In Niel, ByteDance has found a board member who enjoys challenging the established order. Just as TikTok has drawn attention away from Instagram and YouTube, Niel’s telecom company was also an outsider in the 1990s, trying to compete with the telecom giants known as France’s Big Three: Orange, SFR and Bouygues Telecom. He also has direct experience of clashing with competitors. In 2013, Niel’s ISP Free blocked all web ads by default. The move, seen as an attack on Google during negotiations over whether the tech giant should pay to use Free’s infrastructure, led to a major backlash. In that battle, Niel caved in after pressure from the government and free online sites.
The billionaire is also a fervent believer in diverse algorithms. When we met in July, before his appointment at ByteDance was made public, he was preoccupied with the kind of techno-nationalism that is rampant in Europe, after two decades behind American success. “I don’t want my children to be dependent on American algorithms.” If there is a bias, Niel says, he wants it to be European. “I love the US. That’s not the point. But we are completely different in the way we look at the world.”
If Europe wants to compete with Asia and the US in AI, he believes the continent needs to act now. “If you want to create a search engine from scratch now, you can’t win, because you weren’t there 25 years ago,” he says, noting that this window to compete in AI is also closing.
In one way or another, Niel is connected to almost all of France’s rising startup stars. In Mistral AI, valued at €5.8 billion ($6.4 billion), he’s an investor. The same goes for H, another new AI company. Scaleway, the cloud provider Mistral uses, 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 that Niel also launched. Niel, a self-described “geek,” has long been embedded in the French startup scene. Station F launched seven years ago, and before that he was the linchpin of an experimental computer science school called École 42.
His belief that Europe should pursue homegrown AI translated into a €200 million ($220 million) investment he made in French AI last September. Half of that money went to launch Kyutai, a nonprofit research lab based in Paris that this summer launched an AI voice assistant called Moshi. Similar to OpenAI’s voice assistant, Moshi also features a flirtatious female voice in English. But unlike OpenAI, which delayed its launch over security concerns, Moshi has been available for online testing since July, with its models released this week.
“The idea of Kyutai 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 kind of popularity that Kyutai wants to emulate. “Depending on the license that we will attach to this thing, anyone who will make a modification will have to publish it.”
