An anonymous reader cites a TechCrunch report: Meta, Facebook’s parent, is teaming up with Cuddly face and European cloud infrastructure company Ladder to launch a new AI-focused startup program at the Station F startup megacampus in Paris. The underlying objective of the program is to promote a more “open and collaborative” approach to AI development across the French technological world. The timing of this announcement is remarkable, amid growing pressure for regulation and marked conflict between the “open” and “closed” domains of AI. (…)
While Meta herself has been open source of its own generative AI models, Hugging Face — a billion-dollar venture-backed startup in its own right — pitched its booth as a sort of open source alternative to OpenAI, full of open alternatives like ChatGPT and leading projects communities such as BigScience. . So, in many ways, the coming together of Meta and Hugging Face today makes perfect sense, given their respective positions on the whole “open” versus “closed” AI debate. “For me, open source AI is the most important topic of the decade because it is the cornerstone of the democratization of ethical AI,” said Clément Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face, in a statement.
From today until December 1 (2023), startups can apply to join the new “AI Startup Program” at Station F, with five winners who will access the acceleration program which will take place from January to June. The chosen startups, selected by a jury composed of Meta, Hugging Face and the French cloud company Scaleway, will have at least one thing in common: they will work on projects substantially built on open foundation models, or at the very least will be able to demonstrate a “desire to integrate these models into their products and services”, according to the announcement published today by Meta. “With the multiplication of foundation models and generative artificial intelligence models, the objective is to bring to the French ecosystem the economic and technological benefits of open and cutting-edge models,” the press release indicates. Indeed, the winning startups will benefit from mentoring from Meta researchers and engineers, will have access to Hugging Face’s various platforms and tools, as well as Scaleway’s computing resources.
