The Best quotes from ai-PULSE 2024's keynotes

The Best quotes from ai-PULSE 2024's keynotes Build • Salomé Gonzalez • 18/11/24 • 6 min read

The second edition of ai-PULSE, held at Paris's iconic Station F on November 7, kicked off with a powerful morning session that highlighted some of the most important voices in AI today. The morning’s keynote speakers shared their insights into the latest advancements, the growing power of open-source AI, and the urgent need for Europe to position itself as a hub for sovereign, open, and efficient AI solutions.

A future shaped by open, efficient, and sovereign AI

Europe is not only catching up with AI powerhouses in the US and China, but is emerging as a formidable force in its own right. Xavier Niel, Founder of Iliad Group, began his address with a bold statement: "18 months ago, when we said we wanted to create a tech AI conference in Paris, people told us, 'Guys, you're completely crazy, Europe has no AI ecosystem!' Today, we are proving them wrong." He added, "thanks to our talent, we’re building amazing startups like Mistral, Poolside, and Argil. And to keep that talent, we’ve created Kyutai , where we’re assembling the ‘Avengers of AI’, bringing together the best minds to develop open source AI models in Europe, built according to our values and regulations."

Xavier Niel

One of the most exciting innovations to emerge from Kyutai is Moshi , an open source conversational AI model. "Moshi is the first truly open-source AI model created in Europe, and it’s completely free to use. It’s a game-changer for the industry," Niel declared.

Damien Lucas, CEO of Scaleway and Aude Durand, Deputy CEO of iliad Group, took to the stage next, declaring that Moshi is now available as a one-click deployment service through Scaleway's platform.

Durand then emphasized the theme of this year’s event: "Big, Efficient, Open." "In AI, we know that top-tier models require immense computational power," she said. Lucas added: ”Scaleway is proud to support cutting-edge AI models by offering access to 3000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs today - triple our total this time last year - and in the coming weeks, we will surpass 5000 GPUs. This will allow developers across Europe to leverage the power of AI, while minimizing environmental impact. "

Aude Durand and Damien Lucas

As part of its commitment to sustainable AI, Scaleway has also launched its new Environmental Footprint Calculator . "Transparency matters," said Lucas. "We want to give developers the tools to understand the environmental impact of their AI workloads, covering everything from emissions to water consumption. It’s the most comprehensive calculator available today, and it’s already in beta." Lucas also unveiled Generative APIs , a new Scaleway service which allows developers to move from Open AI to alternative open source models in just one line of code. More about Scaleway's ai-PULSE announcements here .

Michael Dell, Chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies, then shared his thoughts on the accelerating pace of AI innovation, drawing comparisons with the rise of the internet. "If you remember the internet in the mid-90s , people were wondering what it really meant,” he said. “It took about a decade before the full impact was understood. We're in that same phase with AI today." Dell then asserted his belief in the transformative power of AI, both in the cloud and on-device: “AI will be used both on the cloud and on devices. It will be used at the edge, on the point of activity closest where the action is. It will run on cloud platforms, on your phone, in cars, factories, and retail stores,” he said.

Dell also spoke passionately about open-source AI, emphasizing that it is a critical driver of innovation. " Open-source AI has already revolutionized the field , and it’s just getting started," he enthused. " Last year would’ve been more about closed models; the world has shifted now. Two thirds of activity is now happening in open models ; derivative, small models that don’t necessarily need to run on massive clusters."

Michael Dell, Dell

As AI continues to evolve, Dell predicted "we’re transitioning from calculating to thinking. The future of AI will require new architectures that bring together data, computing, and cognition in a way that helps humans become more successful," he explained.

The road to power-efficient AI

Renee J. James, Chairman and CEO of Ampere Computing, took the stage next to talk about the future of AI hardware. She reflected on the importance of power efficiency in AI infrastructure. “We set out to build something twice as powerful, but with half the energy consumption, and we ended up getting 3 to 4 times the performance, ” said James.

Renee J. James, Ampere Computing

In a speech echoing her CPO Jeff Wittich’s assertion last year that Ampere CPUs could handle many inference workloads whilst using 3-5 times less energy than comparable GPUs, she stressed that AI hardware, particularly processors, need to evolve to meet the increasing demands of AI models. “Today, we are all about training models, we have people building unlimited clusters to train,” she explained. “But as [AI] starts to moderate and become mainstream, we have to make it affordable and environmentally efficient, because we don’t have more power. That's the journey we are going to begin.”

James also pointed out that Europe has an untapped wealth of intellectual talent, especially in computer architecture, and she believes the continent must focus on increasing investment levels to continue pushing the boundaries of AI hardware. “Access to capital is one of the most important things that needs to continue to improve and the ability for investors to take more risks,” she concluded.

Renen Hallak, VAST Data, and Aude Durand

Renen Hallak, Founder and CEO of VAST Data, agreed with James on the growing importance of efficient data management in AI scaling. “AI is changing from allowing us to analyze numbers and rows and columns to pictures and videos, natural language and sound. Older systems were not built for that. So we need to break that paradigm, and that requires a new software architecture, ” said Hallak. He then discussed the shift from CPUs to GPUs for data analysis, emphasizing the need for new software architectures “when you build exabyte-scale clusters that need to manage themselves.” Hallak also addressed the growing role of AI agents in problem-solving. “ AI agents will soon be communicating with each…