The article is about Kyutai, a French AI lab with an objective to compete with chatgpt and others with full open source (research papers, models, and training data).
They are aiming to also include the capability to use sound, image, etc… (according to this article (French) https://www.clubic.com/actualite-509350-intelligence-artificielle-xavier-niel-free-et-l-ancien-pdg-de-google-lancent-kyutai-un-concurrent-europeen-a-openai.html )
The post article also talks about some French context.
$330m is not nothing. But, with a funding split between a telecom CEO, and a shipping & logistics CEO - person has to wonder what sort of direction & tuning the team might be encouraged to explore. How will they stack up against existing & proven open source non-profits with impressive releases like EleutherAI?
These open source projects are neat, in that they give the average person the opportunity to peek under the hood of an LLM that they’d never be able to run on consumer level hardware. There are some interesting things to find, especially in the dataset snapshots that Eleuther made available.
In general, kind of cool to see France being on the cutting edge of these things. And I think it’s worth saluting any project that moves to decentralize power from states and megacorps, who seal wonderful, powerful things in black boxes.
France is on the cutting edge of AI indeed, the FAIR (Facebook AI lab) has a big office in Paris and its boss is Yann Le Cun. So there are plenty of researchers getting trained on the state of the art.
Makes sense it’d be the French again. They pioneered the internet after all.
I’m sorry are you crazy? Do you know any part of the internets history? American universities, government and defense contractors that created the internet.
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Thanks for the assist. I’m not an expert on the deep lore of the internet, but remember a few things from History class.
What did the Teletubbies have to do with it then? I could have sworn early development was tied with their government research?
You could read the article. It was actually DARPA, from the department of defense and not the CIA, who initially created the first working network. But it was some time later that CYCLADES in France demonstrated the first inter-network with a lot of the working concepts that later would make the internet as we know it today. It wouldn’t go global until we invented the TCP/IP protocols, that was a joint effort of a lot of universities over in Europe and the USA.