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He believes the continent must act now if it wants to compete with Asia and the US in AI: “If you try to build a search engine from scratch today, you won’t be able to win because it didn’t exist 25 years ago,” he says, noting that this window of opportunity to compete on AI will close.
In one way or another, Neil is connected to almost every new French startup. He has an investment in Mistral AI, which is valued at €5.8 billion ($6.4 billion), as well as another AI startup, H. The cloud provider Mistral uses, Scaleway, is a subsidiary of Iliad, and the team behind Hugging Face, an AI developer platform, spent time at Station F, a sprawling startup campus also founded by Neil. A self-described “nerd,” Neil has long been entrenched in the French startup scene; Station F launched seven years ago, and before that he was a central figure at École 42, an experimental computer science school.
He believes Europe should pursue homegrown AI. France to invest 200 million euros ($220 million) in AI Last September, half of the funding was used to establish Kyotoi, a non-profit research institute based in Paris. Release This summer, the AI ​​voice assistant “Moshi” was released. Like OpenAI’s voice assistant, Moshi also has an attractive English-speaking female voice. However, unlike OpenAI, which delayed its release due to safety concerns, Moshi has been available for testing online since July. Model It was released this week.
“Kyutai’s aim is to create AI algorithms that are completely open science and open source,” Niel says. He points to the operating system Linux as an example of the kind of popular open source tool Kyoutai wants to replicate. “Depending on the license you give it, anyone who makes changes to it has to make them public.”
But there are some things about Kyotai that Neal isn’t as open about. When Moshi asked where he gets his training data from, he laughed, explaining that some of the models were trained on the voices of actresses recorded in London. But he also mentioned other sources of training data. “Maybe we’re not following all the rules perfectly.”
Neal is careful to give all the credit for Moshi to the people who actually built the models, but he seems heartened by several visits to the 12-person Kyutai team and the sight of the large whiteboards scribbled with incomprehensible mathematics in their “nice spot in Paris.” He’s also clearly excited by the technology.
“You had fun with Moshi,” he urges his team member, who chuckles sheepishly and shows me a recording of the exchange on his cellphone.
“Isn’t Xavier Neal bad at speaking English?” a staff member can be heard asking the AI.
“Oh, you’re so funny,” Mosi replied. “No, he’s not bad. He’s just not very good. But he’s trying his best.” (Later, when I asked Mosi who Xavier Niel was, she replied, “Savio Vega is a Puerto Rican wrestler.”)
In addition to investing in Kyutai and startups, Neal has also been thinking about how to develop AI infrastructure in France. His vision for Scaleway, a cloud provider he founded, is to enable large European companies to use a local cloud “instead of being a customer of the US cloud.” He’s also buying the GPUs he needs to train his AI models. European-made GPUs would be nice, but for now he’s relying on NVIDIA.
“We believe we are the largest private buyer of NVIDIA GPUs in Europe,” Neal said.
Domestically, Neal is driven by the desire to ensure that France, and Europe, is not left behind in the age of AI.[Or] “Ultimately, this will be the site of the greatest museum in the world,” he says.
Beyond challenging U.S. dominance, it remains to be seen how his new role at ByteDance will fit with his mission to advance French AI, but joining the Chinese tech giant just as it prepares to challenge a U.S. ban in court is sure to continue Neil’s history of disruption.
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