Microsoft announces that it will "gift" a digital Notre-Dame-de-Paris to the French State.

The company announced a partnership with France, France Inter learned on Monday. The digital modeling should take just under two years, according to Microsoft's president.

American tech giant Microsoft announced Monday, July 21, a partnership with France to fully digitize Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, France Inter learned from Microsoft. Its president, Brad Smith, is in Paris on Monday to sign an agreement to this effect with Rachida Dati, Minister of Culture. This multi-million dollar project is a "gift to the French state," Smith said during a press briefing Sunday.

This digital Notre-Dame de Paris will be pixel-perfect to the original, Microsoft specifies. This way, the monument will be preserved for eternity in its 2025 state, allowing future generations to visit it virtually. This is not a first for Microsoft, which has already completed digitizations of Mont-Saint-Michel and St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican.

The modeling of St. Peter's Basilica took two years and was carried out in partnership with a French company, Iconem. And it is this same company that will digitize Notre-Dame-de-Paris. Thanks to the experience gained from digitizing St. Peter's Basilica, the Microsoft president estimates that the modeling of Notre-Dame-de-Paris should take a little less time, that is, a little less than two years.

The multinational, still in the European Commission's sights for suspected antitrust violations , hopes to reap some benefits from this "gift" as it seeks to diversify the training data for its artificial intelligence beyond the internet. Microsoft is indeed the victim of a significant bias: more than half of the web is in English, even though it is the native language of less than 5% of the world's population.

Microsoft, a quarter of whose business comes from Europe, needs resources in Estonian or Maltese. The company is therefore appealing to libraries, archives, and universities to obtain as many documents as possible in 10 underrepresented European languages. The list of these 10 languages has not yet been finalized. It will depend on the proposals made by countries and local organizations, which can fill out an online form, accessible from September 1st.

The idea is to "make their text collections accessible [in digital version] in a responsible and ethical manner" , particularly for "the experimentation and development of multilingual artificial intelligence" , specifies a Microsoft press release consulted by France Inter. For the multinational, beyond preserving all these resources, it is also a way of ensuring that its AI will be better understood in Europe than those of its competitors.