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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.
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In Niel, ByteDance has found a board member who revels in challenging the establishment. Just as TikTok has lured eyeballs away from the likes of Instagram and YouTube, Niel’s telecoms firm was also an outsider in the 1990s, attempting to rival the telecoms giants known as France’s big three: Orange, SFR, and Bouygues Telecom. He also has direct experience clashing with competition. In 2013, Niel’s ISP Free blocked all web ads by default. The move, seen as an attack on Google during negotiations about whether the tech giant should pay to use Free’s infrastructure, sparked major backlash. In that battle, after pressure from the government and free online websites, Niel backed down.
The billionaire is also a staunch believer in diverse algorithms. When we met in July, before his ByteDance appointment was made public, he was preoccupied with the type of techno-nationalism rife in Europe, after two decades trailing American success. “I don't want my kids relying on US algorithms.” If there’s going to be bias, says Niel, he wants that bias to be European. “I love the US. That’s not the point. But we are completely different in our way of seeing the world.”
If Europe wants to compete with Asia and the US on AI, he believes the continent has to act now. “If you want to create a search engine now from scratch, you cannot win, because you were not there 25 years ago,” he says, noting this window to compete on AI will also close.
In one way or another, Niel is connected to almost all of France’s rising startup stars. In Mistral AI, valued at €5.8 billion ($6.4 billion), he’s an investor. The same goes for H, another new AI company. Scaleway, the cloud provider used by Mistral, is an Iliad subsidiary, while the team behind Hugging Face, a platform for AI developers, spent time at Station F, a vast startup campus also launched by Niel. A self-described “geek,” Niel has long been embedded in the French startup scene. Station F was launched seven years ago, and before that, he was central to an experimental computer science school called École 42.
His belief that Europe should pursue homegrown AI translated into a €200 million ($220 million) investment he made in French AI last September. Half of that money went toward launching Kyutai, a nonprofit research lab based in Paris, which launched an AI voice assistant this summer called Moshi. Similar to OpenAI’s voice assistant, Moshi is also a flirty English-speaking female voice. But unlike OpenAI, which delayed its launch due to safety concerns, Moshi has been available to test online since July—with its models released this week.
“The idea of Kyutai is to produce an AI algorithm that is completely open science and open source,” says Niel. He uses the operating system Linux as an example of an open source tool with the kind of popularity Kyutai wants to replicate. “Depending on the license we will attach to this thing, everybody who will make a modification will have to publish it.”
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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.
