AI revoir, Lucie: France's answer to ChatGPT paused after faux pas overdrive
Slew of embarrassing answers sends open source chatterbox back for more schooling
As China demonstrates how competitive open source AI models can be via the latest DeepSeek release, France has shown the opposite.
The Linagora Group, based in Issy-les-Moulineaux, France, in conjunction with the OpenLLM-France consortium, launched the open source chatbot Lucie last Thursday – and by Saturday suspended its online service after the bot spouted AI slop beyond the baseline level of inaccuracy, misstatement, and extra fingers that the artificial intelligence industry has normalized.
The web-based Lucie refused to complete math problems, citing the need for neutrality, or did them incorrectly. The bot offered up recipes for cooking meth and recommended cow's eggs as a nutritious food source, among other fumbles.
So after three days of this nonsense, the OpenAI ChatGPT-esque Lucie bot, billed as being not just open but "especially transparent and reliable," was taken offline to be made still more reliable. It remains unavailable at time of writing.
Lingora Group in a statement suggested that the company had failed to explain the model's limitations sufficiently and then went on to enumerate them.
First, Lucie is described as an academic research project, one that has not been adapted to educational use and should not be used in production.
Second, Lucie is described as a "raw" model, one not yet tutored in the niceties of RHLF (aka Reinforcement Learning by Humans) and lacking in the manners referred to as guardrails. Thus Lucie's responses come without any guarantee that they're accurate or free of bias and error – which in fairness has become a common disclaimer for even the most well-regarded commercial AI models.
What's more, Lucie is said to be primarily a language model and not so much a knowledge model. That explanation taken care of, the French AI biz acknowledged that perhaps it had released Lucie before the model was ready.
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"Aware that the instruction phase was only partial, we wrongly thought that a public launch of the lucie.chat platform was nevertheless possible in the logic of openness and co-construction of open source projects," the outfit said, as translated from French via AI.
The company explained that rolling out Lucie would help raise awareness of the project and lead to the acquisition of more French language data – something that isn't as abundant as the English language corpus used by the large tech platforms for model training.
"We are of course aware that the 'reasoning' capabilities (including on simple mathematical problems) or the ability to generate code of the current version of Lucie are unsatisfactory," the AI maker admitted. "We should have informed the users of the platform of these limitations in such a way as not to create unnecessary waiting.
"We should not have released the lucie.chat service without these explanations and precautions. We were carried away by our own enthusiasm."
Lucie's retreat can't match the financial damage of Google's Bard, which trimmed $120 billion from share value of parent Alphabet in 2023 as a result of inaccuracies, or Google's 2024 suspension of Gemini for color-blind casting in historical images, or Microsoft's shutdown of Tay in 2016 after the social chatbot was hijacked to go Nazi at a time when that wasn't acceptable.
And among the French at least, there are more than a few defenders of the government-supported project as a necessary step toward becoming more competitive in the international AI race – something already established by Paris-based Mistral AI.
As Georges-Etienne Faure, with the French government's General Secretariat for Investment (SGPI), put it in a LinkedIn post, Lucie, as an effort to build an open source foundation for AI, "deserves to be supported rather than ridiculed, even in the first steps necessarily a little stammering."
Cyril de Sousa Cardoso, CEO of generative AI firm Polaria, framed the matter as a national imperative. "This is not the time for sterile mockery that only serves to discourage the efforts of France and Europe in search of technological sovereignty in the face of the new American hostility (are those who mock aware of the interests they defend?)" he wrote in a LinkedIn post. "The subject is essential. Our future is at stake."
You can't make an omelet without breaking a few cow eggs. ®