France plans to spend €1.5bn on artificial intelligence by 2022

France will invest €1.5 billion ($1.85 billion) of public money into artificial intelligence research by 2022 in a bid to catch up with the US and China and reverse a brain drain, Reuters reported. The investment is part of an AI strategy laid out by President Emmanuel Macron at the elite College de France research institute in Paris. According to the French presidency, the goal is to make better use of the country’s higher education system that trains computer engineers and mathematicians only to see them leave for jobs at top US tech companies. Facebook opened an AI research center in Paris in 2015. Macron’s AI plan was inspired by a government-commissioned report by Cedric Villani, the winner of the mathematics equivalent of the Nobel Prize.