The “PayPal mafia”. This term may not mean anything to you, but it brings together the most influential businessmen of the last fifteen years. In 2007, the 19 founders of PayPal were nicknamed that way by the magazine Fortune. Since then, YouTube, LinkedIn, Yelp, Tesla, SpaceX and Palantir have been founded by these same protagonists. Of the 19 members, six have become billionaires. Look at someone absent in this photo: Elon Musk.
But another well-known tech community is cashing in on the explosion of enthusiasm around AI: the French, in exile in the United States, and taking senior positions in the artificial intelligence (AI) departments of giants in the field. A French AI mafia, in short.
Among them, the one who somehow led the way: Yann Le Cun, scientific director of the artificial intelligence department of Meta (Facebook’s parent company). Beginning in the 1980s, he worked at the machine learning and the deep learning. He joined Facebook in 2013, invited by Mark Zuckerberg himself.
In 2018, his first post as Vice President of AI at Facebook was held by another Frenchman: Jérôme Pesenti. Apparently, the company has a predilection for “little Frenchies” since along with Yann Le Cun, there is another Frenchman: Léon Bottou. A former partner with whom he had created the DjVu format, which allows files to be compressed.
Like them, many French people have made a name for themselves in Silicon Valley: Patrice Simard, engineer in charge of the department machine learning from Microsoft, Rémi Muñoz, director of Deepmind (Google subsidiary dedicated to AI) in Paris, but also Rodolphe Jenatton, machine learning scientist on Amazon and then on Google.
One can also mention Nicolás Pinto, former head of the deep learning Apple, Clément Farabet, former vice president in charge of AI at Nvidia, went through Twitter, Vincent Vanhoucke, former robotics manager at Google or Nicolas Koumchatzky, former director of Twitter Cortex.
A French training of excellence
A list far from exhaustive as there are so many. It is even a Frenchman who is at the origin of Google Street View: Luc Vincent. An exemplary curriculum, like that of many of these Frenchmen who have gone through elite schools. Polytechique, the École des Mines, and then Harvard for a post-doc in a robotics lab. He joined Google in 2004 and spent 13 years there, before joining another US company, Lyft.
These important French schools train the best engineers, who will want to put their know-how at the service of the largest leading companies in the field of AI. This is how Antoine Bordes, vice president of AI in Helsing, who used to work for Meta, observes.
According to him, what makes the training courses in French successful is the fact that they “combine a strong theoretical base and a pragmatic instinct and a fairly developed implementation”, but he regrets that “many are still working abroad”.
Joëlle Barral is Google’s chief scientific officer in charge of AI. She retains a “multidisciplinary training” from her passing through l’X, which gave her “the rigor and the bases” that she used after her. In particular, she was able to work with Alain Aspect, 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics. She then studied for seven years at Stanford.
“We are surrounded by people from all over the world who come looking for innovation. There is a dynamic approach, anyone can try, succeed, fail. Students create their new companies. I would say there is less compartmentalization than in France.”
However, it is not about establishing a value judgment, since the spirit between the two countries is so different, “the two formations are complementary and each one brings its share of advantages and disadvantages”, estimates Joëlle Barral.
Jeff Boudier also went to the United States after his studies at CentraleSupelec. “I was there at the end of the Internet bubble,” he recalls, interviewed by Tech & Co. He is now the product and development manager for Hugging Face, a platform for everything from AI to a toolbox to a library.
On the site, anyone can design their own AI, train it on their own data sets or already existing data sets available in open source. Hugging Face thus houses nearly 350,000 models designed by its users.
Cap screwed into his head, Jeff Boudier has lived for over 15 years in San Francisco. He now has dual French-American citizenship. “At the time, I didn’t necessarily dream of going to the United States, but I did see classmates delighted with his experience at Berkeley. So I started my turn, ”he develops, looking for his words between English and French. Then he flew to the other side of the Atlantic where he was able to “discover entrepreneurship.”
France, bad for retaining talent?
Founded by the French, Hugging Face is, however, an American company. Difficult to raise funds in France: therefore it moved to the United States in 2016, where it is now valued at 2 billion dollars. Meanwhile, Jeff worked on AI later. Passed by Stupefix, a video editing software bought by GoPro, using the beginnings of machine learning“techniques that seem prehistoric to us today,” he laughs.
Another Frenchman knows AI like the back of his hand: Luc Julia, the founder of Siri, Apple’s voice assistant. Disappointed by his passing through a CNRS laboratory in Paris at the time of his thesis, he continued the adventure at MIT, flying to the United States “because of his somewhat mythical aspect.”
“I needed a place with a warm climate. As a Toulouse I can’t stand the cold,” he jokes. But he regrets that we see the United States as the absolute model. “France trains the best engineers in the world, we should throw flowers.”
On the business side, he admits that when he designed Siri, it would have been hard to find funding in France. “We couldn’t have put together the human and financial resources. Today is very different, we have not been afraid to say ‘start-up’ for about ten years and French Tech has developed”. So take the example of the success of Sorare.
In France, “we’re good at seed and seed investment. It’s more complicated when you need venture capital, going to the unicorn stage, looking for big funds. It’s mostly a matter of French AI entrepreneurs going to Silicon Valley for the market and Europe for research and development”. He likes to compare the phenomenon of the French in AI to that of French merchants in the 2000s.
Joëlle Barral returned to Paris a year ago. At Google, he oversees critical AI-related research teams and ensures that the research teams are “heading in the right direction.”
His entire career has focused on the links between health and AI. He came to Google in 2014: “We were at a time when I saw that technology was going to be interested in health. Google let us project ourselves into what was going to happen in the next ten years.” A freedom that drew her.
“Give something back to France”
With the explosion of success of ChatGPT, Hugging Face is now in a booming market. “This explosion is, on the one hand, an opportunity for us: it allows us to increase the use of our tool around the world,” explains Jeff Boudier.
“Where we can do well is that we are open source, unlike ChatGPT, and we are strong in commercial services. AI has moved very quickly from scientific use to general public use, therefore it is our responsibility to redouble our vigilance in the influence and impact of our tool”.
Like Joëlle Barral, Luc Julia is back, at least partially, in France, as Renault’s scientific director. For him, it’s like “giving something back to France”, he likes to say. He defends the idea that there is really no such thing as a brain drain phenomenon. “There is a lot of back and forth between France and the United States by these businessmen, and now the trend is reversing.”
Although all the French mentioned are pure products of the French training that has succeeded in Silicon Valley, Joëlle Barral wishes to remind us that fundamental research and innovation are permanently linked, “feeding each other”.
However, the American dream continues to attract a crowd of French entrepreneurs: the French Tech San Francisco gathers around 3,000 people.
Source: BFM TV
