Last month, to the excitement of many French VCs and founders, US tech giant OpenAI announced that it was opening its first office in continental Europe, in Paris.
The move was pitched as a way to plug into France’s “flourishing tech ecosystem”, OpenAI said in a statement at the time, by recruiting a team on the ground and building tighter links with local customers, including startups and large businesses.
This week, the company officially opened its bureau in the heart of the French capital.
“I’ve moved back from the US for this,” Arnaud Fournier, a solutions architect at OpenAI previously based in New York, who is leading the Paris office, tells Sifted. “It’s the start of a big expansion for OpenAI, and we believe Paris is a great base for it.”
It comes as France sees the emergence of several high-profile startups in AI, some of which directly compete against OpenAI. One of the most notable examples is Gen AI scaleup Mistral, which is building LLMs and has raised more than €1bn in less than a year since launching in 2023. It’s often pitched as one of Europe’s most promising competitors to OpenAI.
“We probably wouldn’t be here if there were no competitors and no one on the market,” says Fournier.
“We aren’t pointing fingers to one or another competitor thinking: ‘We’re scared’ […] Instead, we are thinking that we are here because the ecosystem is buzzing.”
Finding fresh talent
Last month, OpenAI announced that it had raised $6.6bn in fresh funding at a $157bn valuation (that’s higher than companies like Uber and Arm).
The company has 1,800 employees; 650 of those are researchers. By comparison, Sifted analysis found that 32 of the 105 employees working at Mistral are dedicated to science and research.
OpenAI said that in Paris it’ll recruit for roles in research, commercial development, marketing and communication. Fournier declined to specify how many employees OpenAI plans to have in France.
Like an increasing number of tech companies, it has its eyes on some of the top AI talent in the French capital. French engineers and researchers are in high demand as companies like Mistral, Poolside, H, FlexAI and Bioptimus multiply in the city.
“France trains top engineers, the brightest of which still often move to Silicon Valley to work in tech companies,” says Fournier. “We’ll enable them to stay and work in France, and put their talent to the benefit of the French ecosystem.”
The Paris office will largely be dedicated to building OpenAI’s commercial footprint in France. Romain Huet, head of developer relations at OpenAI, says the company has seen a “strong call” from the French market.
Partnerships have already been inked with some of French tech’s heavy hitters including AI startup Dust, SaaS unicorn Pigment and online marketplace Mirakl, which are using OpenAI’s technology to build products and automate internal processes.
Competition in Paris
OpenAI released its latest model, ChatGPT o1, in September — a large language model (LLM) that it says is capable of ‘reasoning’ to solve more complex problems.
A number of tech companies around the world are racing to build LLMs that are ever-more capable, including Meta and Google. Mistral is doing that in France.
“I don’t see [Mistral] as competition,” says Huet. “They have a focus on open source and on smaller models… There is plenty of room for everybody.”
OpenAI is also competing against some of French tech’s other hot startups.
Poolside AI, based in the French capital, is building a Gen AI model to help developers write software code — a proposition similar to ‘Canvas’, which OpenAI introduced in early October to enable users to write code in ChatGPT.
At the start of July, Parisian research lab Kyutai — which was created last year by billionaires Xavier Niel, Eric Schmidt and Rodolphe Saadé — released Moshi, an AI-powered voice assistant similar to the conversational voice interface recently released by OpenAI, dubbed ‘Advanced Voice Mode’.
Looking forward, OpenAI will be focusing on AI agents — AI models that are capable of completing tasks, instead of simply answering queries — according to a spokesperson for the company. “We believe that 2025 will be the year of agents,” they said.
AI agents are also the focus of French startup H, which raised a $220m seed round in May.
“Again, we don’t see this as competition,” says Huet. “It’s important to have this diversity, to have an ecosystem where there isn’t one actor but lots of offers.”
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/openai-paris-office-interview/
