CMA CGM invests in artificial intelligence
CMA CGM, together with French telecom operator iliad Group and Schmidt Ventures, the venture capital arm of Google founder Eric Schmidt, each invested 100 million euros to jointly establish Europe's first open research laboratory dedicated to artificial intelligence (AI) - Kyutai.
The CMA CGM Group announced that Kyutai is a non-profit institution. The three co-founding companies have invested 300 million euros and are currently seeking to attract other private investors to join to provide long-term funding for this work.
Kyutai Artificial Intelligence Open Science Laboratory
Kyutai is a non-profit laboratory dedicated entirely to open research in artificial intelligence. The goal is to address the main challenges of modern artificial intelligence, in particular by developing large multimodal models - using text, but also sound, images, etc. - and inventing new algorithms to improve their capabilities, reliability and efficiency. For this purpose, the laboratory will use computing power provided by Scaleway, a subsidiary of the iliad Group. Scaleway’s supercomputers have the highest performance computing capabilities deployed in Europe for artificial intelligence applications.
Kvutai is firmly committed to the democratization of AI, positioning itself as a leader in open science for AI. Its intention is to share its progress with the entire AI ecosystem—the scientific community, developers, companies, society at large, and decision-makers in democracies.
Kyutai will also contribute to the training of future artificial intelligence experts, provide internship opportunities for students in master's programs, and provide guidance for doctoral students and postdoctoral research.
Kyutai, with its office in Paris, has brought in a research team with outstanding academic and business backgrounds, including Alexandre Defossez, Edouard Grave, Herve Jgou, Laurent Mazar, Patrick Perez and Neil Zeghidour.
Kyutai’s scientific committee consists of three leading artificial intelligence experts: Korean scientist Yejin Choi, who specializes in natural language processing and computer vision. French researcher Yann LeCun specializes in artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision and robotics. German researcher Bernhard Scholkopf is world-famous for his work in machine learning.
“Europe has everything it needs to win the race for artificial intelligence. French researchers are called the best in the world. We have all the computing power we need, as well as the artificial intelligence ecosystem,” said Iliad Group Chairman and Founder.
We are accelerating even further by creating an open research laboratory for artificial intelligence in Paris. Kvutai will provide us with ultra-high-performance, reliable large-scale artificial intelligence models, from which the entire European artificial intelligence ecosystem will be able to benefit. It’s great to see so many private partners coming on board and working together we can go further!”
Rodolphe Saade, CEO of the CMA CGM Group, said: “With this new investment in artificial intelligence, I hope that the younger generation will be able to benefit from all the opportunities this technology offers, and that this cause will bring together The best experts in the world come together to tackle the challenges of artificial intelligence. CMA CGM's decision to participate is also driven by the desire to put France and Europe at the forefront of artificial intelligence research. We need to create a dynamic and innovative ecosystem to Keep your business competitive. Joining forces and working together is the best way to prepare for the future.
Kyutai CEO Patrick Perez said: “With the launch of Kyutai, we begin an extraordinary journey! An adventure in cutting-edge artificial intelligence where open research is accessible to everyone. To realize our ambitions, we A remarkable research team is being assembled and immersed in the grand challenges of modern artificial intelligence."
