French billionaire and Iliad CEO, Xavier Niel, has revealed more details about his plans for an AI research lab called Kyutai. The lab, which will focus on artificial general intelligence, will be privately funded and work with PhD students, postdocs, and researchers on research papers and open-source projects. Niel initially committed €100 million ($109 million) to the project, but thanks to additional funding from various contributors, including French billionaire Rodolphe Saadé, the CEO of CMA CGM, the total financing has now reached close to €300 million. Kyutai is also open to more donations and potential investors.
In addition to funding, Kyutai will also have access to computing power through Scaleway, the cloud division of Iliad, which recently acquired a thousand Nvidia H100 GPUs. These GPUs are crucial for inference and model training and will be available to Kyutai at cost. The research lab has already started hiring its core scientific team, which includes researchers with previous experience at companies like Meta’s AI research team FAIR and Google’s DeepMind division.
One of the key aspects that Niel highlighted during the conference is Kyutai’s commitment to open science. Unlike some big tech companies that limit scientific publications, Kyutai will allow researchers to publish their research papers. The lab plans to release open-source models, training source code, and data to explain how these models were developed.
During the conference, French President Emmanuel Macron also spoke about France’s position on Europe’s AI Act. He emphasized the need to regulate use cases rather than model makers. Niel supported this stance, stating that regulation could create barriers to competition and slow down innovation. He expressed hope that French AI companies could become successful enough to contribute to the field on a global scale.
Overall, Kyutai aims to provide a scientific purpose, understanding, and codebase to explain its research results. The lab expects to have something to share within a year and intends to turn open source into a French asset.
