” Welcome ! ” Few companies have the honor of seeing their establishment in France praised by a tweet from the president of the republic. Emmanuel Macron’s message was posted while some of the 300 guests at the launch party hosted by OpenAI on Thursday, November 14 for the opening of its Paris office were still queuing on the sidewalk. “Like in front of a nightclub”laughs Clara Chappaz, Secretary of State responsible for artificial intelligence (AI) and digital technology. “When you want to be great, you receive the great”he later explained on stage, justifying the goodwill towards the American creator of the chatbot ChatGPT by France’s ambition to be a country at the forefront of AI.
OpenAI plans to integrate with “the ecosystem” local, said Sarah Friar, its financial director, who arrived in May from the neighborhood social network NextDoor, and Julie Lavet, a Frenchwoman who left Apple in May to be responsible for relations with European member states and associations at OpenAI. . French tech figures were invited to the stage, including Stanislas Polu, who worked for OpenAI before founding his new AI company, Dust.
Better penetrate the business market
Opening an office in foreign countries is a necessary part of the story for fast-growing American tech companies like OpenAI. Born in 2015 as a non-profit research team, the project has become, since the launch of ChatGPT at the end of 2022, a multinational that is being structured. It has 1,700 employees, including 650 AI researchers. The Paris office will be the ninth in the world, all of them open since January. But despite this rapid expansion, “The company culture remains close to that of a research laboratory”says Olivier Godement, director of the business services platform. The latter is, together with Romain Huet, responsible for developer relations, one of the two French OpenAI based in San Francisco who came to Paris to present their products to the media and their partners.
The Paris facility aims, in particular, to better penetrate the French business market. In fact, the latter are not “only one in four” having significantly implemented artificial intelligence tools, lamented Mme Chappaz presenting his roadmap. Among the obstacles: the cost of technology, the persistence of errors or concerns about data security. To help startups better understand and use its tools, OpenAI hosted an event on Tuesday at the Station F incubator, led by Roxanne Varza, present on Thursday evening, and founded by Xavier Niel, founder of Free and shareholder of individual title World. A meeting with leaders of large companies was also scheduled for Friday. OpenAI says it already has major clients in France using its AI assistants, such as Sanofi, to speed up the process of recruiting clinical trial patients, or Orange, to help their customer service or agents consult documentation internal.
You have 40.81% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
