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This morning at Scaleway’sai - PULSE conference , Gallic billionaire and Iliad CEO Xavier Niel give some extra details abouthis plansfor an AI research lab based in Paris .
This new lab , calledKyutai , will be a in private funded non-profit-making working on artificial worldwide intelligence . It will sour with Ph.D. students , postdocs and investigator on inquiry papers and open reservoir projects . When Iliad originally unveiled this research science laboratory , the firm said that Niel was intrust € 100 million to this task ( $ 109 million at today ’s exchange rate ) .
“ Thanks to some amazing friends who are there today , now we are nigh to € 300 million for the funding of this enterprisingness , ” Niel said at the conference . Among those “ friends ” is another French billionaire , Rodolphe Saadé , the CEO of French transportation and logistics behemoth CMA CGM , who is putting € 100 million too . There are other smaller contributors , such as Eric Schmidt ’s foundation and some unknown donators .
This is just a start period , as Kyutai is assailable to more donations . “ What ’s interesting with so many journalists in the room is that the project will potentially interest other investors , ” Saadé suppose at a press league after the announcement .
As Kyutai will form on foundational models , they will also call for some compute ability . The good news is that Scaleway , the swarm division of Iliad , recently acquired a thousand Nvidia H100 GPUs . These top - of - the - personal credit line GPUs are indispensable for illation and mannikin grooming and will be uncommitted at price for Kyutai .
Kyutai has already started charter for its core scientific squad . Six human race took the stage this morning to talk about their late employment and what they have in mind for the research research laboratory — Patrick Perez , Edouard Grave , Hervé Jegou , Laurent Mazaré , Neil Zeghidour and Alexandre Defossez . They previously worked for Meta ’s AI inquiry team FAIR , Google ’s DeepMind partition , Inria , etc .
Patrick Perez , who previously worked for Valeo , is going to be the director of the research lab . Kyutai has also put together a team of scientific advisors who are well - live AI researchers — Yejin Choi , Yann LeCun and Bernhard Schölkopf . They will just check everyone ’s piece of work once or double a yr and give feedback .
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One of the cause Kyutai think it can convert some researchers to join its lab is that research worker will be able to publish inquiry papers .
“ unluckily , big tech companies tolerate scientific publications less and less . Beyond the ego boost for researcher , it helps to advance inquiry and contribute to the vernacular goodness , ” Niel say during the printing press league .
Of course , this is n’t the first open AI research lab . OpenAI , as the name still indicates , started as a not-for-profit . But things changed drastically after Sam Altman started working full time on OpenAI in 2019 . OpenAI moved to a more traditional bodied structure and lift funding from Microsoft .
Other company have also been working on open source foundational models , such as Meta with itsLlama modelandMistral AI . Kyutai ’s models will be open source too , but the investigator trace their workplace as open science . They plan to let go open source models , but also the training germ code and datum that explicate how they released these models .
“ When it come to the timeline , I do n’t think our aim is necessarily to go as fast as Mistral , because our ambition is to supply a scientific intention , an discernment and a codification base to explain the event , ” Defossez said at the pressure league . But they wait to have something to apportion within a year .
Mazaré , another researcher from Kyutai ’s team , still describedMistral AI ’s first open source modelas a success because many community members have been fine - tune it and exploring use cases base on the Mistral 7B model .
It ’s also going to be interesting to see if a research research laboratory is more efficient at releasing foundational models equate to secret company , and how private fellowship are travel to leverage Kyutai ’s piece of work for commercial-grade coating .
“ I ’m also a strong believer in open source , and we require to twist it into a French plus , ” Gallic President Emmanuel Macron said in a prerecorded video message at the conference .
France’s position: Regulating use cases, not models
Macron also used this opportunity to specify and defend France ’s position on Europe ’s AI Act , saying that use case should be regulated , not model Jehovah . France has been push towater down the AI Actin trilogues ( a trilogue is a talks between Europe ’s three independent instances , the Parliament , the Commission and the Council ) .
“ regularization is not the enemy of innovation , quite the contrary . It ’s not a question of defining good models , but we need to ascertain that the services made useable to our citizens are dependable for them , for other economic actor and for our democracy , ” Macron state .
“ With work on the European regulation for artificial intelligence presently in ‘ trilogues , ’ regulation must be controlled and not punitive , to bear on invention and regulate usage rather than engineering as such , ” he add together .
Niel basically sided with France ’s position on this subject during the press conference . According to him , Europe is lagging behind when it comes to AI innovation , and regulation will slack down European fledgeling and decrease the chances of them catching up .
“ For the time being we ’re more in the initiation part than the ordinance part . Creating regulation mean it creates barriers to competition , ” Niel said .
Maybe if French AI company become massively successful , things could change . “ I ’d love it if one day we could utter about Gallic imperialism in AI , ” Niel total afterward in the conversation .
