French billionaire Xavier Niel has announced plans to fund a €300 million AI research lab in Paris. The lab, called Kyutai, will focus on artificial general intelligence and operate as a privately funded nonprofit organization. Niel, who is also the CEO of Iliad, initially committed €100 million to the project, but thanks to additional contributions from other individuals and organizations, the financing has now reached €300 million. Rodolphe Saadé, the CEO of French shipping company CMA CGM, is among the contributors, along with Eric Schmidt’s foundation and unnamed donors.
Kyutai aims to collaborate with PhD students, postdocs, and researchers on research papers and open-source projects. The lab has already started hiring its scientific team, which includes researchers with previous experience at companies like Meta, Google’s DeepMind, and Inria. Patrick Perez, formerly of Valeo, will be the director of the research lab.
One of Kyutai’s key objectives is to work on foundational models and advance open science. Unlike many big tech companies that limit scientific publications, Kyutai will encourage researchers to publish their work, contributing to the common good and promoting research advancement. The lab plans to release open-source models as well as the training source code and data, enabling an understanding of the results.
Kyutai has also secured crucial compute power for its operations. Scaleway, the cloud division of Iliad, recently acquired a thousand Nvidia H100 GPUs, which will be available to Kyutai at cost. These high-performance GPUs are essential for model training and inference.
The announcement of Kyutai comes as various companies and organizations are increasingly focusing on open AI research. OpenAI, for example, began as a nonprofit before transitioning to a corporate structure and receiving funding from Microsoft. Kyutai aims to adopt a different approach by emphasizing open science and releasing comprehensive resources that explain their models and methodologies.
The funding of Kyutai will contribute to France’s AI landscape and potentially boost AI innovation in Europe. French President Emmanuel Macron, in a video message at the conference, expressed his support for open source and underlined the need for regulations focused on use cases rather than model makers. Macron also mentioned France’s stance on the European AI Act, emphasizing the importance of controlled regulation that preserves innovation and regulates usage. Niel echoed this sentiment, highlighting that excessive regulations could hinder competition and impede the progress of European AI companies.
The establishment of Kyutai and its commitment to open science represents an important step in the advancement of AI research and development in France and Europe. With substantial funding, a highly qualified scientific team, and a focus on collaboration and transparency, Kyutai aims to facilitate groundbreaking discoveries and contribute to the global AI community.
