaning when you know how to deploy artificial intelligence in essential services, you want to make sure that access to the service cannot be cut off, which is actually quite plausible. We've seen it in different places. So that means it's important for all sovereign, governmental aspects. It's obviously important for defense because artificial intelligence is now at the heart of military operational centers and becomes the platform that allows making operational decisions on the battlefield, doing intelligence, etc. And so if we don't have access to this technology, we'll have to import it from elsewhere, and that means they can cut off our access.
You need to be aware that artificial intelligence enables defense, it allows having much more operational armies. Obviously, it improves operations, etc., it enables defense, but it's also absolutely critical in deterrence. That is to say, you have armies like the Russian army that use artificial intelligence massively in their drones. If you're not capable of having counters that are themselves activated by artificial intelligence, well, you don't have sufficient deterrence. And so the deployment of artificial intelligence in autonomous systems in particular, I think you absolutely must not cut off. It's absolutely indispensable for having conventional deterrence today.
That also means we need to master artificial intelligence end to end. That's on the first subject. Then, on the subject of cyber defense and cyber attacks, we have one of our American competitors who knows very well how to do fear marketing if you will, but the subject is that models are excellent programmers and are absolutely capable of orchestrating attacks, discovering vulnerabilities and proposing exploits. It's been 6 months that this has started to rise, it rises in a linear, predictable way, it rises everywhere at the same time. That is to say, you have another American competitor with a model that does exactly the same thing. You have Chinese actors doing it too, and our models are capable of discovering all the vulnerabilities reported by MITRE for example. So for us, that means we work with our clients to help them on these cyber subjects. It's obviously a sovereign subject and so it's yet another argument for saying we need to have control over this technology. You can't have the French army's code bases scanned by MITRE.
I think there's a dependency that is so irremediable that we absolutely must find solutions. The first one, which is usage, is software development. Today, engineers at Mistral no longer write lines of code. So you have a way of working in software development that has profoundly changed in the last 6 months. That is to say, before it was rather craftsmanship if you were an individual contributor. You write your code and people liked this craftsmanship. I come from there, I liked this craftsmanship. Today, you're no longer a craftsman, you're a manager, and so you ask agents to write the code for you. So you give specifications, you're a project owner, it's still a quite profound change. And it comes with very significant productivity gains when you're alone. When you're alone, you can go 10 to 20 times faster. When you're 5, it decreases because you still have communication issues. When you're a very large company, suddenly you're in many organizational bottlenecks. So that's what needs to be lifted to have the productivity gains we dream of.
