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mikhailfranco

France is top industrial espionage offender

https://www.france24.com/en/20110104-france-industrial-espio...

Well, I guess espionage is a French word:

https://www.etymonline.com/word/espionage

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I don't know if France is the top industrial espionage offender. TBH, I doubt it. But yes, it has been well documented that my home country is very pro-active with industrial espionage. If you understand french I recommend the Spécial Investigation documentary "Espions privés: barbouze 2.0".

However, linking the raid of Nvidia's offices to industrial espionage is a fantasy. It's well known that:

• French companies mostly spy on their French competitors (Renault spies on PSA and vice-versa)

• France mostly, if not exclusively, spies in sectors they can compete or are trying to compete. (Aerospace, Car, Pharma, ...)

Nvidia is not a French company and has no french competitors. France doesn't have a tech sector. So your conspiracy theory is very unlikely. STMicroelectronics has no interest or ability to manufacture GPUs.

I came to find an answer to this question: why the heck do France care about nVidia?

Well, they do business in France, don't they? So they need to follow French law. Seems in this case, French authorities think they didn't follow French law, so French law enforcement got involved. Seems pretty simple.

No offense, but whenever this claim comes up, the same article from that one guy is quoted, and not much else. If the claim was true, one would think that, in the decade or so since, there would have been countless stories of french embassy personnel expelled, of french students being undercover spies, or of french secret services corrupting civil servants abroad, like there are for Russia or China.

> Well, I guess espionage is a French word

Also there is no french word for entrepreneur.

> Also there is no french word for entrepreneur.

It's hard to tell whether you are being sarcastic. In case you aren't: entrepreneur is a French word. https://www.etymonline.com/word/entrepreneur

It's a reference to an apocryphal quote attributed to George W. Bush "You can't trust the French. They don't even have a word for entrepreneur". Obviously sarcastic.

It's a reference to this: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/french-lesson/

https://www.tarlogic.com/blog/france-and-economic-intelligen...

It appears to be more so that they just really suck.

There's not much data to back the claim. And given this line you would have to expect a lot of spying going on from any other country in the world than Germany and the USA:

> Germany, the cables said, was trying to develop an optical observation-based satellite spy system with Washington's help despite objections from France, which is leading pan-European efforts in the field with its Helios satellites.

The US slowly pulling Germany away from pan-EU projects like this is genious, from the US perspective. Because without Germany, not a single project in this space (military aerospace, defense and so on) will develop a size that could make as much as dent in the US defense sector and the likes of Lockheed-Martin, Northrop and Raytheon. And thisballowsbthe US to corner the NATO market for military goods, and that market is the biggest in the world.

Germany is an easy target for that, usually we suck at this kind of projects because our requirements management doesn't deserve the name. Just how things like A400M, NH90, Eurofighter, Galileo and Tiger came to be sometimes really puzzles me. There seems to have been a different climate in the 80 through early 90s went it came to that. Ever since, not so much.

> US defense sector and the likes of Lockheed-Martin, Northrop and Raytheon. And thisballowsbthe US to corner the NATO market

German companies hesitance to work on Pan-EU (in reality only French) defense projects is because of a headache the Eurofigher has become, as both France and Germany have different export exemptions plus plenty of French companies are still manufacturing weapons systems to directly compete with French-German projects (eg. Dassault vs Eurofighter, Thales vs Airbus, etc).

Also, the American defense manufacturers don't care to target the EU market as much anymore excluding the F-35 project because indigenous capabilities have caught up and North American procurement still dwarfs what individual European countries could buy and maintain.

Eurofighter, without French participation as they have the Rafale, is actually quite a success. Thales is not really a competitor but rather a supplier of Airbus with some overlap in defense electronics. The Airbus defense electronics have been spun-off to a large extent in the form of Hensoldt so.

You underestimate how much leverage it gives the US of supplying the vast majority of NATO hardware. As ypu said, individual countries. If there are alternative programs to choose from, NH90 comes to mind, all the combined individual defense spending goes the US way. Which is quite nice, isn't it?

And the link to anti-trust i what exactly now?

They are suggesting that anti-trust is an excuse to perform industrial espionage. France is, however, also the top anti-trust and pro-consumer enforcer in the EU, which in many sectors leads the world in consumer protection regulations. There is no reason to assume it was done for industrial espionage reasons, especially as NVIDIA France is explicitly already a French company producing these AI chips.

Ah, all those poor, prosecuted tech giants and multi-nationals... I'll shed I tear for them when I have time, or not. Explicitly including all former, current and potentially future employers. All of which raked in at least 10s of millions of anti-trust and other non-compliance fines, in some cases reaching billions.

Don't do the crime if you don't have the dime, I guess.

The idea that only tech giants and multi-nationals get access to high-end AI accelerators is the main problem IMO.

Nvidia keeps private individuals and hobbyists from access to affordable GPUs that can be used for machine learning by intentionally gimping the available memory in their consumer cards.

Sounds like a potential anti-trust case to me, right?

Sounds like 'we (French/Europeans) should get off our asses and build our own AI infra, twenty years ago' and instead grasp at straws whining that distribution of resources in very high demand by a for-profit American company is unfair.

I see the lack of will around SiPearl, or the sad state of e.g. Kalray, and I say we deserve our place in the queue. No serious sustained ambition there. Or maybe We're betting on scrapiness and ingenuity and that once the LLM-740B-parameters dust settles, we'll find frugal alternatives...

That's not serious, c'mon

Here is serious one:

Industrial Espionage + Anti-Competitive Practice + IP Theft, all of that facilitated by US's spying network + US extraterritoriality law

- France loosing Alcatel (article in french [1])

- Alstom forced to sell its Energy department (patents, including nuclear) to the US's G.E (article in french [2], book[3], itw [4])

- Former French minister of economy itw [5]

- NSA spying on international transactions [6]

- Industrial Espionage against France [7]

[1] - https://atlantico.fr/article/decryptage/comment-les-usa-ont-...

[2] - https://atlantico.fr/article/decryptage/alstom---sept-ans-de...

[3] - https://books.google.com/books/about/The_American_Trap.html?...

[4] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d7qu14y8F8

[5] - https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1665370246126125060

[6] - https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/how-the-nsa-spies...

[7] - https://www.mediapart.fr/en/journal/france/290615/revealed-m...

Funny how the "top" on that seems to be a rather subjective interpretation, could have sworn China was made out as top, and two centuries ago it was apparently the US; https://apnews.com/general-news-b40414d22f2248428ce11ff36b88...

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