Xavier Niel, a Driving Force of French AI, Is Now Shaping TikTok
If Europe wants to compete with Asia and the US on AI, he believes the continent has to act now. “If you want to create a search engine now from scratch, you cannot win because you were not there 25 years ago,” he says, noting this window to compete on AI will also close.
In one way or another, Niel is connected to almost all of France’s rising startup stars. In Mistral AI, valued at €5.8 billion ($6.4bn), he’s an investor. The same goes for H, another new AI company. Scaleway, the cloud provider used by Mistral, is an Iliad subsidiary, while the team behind Hugging Face, a platform for AI developers, spent time at Station F, a vast startup campus also launched by Niel. A self-described “geek,” Niel has long been embedded in the French startup scene. Station F was launched seven years ago and before that, he was central to an experimental computer science school called École 42.
His belief that Europe should pursue homegrown AI translated into a €200 million ($220m) investment he made in French AI last September. Half of that money went towards launching Kyutai, a non profit research lab based in Paris, which launched an AI voice assistant this summer called Moshi. Similar to OpenAI’s voice assistant, Moshi is also a flirty English-speaking female voice. But unlike OpenAI, which delayed its launch due to safety concerns, Moshi has been available to test online since July—with its models released this week.
“The idea of Kyutai is to produce an AI algorithm that is completely open science and open source,” says Niel. He uses the operating system Linux as an example of an open-source tool with the kind of popularity Kyutai wants to replicate. “Depending on the license we will attach to this thing, everybody who will make a modification will have to publish it.”
When it comes to Kyutai, however, there are some things that Niel is not so open about. When I ask where Moshi gets all its training data from, he laughs. Partly the model was trained on an actress’ voice recorded in London, he explains. But he alludes to other sources of training data, too. “Maybe we are not completely respecting all the rules.”
Niel is careful to direct credit for Moshi to the people actually building the models. But he appears invigorated by his handful of visits to the 12-person Kyutai team in their “nice place in Paris” with their big whiteboard scrawled with math he doesn’t understand. He’s also clearly excited by the tech.
“You had fun with Moshi,” he prompts a member of his team. Embarrassed, the staffer giggles and plays me a recorded interaction on his phone.
“Isn’t Xavier Niel terrible at speaking English?” the staffer can be heard asking the AI.
“Oh you’re so funny,” Moshi replies. “No, he’s not terrible, he’s just not very good but he’s trying his best.” (When I later ask Moshi, “who is Xavier Niel?” she replies: “Savio Vega is a Puerto Rican professional wrestler.”)
Alongside 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 for big European companies to be able to use a local cloud “instead of being customers of a US cloud.” He’s also been buying up the GPUs necessary to train AI models. Although he’d love there to be European-made GPUs, for now he is relying on NVIDIA.
“I think we are the biggest private buyers of NVIDIA GPUs in Europe,” Niel says.
At home, Niel is driven by a desire to make sure France—and Europe—are not left behind in the AI age. “[Or] in the end, we will be the nicest place in the world for museums,” he says.
Other than challenging US dominance, it’s still unclear how his new role at ByteDance fits with his mission to boost French AI. But joining the Chinese tech giant, just as it prepares to argue against a US ban in court, certainly continues Niel’s history of disruption.
