Lessons from the French Model

French entrepreneurship offers valuable lessons. First, deep tech and patient development can create more sustainable businesses than rapid scaling. Second, ecosystem building requires coordinated public-private efforts—neither alone suffices. Third, cultural change takes time but is essential for entrepreneurial dynamism.

Fourth, diversity strengthens entrepreneurship. Including women, immigrants, and regional talent expands the pool of ideas and perspectives. Fifth, failure tolerance must be cultivated—it doesn't emerge naturally in risk-averse cultures. Finally, purpose and profit can align—businesses solving real problems often succeed financially.

French entrepreneurship has traveled far from its risk-averse past to vibrant present. The journey continues toward a future where entrepreneurship is normalized career path, where startups tackle humanity's greatest challenges, where success is measured in impact not just valuation. France has rediscovered its entrepreneurial spirit, adapting it for 21st century challenges while maintaining distinctive characteristics that make French startups truly "startups with savoir-faire."

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Artificial Intelligence à la Française

In the grand amphitheater of the Collège de France, Yann LeCun delivers a lecture on self-supervised learning to a packed audience of students, researchers, and entrepreneurs. As one of the "godfathers of AI" and a Turing Award winner, LeCun embodies French AI excellence—brilliant theoretical insights combined with practical applications, now serving as Chief AI Scientist at Meta while maintaining strong ties to French research. His trajectory from Paris to New York and back through continuous collaboration illustrates French AI's global nature: rooted in exceptional mathematical traditions but flourishing through international exchange and ambitious applications.

French AI occupies a unique position in the global landscape. With the world's second-highest concentration of AI researchers per capita after the United States, France combines theoretical depth with increasing commercial ambition. From the mathematical foundations laid at INRIA to the AI-powered drug discovery at Owkin, from the neuromorphic chips at Prophesee to the open-source language models at Hugging Face, French AI reflects national characteristics: mathematical rigor, philosophical depth about AI's societal implications, and growing entrepreneurial dynamism that transforms research excellence into world-changing applications.