Xavier Niel, a Driving Force of French AI, Is Now Shaping TikTok

I wait to meet Xavier Niel in a room that feels fitting for one of France’s richest men. Gold-encrusted walls frame a boardroom table the size of a small swimming pool. And beyond the large windows, a lily pond.

Niel is the original French internet mogul, of the generation before founders wore T-shirts to the office. His team wears suits; he arrives in a classic white shirt. Niel might ooze establishment now but his fortune is rooted in Minitel Rose, the “erotic chat” service he launched as a teenager. Later, he graduated to telecoms, and the company he founded in the ’90s, Iliad, is now one of Europe’s major mobile operators. He’s also co-owner of French newspaper Le Monde.

Niel, a former hacker who never went to college, has always been preoccupied with disruption. Over the past year, he—and his money—have become an engine powering the rising French AI industry. Niel is not building models himself. Instead he considers his role to be more paternalistic. “I'm the old guy who likes entrepreneurs,” he explains to me, across the boardroom in Paris. Earlier this year, Niel took a surprise step onto the international stage when ByteDance announced the French billionaire would become a board member. The TikTok owner enlisted Niel as it faces growing legal problems, especially in the US. Amid concern that the Chinese government could access TikTok user data, US president Joe Biden signed a law in April that bans TikTok in the US unless ByteDance sells the platform to a US-approved buyer. ByteDance sued in response, meaning the case is likely to end up in court.

It is against this fraught backdrop that Niel joins the five-person ByteDance board, where he’ll be the sole European representative able to vote on strategy alongside ByteDance cofounder Rubo Liang, Chinese VC Neil Shen, and two American finance executives, Arthur Dantchik and William E. Ford. “We will continue to strengthen the diversity of skills and expertise within our board to safeguard the interests of the company and all shareholders,” was the only statement ByteDance would share on Niel’s appointment. Niel himself declined to comment.

I wait to meet Xavier Niel in a room that feels fitting for one of France’s richest men. Gold-encrusted walls frame a boardroom table the size of a small swimming pool. And beyond the large windows, a lily pond.

Niel is the original French internet mogul, of the generation before founders wore T-shirts to the office. His team wears suits; he arrives in a classic white shirt. Niel might ooze establishment now but his fortune is rooted in Minitel Rose, the “erotic chat” service he launched as a teenager. Later, he graduated to telecoms, and the company he founded in the ’90s, Iliad, is now one of Europe’s major mobile operators. He’s also co-owner of French newspaper Le Monde.

Niel, a former hacker who never went to college, has always been preoccupied with disruption. Over the past year, he—and his money—have become an engine powering the rising French AI industry. Niel is not building models himself. Instead he considers his role to be more paternalistic. “I'm the old guy who likes entrepreneurs,” he explains to me, across the boardroom in Paris. Earlier this year, Niel took a surprise step onto the international stage when ByteDance announced the French billionaire would become a board member. The TikTok owner enlisted Niel as it faces growing legal problems, especially in the US. Amid concern that the Chinese government could access TikTok user data, US president Joe Biden signed a law in April that bans TikTok in the US unless ByteDance sells the platform to a US-approved buyer. ByteDance sued in response, meaning the case is likely to end up in court.

It is against this fraught backdrop that Niel joins the five-person ByteDance board, where he’ll be the sole European representative able to vote on strategy alongside ByteDance cofounder Rubo Liang, Chinese VC Neil Shen, and two American finance executives, Arthur Dantchik and William E. Ford. “We will continue to strengthen the diversity of skills and expertise within our board to safeguard the interests of the company and all shareholders,” was the only statement ByteDance would share on Niel’s appointment. Niel himself declined to comment.

When it comes to Kyutai, however, there are some things Niel is not so open about. When I ask where Moshi gets all its training data from, he laughs. Partly the model was trained on an actress’ voice recorded in London, he explains. But he alludes to other sources of training data, too. “Maybe we are not completely respecting all the rules.”

Niel is careful to direct credit for Moshi to the people actually building the models. But he appears invigorated by his handful of visits to the 12-person Kyutai team in their “nice place in Paris” with their big whiteboard scrawled with math he doesn’t understand. He’s also clearly excited by the tech.

“You had fun with Moshi,” he prompts a member of his team. Embarrassed, the staffer giggles and plays me a recorded interaction on his phone.

“Isn’t Xavier Niel terrible at speaking English?” the staffer can be heard asking the AI.

“Oh you’re so funny,” Moshi replies. “No, he’s not terrible, he’s just not very good, but he’s trying his best.” (When I later ask Moshi, “Who is Xavier Niel?” she replies: “Savio Vega is a Puerto Rican professional wrestler.”)

Alongside Kyutai and his startup investments, Niel has also been thinking about how to develop AI infrastructure in France. His vision for the cloud provider he founded, Scaleway, is for big European companies to be able to use a local cloud “instead of being customers of a US cloud.” He’s also been buying up the GPUs necessary to train AI models. Although he’d love there to be European-made GPUs, for now he is relying on Nvidia.

“I think we are the biggest private buyers of Nvidia GPUs in Europe,” Niel says.

At home, Niel is driven by a desire to make sure France—and Europe—are not left behind in the AI age. “[Or] in the end, we will be the nicest place in the world for museums,” he says.

Other than challenging US dominance, it’s still unclear how his new role at ByteDance fits with his mission to boost French AI. But joining the Chinese tech giant, just as it prepares to argue against a US ban in court, certainly continues Niel’s history of disruption.

Source: wired.com