Billionaires Fund New Nonprofit AI Lab in France

Kyutai, with €300 million in funding, aims to advance open-source AI research.

Billionaires Xavier Niel, Rodolphe Saadé and Eric Schmidt have announced a new nonprofit artificial intelligence research lab in Paris, marking France’s latest push to develop sovereign AI technology.
The lab, called Kyutai, will have €300 million in total funding and produce open-source research. Some of its scientists previously worked for Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Meta Platforms Inc.
Kyutai will work on foundational models and will also need some compute power. Scaleway, the cloud division of Iliad, recently acquired a thousand Nvidia H100 GPUs which will be available at cost for Kyutai.
Kyutai has already started hiring for its core scientific team. The team includes former Valeo SA science director Patrick Perez, former Neil Zeghidour and Laurent Mazare — formerly of Google’s DeepMind — and Hervé Jégou, Edouard Grave and Alexandre Defossez, who are Meta alumni.
Kyutai’s models will be open source, but the researchers describe their work as open science. They plan to release open-source models, but also the training source code and data that explain how they released these models.