If Europe wants to compete with Asia and the US in 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 that window to compete in AI will also close.
Niel is connected to almost every rising star in French startups, in one way or another. He’s an investor in Mistral AI, valued at €5.8 billion ($6.4 billion). 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. A self-described “geek,” Niel has long been embedded in the French startup scene. Station F launched seven years ago, and was previously the centerpiece of an experimental computer science school called École 42.
His belief that Europe should develop its own artificial intelligence resulted in France invests €200 million ($220 million) in AI in September last year. Half of that money went to start Kyutai, a nonprofit research lab based in Paris that shot AI voice assistant this summer called Moshi. Like OpenAI’s voice assistant, Moshi is also a flirty, English-speaking female voice. However, 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.
“The idea behind Kyutai is to create an AI algorithm that is completely open-source and open-source,” Niel says. He uses the Linux operating system as an example of an open-source tool of the kind of popularity Kyutai wants to replicate. “Depending on the license we attach to this thing, anyone who modifies it will have to publish it.”
When it comes to Kyutai, though, there are some things Niel isn’t as forthcoming about. When I ask where Moshi gets all its training data, he laughs. The model was partly trained on an actress’s voice, recorded in London, he explains. But he also alludes to other sources of training data. “We may not be following all the rules exactly.”
Niel is cautious about giving credit for Moshi to the people who actually build the models. But he seems invigorated by several visits to the 12-person Kyutai team at their “nice place in Paris” with their massive blackboard covered in math he doesn’t understand. He’s also clearly excited about the technology.
“You had fun with Moshi,” he encourages his team member. The embarrassed employee chuckles and plays me a recorded interaction on his phone.
“Isn’t Xavier Niel terrible at speaking English?” the employee 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 tries his best.” (When I later ask Moshi, “Who is Xavier Niel?” he 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 for immense European companies to be able to exploit the local cloud “instead of being customers of the American cloud.” He’s also been buying the GPUs needed to train AI models. While he’d like to see those GPUs manufactured in Europe, for now he’s relying on NVIDIA.
“I think we are the largest private buyer of NVIDIA GPUs in Europe,” says Niel.
At home, Niel is driven by a desire to ensure that France – and Europe – are not left behind in the age of artificial intelligence.[Or] “We will finally become the nicest place in the world for museums,” he says.
Beyond challenging U.S. dominance, it’s still unclear how his modern role at ByteDance fits into his mission to boost French AI. But joining the Chinese tech giant as it prepares to argue against the U.S. ban in court certainly continues Niel’s history of disruption.