Creation of an artificial intelligence research laboratory in Paris by a group of billionaires, including Eric Schmidt.

Billionaires Eric Schmidt, Xavier Niel, and Rodolphe Sade announced on Friday the creation of a new nonprofit research laboratory for artificial intelligence, which will be based in Paris and called Kyutai.These are Europe's latest efforts to catch up with Silicon Valley, partly by attracting former Silicon Valley executives to work with well-established European business leaders.

Two French billionaires, shipping magnate Saade from CMA CGM SA and the head of telecommunication company Iliad, Niel, both will invest100 million euros (around108 million US dollars), and former CEO of Google Schmidt financed an unknown amount through his charity organization Schmidt Futures, according to the announcement.

This effort can lay the foundation for the artificial intelligence industry in Europe.The founders, speaking at the ai-Pulse conference in Paris on Friday, announced that Iliad has acquired 1,000 Nvidia H100 graphics processors, which will be available to Kyutai to support the research of the new organization, according to TechCrunch.

The laboratory will operate as a non-profit and will be open source, TechCrunch reports, just as OpenAI originally was in the US.And the new nonprofit organization has already announced some of its first scientists, including former employees of Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, and Meta.

At the event on Friday, Schmidt stated that France produces high-level scientists, but the country must remain "under the control of Brussels" and avoid, in his opinion, excessive regulation within the European Union., reports Bloomberg.

Niel is a French telecommunications magnate who also owns shares in the newspaper Le Monde and the real estate firm Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield, while Sade, along with his brothers, inherited the third-largest container shipping line CMA CGM from their father. Both have already significantly invested in the French artificial intelligence business, Bloomberg notes. These investments have manifested in the form of Mistral, a Paris-based company aiming to compete with California's OpenAI, and Poolside AI, an American startup that has expanded into France with plans to relocate its headquarters there. These companies are just some of the many in Europe trying to catch up with the achievements of the United States in the field of artificial intelligence. According to Bloomberg, the German startup Aleph Alpha GmbH is trying to position itself as the "European answer to OpenAI."

However, despite the race among the business community in the field of innovation, European government leaders are trying to become international standard-setters for artificial intelligence regulation. EU lawmakers passed the EU AI Act in June, the first major law regulating artificial intelligence, according to CNN.

OpenAI, which released its ChatGPT bot in 2022 and sparked widespread public interest in AI, received $13 billion from Microsoft, which integrated ChatGPT into its Bing search engine and other software, according to the New York Times. In response, Alphabet, the owner of Google, created its own chatbot called Bard, while simultaneously investing $300 million in Anthropic, another AI startup founded by former OpenAI employees, reports Motley Fool.

A Forbes investigation last week found that Schmidt, one of this nonprofit’s top backers, abruptly dropped his involvement in—or placed on review—several other nonprofit programs he was behind, calling into question his reliability. Those include partnerships with the White House to provide grants to students in an effort to create “the next generation of scientists and technologists” and a talent and networking program for teenagers around the world called Rise. Current employees of Schmidt’s philanthropic venture told Forbes it was “embarrassing” that the organization was suddenly backing out of its commitments.

We estimate Schmidt's net worth at $19.9 billion, making him the 89th richest person in the world. We estimate Neil's fortune at $6.6 billion. And we estimate Sade's fortune at $9.8 billion.

Billionaires Nill, Sade, and Schmidt invested €300 million in an AI laboratory (Forbes)

Details of the philanthropic chaos of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt worth $1 billion (Forbes)

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