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In just a few months, dozens of French entrepreneurs have turned their focus to AI
Last night , Motier Ventureshelda tech meetupfocused on AI startups featuring some of the most hyped tech startup in the Gallic technical school ecosystem : Dust , Finegrain , Gladia , Mistral AI and Scenario — all of them are portfolio companies of Motier Ventures . And you could find a sense of excitement both onstage and in the audience .
contrived intelligence , just like in the U.S. , has chop-chop become a buzzy vertical within the Gallic tech industry . But this time , France seems particularly well positioned to become one of the main AI hub of the world .
And it should n’t get along as a surprise . technical school giants have historically set up AI research research lab in Paris , as there ’s a orotund talent pocket billiards of PhD students in math , computing equipment skill and applied science . They unremarkably graduate from Polytechnique , ENS or Inria . They sometimes move to the U.S. for postdoctoral enquiry and then move back to France to fall in a research lab .
For instance , Facebook ( now Meta ) make its Paris enquiry labback in 2015with Yann LeCun at the helm of the AI initiative — this inquiry group is called FAIR , for Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research . Googlefollowed suitwith its own AI inquiry center dedicate to AI in Paris .
“ The fairish team is extremely telling . Just take care at what they ’ve done with Llama , ” an entrepreneur differentiate me yesterday . He recently had a private meeting with some of the railroad engineer and scientist process on AI project .
And if you attend at the founding father ofMistral AI , the French AI inauguration exercise on receptive author large language mannikin thatraised a € 105 million seed round($112 million at today ’s exchange rate ) , all three atomic number 27 - founders ( Arthur Mensch , Timothée Lacroix and Guillaume Lample ) previously worked at Google ’s DeepMind or FAIR .
Last Nox , Mistral ’s co - founders put together a demo of Mistral AI in a ChatGPT - similar user interface call Mistral AI Chat . The demo was found on a new model call “ mistral-70b - instruct - alpha01 , ” indicate that the team is actively working on a newfangled model with more parameters so that it can be more competitive with advanced LLM . concord to a recentreport from The Information , Mistral AI plan to raise as much as $ 300 million in the coming weeks .
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Mistral is n’t the only high - visibility AI society in France . Poolside , a company that recentlyraised a $ 126 million seed bout , plans to use AI to make it drastically easier to write codification . Co - institute by Jason Warner , the former CTO of GitHub , and Eiso Kant , a serial entrepreneur who work on Athenian and source{d } , the company has picked Paris as its home al-Qaida .
Dust , a companionship that is working onintegrating large language models with interior corporate datafrom GitHub , Notion or Slack , also took the point for a demonstration last nighttime . At Dust ’s office thawing party , I realized that Dust share its beautiful billet building withNabla , another French AI startup focalise on helping Doctor of the Church leverage magnanimous language exemplar and co - founded by former FAIR railroad engineer . This proves once again that an AI ecosystem is emerging .
The founder of Mistral AI and Dust had to go away the meetup quickly after their demos as they were both invite for dinner at the Elysée Palace , the residence of Emmanuel Macron . So there ’s also some public support for AI startups in France . An enterpriser of late told me that multiple AI startup are working together on public tenders for political science grants deserving jillion of euros as part of France 2030 .
One matter that might differentiate European AI startup from AI giants like OpenAI and Anthropic is that they ’re thinking about rule and compliance from Clarence Shepard Day Jr. one . An interesting Gallic AI inauguration in this field isGiskard , which is develop an open informant testing framework , or “ the good LLM antivirus in the market , ” as Giskard Centennial State - beginner and CEO Alex Combessie say me . I ’ll have more to write about Giskard in the come days .
And another wave of stealth AI startups
in the beginning this week , The Informationreportedthat Adaptive , an AI inauguration based in Amsterdam and co - founded by French AI researcherJulien Launay , was about to farm a seed around at a $ 100 million valuation . Adaptive helps companies iterate on their AI applications without relying on external datum or annotations .
A rootage confirm that Index Ventures is conduct the Adaptive cycle , with Iconiq and Motier Ventures participating .
Another origin state me that Index Ventures is also leading a germ round for an AI startup with a team split between Paris and London .
In other intelligence , I ’ve get word thatSteeve Morin , a key penis of the squad behindZenly , a popular consumer app that was acquired by Snap , is also creating an AI startup called ZML . The squad will focus on improving machine learning inference and other low - horizontal surface tools .
Maxime Germain , the founder of mental health startup Jour , which wasacquired by Alan , is leaving Alan to startHeart Hands , an AI startup that is developing a “ 2d brainiac in your pouch , ” as an investor described it to me .
Pierre Valade , the laminitis ofSunriseandJumbo , is putting together a team for an AI startup presently called Chief of Staff . Hugo Mercieris working on an AI startup in stealth way as well .
I think it ’s safe to call this novel wafture of inauguration a movement . While the overall tech ecosystem is stillexperiencing a downturn , there ’s an absurd amount of activity among Gallic startup at the early stage with unexampled AI startups getting establish at a rapid stride and VC house fight for the most competitory support rung .
