“Kyutai’s idea is to produce an AI algorithm that is completely open science and open source,” says Niel. He uses the Linux operating system as an example of an open source tool with the popularity Kyutai wants to replicate. “Depending on the license we’re going to attach to this thing, anyone who makes 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 his training data, he laughs. In part, the model was trained in the voice of an actress recorded in London, he explains. But he also refers to other sources of training data. “Maybe we’re not completely following all the rules.”
Niel is careful to direct credit for Moshi to the people who actually build the models. But he seems inspired by his handful of visits to Kyutai’s team of 12 in their “nice place in Paris” with their big whiteboard scrawled with math he doesn’t understand. He’s also clearly excited about technology.
“You had fun with Moshi,” he prompts a member of his team. Embarrassed, the clerk giggles and plays me a recorded interaction on his phone.
“Isn’t Xavier Neal 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’s giving it his all.” (When I later ask Moshi, “Who is Xavier Niel?” she replies, “Savio Vega is a professional wrestler from Puerto Rico.” )
Along with 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 large European companies to be able to use an on-premises cloud “instead of being US cloud customers.” It also buys the GPUs needed to train AI models. Although he would like to have European GPUs, he is relying on Nvidia for now.
“I think we are the largest private purchasers of Nvidia GPUs in Europe,” says Neal.
At home, Neil is driven by a desire to make sure that France and Europe are not left behind in the age of AI. “[Or] ultimately we will be the best place in the world for museums,” he says.
Beyond challenging US dominance, it’s not yet clear how his new role at ByteDance fits into his mission to boost French AI. But joining the Chinese tech giant, just as it prepares to argue against the US ban in court, certainly continues Niel’s history of disruption.
