Kyutai

Kyutai is a privately funded nonprofit artificial intelligence (AI) research lab based in Paris with the goal of building and democratizing artificial general intelligence through open science. The lab was founded by the iliad Group, CMA CGM, and Schmidt Futures in November 2023, with an almost €300 million ($330 million) investment from its founding donors and plans to bring other private investors on board. Kyutai aims to advance the entire AI ecosystem from the scientific community, developers, companies, government decision-makers, and society at large. The research lab develops new large multimodal models (text, sound, images, etc.) and invents algorithms to enhance the capacity, reliability, and efficiency of AI models. Kyutai also trains interns and works with masters and PhD students.

In September 2023, the CEO of French telecom company iliad, Xavier Niel, pledged to invest €200 million ($210 million) in AI. As part of this pledge, he announced several new projects, including a new research center in Paris with an initial investment of €100 million ($105 million). The research lab, run by a nonprofit foundation, would hire AI researchers and provide grants to PhD students.

On November 17, 2023, the research center was launched as Kyutai at Scaleway’s ai-PULSE conference. Described as Europe's first independent research lab dedicated to AI open science, the launch was attended by its three cofounders—Xavier Niel (Chairman and Founder of the iliad Group), Rodolphe Saadé (President and CEO of the CMA CGM Group), and Eric Schmidt (cofounder of Schmidt Futures, and former CEO & chairman of Google), as well as its scientific team. Both the iliad Group and the CMA CGM Group contributed €100 million to Kyutai's funding with Schmidt Futures also joining as a cofounder, making a smaller contribution. At the announcement, the new lab announced almost €300 million ($330 million) in investments with plans to bring in new private investors.

The science team announced at the lab's founding includes Patrick Perez (Kyutai's CEO), Edouard Grave, Hervé Jegou, Laurent Mazaré, Neil Zeghidour, and Alexandre Defossez. Members of the science team previously worked in AI research teams, such as Meta’s AI research team FAIR, Google’s DeepMind division, and Inria. Kyutai also announced a three-member scientific committee made up of well-known AI researchers Yejin Choi, Yann LeCun, and Bernhard Schölkopf.

Computing power for Kyutai's research is available from Scaleway, an iliad Group subsidiary. Prior to the announcement of Kyutai, Scaleway acquired a thousand Nvidia H100 GPUs for inference and model training.