French billionaire Xavier Niel builds a ChatGPT competitor with a “strong French accent”

Kyutai, a nonprofit AI group founded last year, unveiled its Moshi service at an event in Paris on Wednesday. The lab’s scientists said their system can speak with 70 different emotions and styles. They demonstrated the assistant offering advice on climbing Mount Everest and reciting a poem it had written in a thick French accent.

“It thinks as it speaks,” said Patrick Pérez, CEO of Kyutai. “We believe Moshi has enormous potential to change the way we communicate with and through machines.”

The assistant is the latest challenger to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the best-known chatbot. More startups and big tech companies, including Anthropic, Cohere and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, have rushed to introduce models that can compete with OpenAI’s GPT-4, although some industry experts worry about the dangers the new technology poses.

OpenAI held a launch event in May for a voice assistant for ChatGPT Plus users that combined powerful image recognition capabilities with lightning-fast responses for the first time. The new product was expected to be available within weeks, but the company later pushed the launch back to the fall, saying it would not initially include the video and screen-sharing features it had demonstrated.

OpenAI also faced criticism for using an AI voice in its film that sounded like that of actress Scarlett Johansson. The company pulled the voice after the actress hired lawyers.

Pérez said his lab will release the models and research behind the assistant as open-source technology, with the code freely shareable. He called Moshi the “first published real-time voice AI assistant.”

The new service is an “experimental prototype,” Kyutai said in a statement on Wednesday. A representative of the lab said the model and research would be available in the coming weeks, but did not give a date.

Kyutai was founded in November with 300 million euros ($324 million) in funding from, among others, Niel, French billionaire Rodolphe Saadé and former Google chairman Eric Schmidt. Pérez, a former director of Valeo SA, hired researchers from Google DeepMind and Meta Platforms Inc. for his lab.

The voice assistant is a promising indicator that Europe can be a global player in AI development, said Niel. “All the products they showed today are the best in their class worldwide,” he said in an interview on Wednesday. “We are very happy to have this in Europe.”

Kyutai’s chief scientific officer, Hervé Jégou, briefly addressed security concerns at the event. The lab will use indexing and watermarking tools to identify and track audio generated by its AI, he said.

To train his new model, Kyutai said he worked with a voice actress named Alice, but did not reveal her full name.

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