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submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by Tibert@jlai.lu to c/technology@lemmy.world

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.

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[-] cyd@lemmy.world 44 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Ideally, they'd just blow the entire $330M training an LLM, and release the weights. In reality, much of that money will probably go into paying salaries, various smaller research projects, etc.

[-] Mahlzeit@feddit.de 110 points 10 months ago

Ideally, they wouldn't be paying salaries? What?

[-] cyd@lemmy.world 12 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

The context is that LLMs need a big up front capital expenditure to get started, because of the processor time to train these giant neural networks. This is a huge barrier to the development of a fully open source LLM. Once such a foundation model is available, building on top of it is relatively cheaper; one can then envision an explosion of open source models targeting specific applications, which would be amazing.

So if the bulk of this €300M could go into training, it would go a long way to plugging the gap. But in reality, a lot of that sum is going to be dissipated into other expenses, so there's going to be a lot less than €300M for actual training.

[-] Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago

Methinks cyd might be a libertarian 😄

[-] 5BC2E7@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago

?? Do you know people with enough time qualifications and money that are willing to work for free? I haven’t.

[-] Thekingoflorda@lemmy.world 14 points 10 months ago

I know a few people on a certain site that host a kind of reddit alternative in their free time.

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[-] Honytawk@lemmy.zip 7 points 10 months ago

Good luck training an LLM without any developer.

[-] LUHG_HANI@lemmy.world 41 points 10 months ago
[-] kadotux@sopuli.xyz 21 points 10 months ago
[-] ohlaph@lemmy.world 9 points 10 months ago

Which is more than -$1.00.

[-] weew@lemmy.ca 10 points 10 months ago

Maybe they can buy... three nVidia GPUs and electricity to run them!

[-] RGB3x3@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago

In that case, I'll let them get a discount on the one I'm selling... Now only $100m.

[-] oce@jlai.lu 7 points 10 months ago

That's thousands of salaries for a year, that's not too bad for an unknown company. More than enough to produce something that can attract more funding. Many startups became successful with less funding.

[-] voluble@lemmy.world 24 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

$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.

[-] erwan@lemmy.ml 8 points 10 months ago

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.

[-] Goldmage263@sh.itjust.works 6 points 10 months ago

Makes sense it'd be the French again. They pioneered the internet after all.

[-] Sandbag@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago

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.

[-] yamanii@lemmy.world 20 points 10 months ago

I hope they actually do, unlike "Open"AI

[-] autotldr@lemmings.world 15 points 10 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:


This morning at Scaleway’s ai-PULSE conference, French billionaire and Iliad CEO Xavier Niel gave some extra details about his plans for an AI research lab based in Paris.

Six men took the stage this morning to talk about their previous work and what they have in mind for the research lab — Patrick Perez, Edouard Grave, Hervé Jegou, Laurent Mazaré, Neil Zeghidour and Alexandre Defossez.

Kyutai has also put together a team of scientific advisors who are well-known AI researchers — Yejin Choi, Yann LeCun and Bernhard Schölkopf.

“When it comes to the timeline, I don’t think our aim is necessarily to go as fast as Mistral, because our ambition is to provide a scientific purpose, an understanding and a code base to explain the results,” Defossez said at the press conference.

Macron also used this opportunity to define and defend France’s position on Europe’s AI Act, saying that use cases should be regulated, not model makers.

It’s not a question of defining good models, but we need to ensure that the services made available to our citizens are safe for them, for other economic players and for our democracy,” Macron said.


The original article contains 905 words, the summary contains 192 words. Saved 79%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[-] whyNotSquirrel@sh.itjust.works 7 points 10 months ago

with translation as well! good bot!

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[-] SchizoDenji@lemm.ee 8 points 10 months ago

Smart. Even Google knows that they can't compete with open source models since open source development of AI models is much more optimized and a compliance serving model can't catch up with it.

So an open source model is their best way to leapfrog these giants.

[-] Treczoks@lemmy.world 7 points 10 months ago

What use would an AI be if it was made by French developers? The source would likely be in French (i.e. Variables, functions, objects names as well as comments). Yes, they are that in love with their own language. Check out their names for about everything related to computers...

[-] filister@lemmy.world 68 points 10 months ago

Tell me you know nothing about coding without telling me

[-] REdOG@lemmy.world 16 points 10 months ago

Wait until he finds out about obfuscated code he's going to be real frenchy then

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[-] ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.de 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)
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[-] porcariasagrada@kbin.social 23 points 10 months ago

wut!? did some bagget french kissed your mom or something?

[-] whyNotSquirrel@sh.itjust.works 14 points 10 months ago

Isn't it Quebec(Canada) you're thinking about?

Ive never seen french code in my jobs, it's in English, Most Frameworks are in English anyway so why would they code in French

PHP Symfony is from a french company, and it's in English, docs also available in English

And there might be translation of english words in French yes, how is it crazy, that's the definition of a language otherwise we would all have the same words for everything and therefore the same language

[-] Schneemensch@programming.dev 9 points 10 months ago

As a SW Engineer from Germany, you will be surprised how much code exists in other languages. But I would expect companies on the edge of technology, who are either working closely with universities or with open source, that they usually chose English.

[-] OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 11 points 10 months ago

You ever heard of VLC?

[-] msgomez06@literature.cafe 7 points 10 months ago

I'll take this opportunity to highlight that Scikit-Learn (Open Source ML library) is developed in large part by INRIA (based in Paris) and people have been relying on their code for preprocessing, baselines, and the rest for a long time. And all of the documentation is in English.

[-] Treczoks@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago

Good for them. I has different experiences.

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[-] idefix@sh.itjust.works 6 points 10 months ago

Seriously, all code produced by French devs are in English minor a few personal projects

[-] Damage@feddit.it 5 points 10 months ago

Eh get the AI to translate the code to your language of preference.

Personally as an Italian, I think it would be good for Europeans to learn other languages aside from English... And the most widespread are French and Spanish.

[-] Merwyn@sh.itjust.works 4 points 10 months ago

Probably not, this is Quebec. I'm in a french lab and everything is written in English. You don't really have choice as you are collaborating internationally. Even if the lab is based/funded in France, not all of the people inside will be french. They plan to have scientific advisors that are not french according to the link.

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago

Let's say you're right and it will only be in French. It's a language with hundreds of millions of speakers. Why not have it in French?

[-] Treczoks@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago

While it may have hundreds of millions of speakers, there are still billions of people who don't speak french.

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[-] 5BC2E7@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago

I was assuming they would not self sabotage like that but if they do then you can use a llm to fix that issue with tranlations

[-] RAM@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 10 months ago
[-] vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 10 months ago

so they have enough money to train one model

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[-] nyakojiru@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 10 months ago

I would be happy to see the real story behind every kind of this tech news. You know we’re the real money will be.

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this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2023
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