Ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Paris, France’s President Emmanuel Macron said both the leaders want to push for tech sovereignty.

PM Modi headed to France on Monday to co-chair the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit along with French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday.

In an interview with Firstpost, Macron said that pushing for tech sovereignty on a global stage will be his and PM Modi’s main agenda at the summit. “I think with Prime Minister Modi we firmly believe that India and France are two great powers, and we have a special relationship in respect to this. We respect and want to work with the United States, and we want to work with China but don’t want to depend on one,” the French leader said.

Collaboration in defence sector

According to Macron, India and France have a strong bilateral partnership in the defence sector. He hailed India as a “training superpower,” that produces 1 million engineers a year, which is “more than Europe and the US combined.”

“It’s a very deep-seated conviction that we want to be independent, that doesn’t mean we want to be isolated, but we want to have technologies and partners that we can trust without dependencies,” he told Firstpost.

AI tech sovereignty

The French President also spoke about how both France and India pushed for strategic autonomy over the years. “India and France are leading. So we have the US and China far ahead. And then you have France, the UK, India, the UAE, and then Germany and the others. So we want to work together on AI. Prime Minister Modi is facing the same issue that all Americans and there are a few Chinese players in that space, and he wants to benefit from the innovation, but he wants it to also be happening in India,” Macron told Firstpost.

According to the French President, if there’s non-cooperation with these players, a nation will have to take things on its own. He also reminded how during the Covid-19 pandemic all the nations started looking inward. “If you depend on others to produce medicine and technology then things can go wrong, so we need that partnership because we have shared interest and we have the same worldview focused on friendship and interest,” he said.

The French president said India and France will develop technological sovereignty “We want to train our talent so that they can go abroad but they should also be at home and we can create data centres in India and France with sustainable energy and we want our own language model in France and India. We don’t want to depend on the US and the Chinese models and we want applications in all fields,” Marcon told Firstpost.

‘Third way forward’

Macron also spoke about how India and France can manage to carve a third way forward in the tech race.

“I believe very strongly that that is the future. That is why in 2018 I started this Indo-Pacific strategy. I’m obsessed with one thing and that is that I want our children to lead better lives than we do, and I want them to have a say in their future that is independence, that is progress for France and for Europe,” Macron said.