If Europe wants to compete with Asia and the US on AI, he believes the continent needs to act now. “If you want to build a search engine from scratch now, you can’t win because you weren’t there 25 years ago,” he says, noting that this window to compete on AI will also close.
In one way or another, Niel is connected to almost all of France’s rising stars. At Mistral AI, valued at €5.8 billion ($6.4 billion), he is an investor. The same goes for H, another AI startup. Scaleway, the cloud provider used by Mistral, is a subsidiary of Iliad, while the team behind Hugging Face, a platform for AI developers, spent time at Station F, a massive startup campus also launched by Niel. Niel, who describes himself as a “geek,” has long been embedded in the French startup scene. Station F launched seven years ago and before that, he was instrumental in an experimental computer science school called École 42.
His belief that Europe should develop local AI translated into a Investment of 200 million euros (220 million dollars) made in French artificial intelligence Last September, half of that money went to launch Kyutai, a Paris-based nonprofit research lab that Released This summer, an AI voice assistant called Moshi was launched. Like OpenAI’s voice assistant, Moshi is also a flirtatious female voice that speaks English. But unlike OpenAI, which delayed its launch due to security concerns, Moshi has been available for online testing since July, with its models released this week.
“Kyutai’s idea is to produce an AI algorithm that is completely open science and open source,” Niel says. He uses the Linux operating system as an example of an open source tool with the kind of popularity Kyutai wants to replicate. “Depending on the license we assign to this thing, anyone who makes a modification will have to publish it.”
However, when it comes to Kyutai, there are some things that Niel doesn’t reveal so clearly. When I ask him where Moshi gets all the training data from, he laughs. In part, the model was trained using the voice of an actress recorded in London, he explains, but he also alludes to other sources of training data. “Maybe we’re not respecting all the rules completely.”
Niel is careful to give credit for Moshi to the people who build the models. But he seems encouraged by the few visits he has made to Kyutai’s 12-person team at their “nice place in Paris” with its big whiteboard full of numbers he doesn’t understand. He is also clearly excited by the technology.
“You had fun with Moshi,” he tells a member of his team. Embarrassed, the employee laughs and plays me a recorded interaction on his phone.
“Isn’t Xavier Niel terrible at speaking English?” the staff member can be heard asking the AI.
“You’re very funny,” Moshi replies. “No, he’s not terrible, he’s just not very good, but he’s doing the best he can.” (When I later ask Moshi, “Who is Xavier Niel?” she replies, “Savio Vega is a Puerto Rican professional wrestler.”)
In addition to Kyutai and his startup investments, Niel has also been thinking about how to develop AI infrastructure in France. His vision for the cloud provider he founded, Scaleway, is that large European companies can use a local cloud “rather than being customers of an American cloud.” He has also been buying the GPUs needed to train AI models. While he would love to see GPUs made in Europe, for now he is relying on NVIDIA.
“I think we are the largest private buyer of NVIDIA GPUs in Europe,” says Niel.
In his country, Niel is motivated by the desire to ensure that France (and Europe) is not left behind in the era of artificial intelligence. “Or, in the end, we will be the best place in the world for museums,” he says.
As well as challenging American dominance, it remains unclear how his new role at ByteDance fits with his mission to boost French artificial intelligence. But joining the Chinese tech giant, just as it prepares to argue against a US ban in court, certainly continues Niel’s story of disruption.