You don’t have to look long to find French people in the organizational charts of major American tech companies. Trained in France, they cross the Atlantic for better opportunities.

The “PayPal Mafia”. This term may mean nothing to you, yet it brings together the most influential entrepreneurs of the past fifteen years. In 2007, the 19 founders of PayPal were nicknamed thus by magazine Fortune. Since then, Youtube, LinkedIn, Yelp, Tesla, SpaceX and Palantir have been founded by these same protagonists. Of the 19 members, six have become billionaires. Notice one absentee in this photo: Elon Musk.

But another well-known tech community is taking advantage of the explosion of enthusiasm around AI: French people, exiled to the United States, and occupying positions of responsibility in the artificial intelligence (AI) departments of giants of the field. A French Mafia of AI, in short.

Among them, the one who somehow showed the way: Yann Le Cun, scientific director of the artificial intelligence department of Meta (parent company of Facebook). From the 1980s, he worked on the machine learning and the deep learning. He joined Facebook in 2013, invited by Mark Zuckerberg himself.

In 2018, his first position as AI vice-president at Facebook was taken over by another Frenchman: Jérôme Pesenti. Apparently, the company has a penchant for “Frenchies” since alongside Yann Le Cun, there is another Frenchman: Léon Bottou. A former partner with whom he had created the DjVu format, which allows files to be compressed.

Like them, many French people have made a name for themselves in Silicon Valley: Patrice Simard, engineer in charge of the department machine learning from Microsoft, Rémi Munoz, director of Deepmind (Google subsidiary dedicated to AI) in Paris, but also Rodolphe Jenatton, machine learning scientist at Amazon and then Google.

Mention may also be made of Nicolas Pinto, former head of the deep learning Apple, Clément Farabet, former vice-president in charge of AI at Nvidia passed by Twitter, Vincent Vanhoucke, former robotics manager at Google or Nicolas Koumchatzky, former director of Twitter Cortex.

A French training of excellence

A list far from being exhaustive as there are so many. It is even a Frenchman who is at the origin of Google Street View: Luc Vincent. An exemplary CV, like many of these French people who have gone through elite schools. Polytechique, the École des Mines then Harvard for a post-doctorate in a robotics laboratory. He joined Google in 2004 and spent 13 years there, before joining another American company, Lyft.

These major French schools train the best engineers, who will want to put their know-how at the service of the largest cutting-edge companies in the field of AI. This is observed by Antoine Bordes, vice-president of AI at Helsing, who worked for Meta.

“AI is populated by French people and people who have studied in France, he explains to Tech&Co. “In particular at Meta, which has a research laboratory in France, many of whose employees were trained here”.

According to him, what makes the success of French training courses is the fact “that they combine both a strong theoretical base and a pragmatic instinct and fairly developed implementation”. But he regrets that “many are still working on foreign”.

Joëlle Barral is scientific director at Google in charge of AI. From her time at l’X, she retains a “multidisciplinary training”, which brought her “the rigor and the bases” which she used later. In particular, she was able to work with Alain Aspect, Nobel Prize in Physics 2022. Then she studied seven years at Stanford.

“On campus, there was this kind of emulation between students,” she recalls for Tech&Co.

“We are surrounded by people from all over the world who come to seek innovation. There is a dynamic approach, anyone can try, succeed, fail. Students set up their start-ups. I would say that there are less compartmentalization than in France”.

Joëlle Barral is scientific director at Google in charge of AI
Joëlle Barral is scientific director at Google in charge of AI © Joelle Barral

However, there is no question of establishing a value judgment, as the spirit between the two countries is so different, “the two formations are complementary and each bring their share of advantages and disadvantages” estimates Joëlle Barral.

Jeff Boudier also left for the United States after his studies at CentraleSupelec. “I was there at the end of the internet bubble”, he recalls, interviewed by Tech&Co. He is now the product and development manager of Hugging Face, a platform for everything from AI to both a toolbox and a library.

On the site, anyone can design their own AI, train it with their own datasets or already existing sets available in open source. Hugging Face thus hosts nearly 350,000 models designed by its users.

Cap screwed on the head, Jeff Boudier has lived for more than 15 years in San Francisco. He now has dual Franco-American nationality. “At the time, I didn’t necessarily dream of going to the United States, but I saw classmates delighted with their experience at Berkeley. So I started in my turn”, he develops, searching for his words between English and French. He then flew to the other side of the Atlantic where he was able to “discover the entrepreneurial spirit”.

France, bad at retaining talent?

Founded by French people, Hugging Face is nevertheless an American company. Difficult to raise funds in France: it therefore moved to the United States in 2016, where it is now valued at 2 billion dollars. Jeff meanwhile worked in AI later on. Passed by Stupefix, a video editing software bought by GoPro, using the beginnings of machine learning“techniques that seem prehistoric to us today”, he laughs.

Another Frenchman knows AI like the back of his hand: Luc Julia, the founder of Siri, Apple’s voice assistant. Disappointed by his time in a laboratory at the CNRS in Paris at the time of his thesis, he continued the adventure at MIT, flying to the United States “for their somewhat mythical aspect”.

“I needed a place with a warm climate. As a Toulousain I can’t stand the cold,” he jokes. But he regrets that we see the United States as the absolute model. “France trains the best engineers in the world, we should throw flowers at each other”.

On the business side, he admits that when he designed Siri, it would have been difficult to find funds in France. “We couldn’t have gathered the human and financial resources. Today it’s very different, we haven’t been afraid to say ‘start-up’ for about ten years and French Tech has developed”. He thus takes the example of the success of Sorare.

In France, “we are good at initial investment and seed. It’s more complicated when you need risk capital, going to the unicorn stage, looking for large funds. It’s above all a question of French AI entrepreneurs go to Silicon Valley for the market and to Europe for research and development”. He likes to compare the phenomenon of the French in AI to that of the French traders in the 2000s.

Joëlle Barral returned to Paris a year ago. At Google, she supervises fundamental research teams related to AI and ensures that the research teams are “going in the right direction”.

His entire career has been focused on the links between health and AI. She arrived at Google in 2014: “We were at a time when I saw that tech was going to be interested in health. Google let us project ourselves into what was going to happen in the next ten years”. A freedom that attracted her.

“Give something back to France”

With ChatGPT’s explosion of success, Hugging Face now finds itself in a booming market. “This explosion is on the one hand an opportunity for us: it allows us to increase the use of our tool all over the world”, explains Jeff Boudier.

“Where we can do well is that we are open source, unlike ChatGPT, and we are strong on commercial services. AI has very quickly moved from a scientific use to a general public use, it is therefore our responsibility to redouble our vigilance on the influence and impact of our tool”.

Like Joëlle Barral, Luc Julia is back – at least partially – in France, as scientific director at Renault. For him, it’s like “giving something back to France”, he likes to say. He defends the idea that there is not really a brain drain phenomenon. “There are a lot of comings and goings between France and the United States on the part of these entrepreneurs, and now the trend is reversing”.

Although all the French people mentioned are pure products of French training having succeeded in Silicon Valley, Joëlle Barral wishes to recall that fundamental research and innovation are permanently linked, “feeding off each other”. .

Nevertheless, the American dream continues to attract a crowd of French entrepreneurs: the French Tech San Francisco brings together some 3,000 people.

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