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This morning at Scaleway\u2019s ai-PULSE conference<\/a>, French billionaire and Iliad CEO Xavier Niel gave some extra details about his plans<\/a> for an AI research lab based in Paris.<\/p>\n This new lab called Kyutai<\/a> will be a privately-funded nonprofit working on artificial general intelligence. It will work with PhD students, postdocs and researchers on research papers and open-source projects. When Iliad originally unveiled this research lab, the firm said that Niel was committing \u20ac100 million to this project ($109 million at today\u2019s exchange rate).<\/p>\n \u201cThanks to some amazing friends who are there today, now we are close to \u20ac300 million for the financing of this initiative,\u201d Xavier Niel said at the conference. Among those \u201cfriends\u201d is another French billionaire, Rodolphe Saad\u00e9, the CEO of French shipping and logistics giant CMA CGM, who is putting \u20ac100 million too. There are other smaller contributors, such as Eric Schmidt\u2019s foundation and some unnamed donators.<\/p>\n This is just a starting point as Kyutai is open to more donations. \u201cWhat\u2019s interesting with so many journalists in the room is that the project will potentially interest other investors,\u201d Saad\u00e9 said at a press conference after the announcement.<\/p>\n As Kyutai will work on foundational models, they will also need some compute power. The good news is that Scaleway, the cloud division of Iliad, recently acquired a thousand Nvidia H100 GPUs. These top-of-the-line GPUs are essential for inference and model training and will be available at cost for Kyutai.<\/p>\n Kyutai has already started hiring for its core scientific team. Six men took the stage this morning to talk about their previous work and what they have in mind for the research lab \u2014 Patrick Perez, Edouard Grave, Herv\u00e9 Jegou, Laurent Mazar\u00e9, Neil Zeghidour and Alexandre Defossez. They previously worked for Meta\u2019s AI research team FAIR, Google\u2019s DeepMind division, Inria, etc.<\/p>\n 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-known AI researchers \u2014\u00a0Yein Choi, Yann LeCun and Bernhard Sch\u00f6lkopf. They will just check everyone\u2019s work once or twice a year and give feedback.<\/p>\n One of the reasons why Kyutai thinks it can convince some researchers to join its lab is that researchers will be able to publish research papers.<\/p>\n \u201cUnfortunately, big tech companies tolerate scientific publications less and less. Beyond the ego boost for researchers, it helps to advance research and contribute to the common good,\u201d Niel said during the press conference.<\/p>\n Of course, this isn\u2019t the first open AI research lab. OpenAI, as the name still indicates, started as a nonprofit. But things have changed drastically after Sam Altman started working full time on OpenAI in 2019. OpenAI moved to a more traditional corporate structure and raised funding from Microsoft.<\/p>\n Other companies have also been working on open-source foundational models, such as Meta with its Llama model<\/a> and Mistral AI<\/a>. Kyutai\u2019s models will be open source too, but the researchers describe their work as open science. They plan to release open-source models, but also the training source code and data that explain how they released these models.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen it comes to the timeline, I don\u2019t think our aim is necessarily to go as fast as Mistral, because our ambition is to provide a scientific purpose, an understanding and a code base to explain the results,\u201d Alexandre Defossez said at the press conference. But they expect to have something to share within a year.<\/p>\n Laurent Mazar\u00e9, another researcher from Kyutai\u2019s team, still described Mistral AI\u2019s first open-source model<\/a> as a success because many community members have been fine-tuning it and exploring use cases based on the Mistral 7B model.<\/p>\n It\u2019s also going to be interesting to see if a research lab is more efficient at releasing foundational models compared to private companies, and how private companies are going to leverage Kyutai\u2019s work for commercial applications.<\/p>\n Image Credits:<\/strong> Romain Dillet \/ TechCrunch<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI\u2019m also a strong believer in open source, and we need to turn it into a French asset,\u201d French President Emmanuel Macron said in a pre-recorded video message at the conference.<\/p>\n Macron also used this opportunity to define and defend France\u2019s position on Europe\u2019s AI Act, saying that use cases should be regulated, not model makers. France has been pushing to water down the AI Act<\/a> in trilogues (a trilogue is a negotiation between Europe\u2019s three main instances, the Parliament, the Commission and the Council).<\/p>\n \u201cRegulation is not the enemy of innovation, quite the contrary. It\u2019s not a question of defining good models, but we need to ensure that the services made available to our citizens are safe for them, for other economic players and for our democracy,\u201d Macron said.<\/p>\n \u201cWith work on the European regulation for artificial intelligence currently in \u2018trilogues\u2019, regulation must be controlled and not punitive, to preserve innovation and regulate usage rather than technology as such,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n Xavier Niel basically sided with France\u2019s position on this topic during the press conference. According to him, Europe is lagging behind when it comes to AI innovation, and regulation will slow down European newcomers and diminish the chances of them catching up.<\/p>\n \u201cFor the time being we\u2019re more in the innovation part than the regulation part. Creating regulation means it creates barriers to competitors,\u201d Niel said.<\/p>\n Maybe if French AI companies become massively successful, things could change. \u201cI\u2019d love it if one day we could talk about French imperialism in AI,\u201d Niel added later in the conversation.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\nFrance\u2019s position: regulating use cases, not models<\/h2>\n