A great pleasure to join colleagues from France and Australia in Sydney for a discussion on AI, productivity, sovereignty and opportunities for deeper research and industry collaboration.

One point I emphasised is that Australia already works with many outstanding French AI researchers and mathematicians. France has long had exceptional strength in mathematics and the theoretical foundations underpinning modern AI, while much of our work at CSIRO focuses on the system around the model: eliciting strong capabilities, engineering reliable AI systems, and developing supervisory and assurance mechanisms to make increasingly capable AI safer and more useful.

The opportunity also extends well beyond general-purpose language models. I am particularly interested in specialised and sector foundation models, and in the growing intersection between AI, physics, simulation and modelling. It was encouraging to hear more about work by Mistral and others on using AI surrogate models to accelerate simulation of industrial processes, while also using physical models and simulation to ground AI more firmly in the real world. This two-way interaction between AI and modelling could become an important part of industrial AI.

There was also an interesting sovereignty dimension. With Samsung leading Mistral AI’s latest Series D, one could jokingly say that Mistral is becoming a little more Asian as well as European. More seriously, it illustrates how AI capability, capital, compute, industrial expertise and sovereign interests are increasingly crossing national boundaries. For countries such as Australia and France, the question is less about building new frontier large language models, but how we combine models, data, domain expertise, infrastructure and the AI systems around them to retain meaningful capability and choice.

I came away seeing substantial scope for French-Australian collaboration, particularly where French strengths in foundational AI meet Australian strengths in sector expertise, system-level AI engineering and demanding real-world applications.

Looking forward to continuing these conversations, including at Adopt AI in Paris this December.