From Wired, September 20:
The TikTok owner’s newest board member revels in challenging the establishment.
I wait to meet Xavier Niel in a room that feels fitting for one of France’s richest men. Gold-encrusted walls frame a boardroom table the size of a small swimming pool. And beyond the large windows, a lily pond.
Niel is the original French internet mogul, of the generation before founders wore T-shirts to the office. His team wears suits; he arrives in a classic white shirt. Niel might ooze establishment now but his fortune is rooted in Minitel Rose, the “erotic chat” service he launched as a teenager. Later, he graduated to telecoms, and the company he founded in the ’90s, Iliad, is now one of Europe’s major mobile operators. He’s also co-owner of French newspaper Le Monde.
Niel, a former hacker who never went to college, has always been preoccupied with disruption. Over the past year, he—and his money—have become an engine powering the rising French AI industry. Niel is not building models himself. Instead he considers his role to be more paternalistic. “I'm the old guy who likes entrepreneurs,” he explains to me, across the boardroom in Paris. Earlier this year, Niel took a surprise step onto the international stage when ByteDance announced the French billionaire would become a board member. The TikTok owner enlisted Niel as it faces growing legal problems, especially in the US. Amid concern that the Chinese government could access TikTok user data, US president Joe Biden signed a law in April that bans TikTok in the US unless ByteDance sells the platform to a US-approved buyer. ByteDance sued in response, meaning the case is likely to end up in court.
It is against this fraught backdrop that Niel joins the five-person ByteDance board, where he’ll be the sole European representative able to vote on strategy alongside ByteDance cofounder Rubo Liang, Chinese VC Neil Shen, and two American finance executives, Arthur Dantchik and William E. Ford. “We will continue to strengthen the diversity of skills and expertise within our board to safeguard the interests of the company and all shareholders,” was the only statement ByteDance would share on Niel’s appointment. Niel himself declined to comment.
In Niel, ByteDance has found a board member who revels in challenging the establishment. Just as TikTok has lured eyeballs away from the likes of Instagram and YouTube, Niel’s telecoms firm was also an outsider in the 1990s, attempting to rival the telecoms giants known as France’s big three: Orange, SFR, and Bouygues Telecom. He also has direct experience clashing with competition. In 2013, Niel’s ISP Free blocked all web ads by default. The move, seen as an attack on Google during negotiations about whether the tech giant should pay to use Free’s infrastructure, sparked major backlash. In that battle, after pressure from the government and free online websites, Niel backed down.
The billionaire is also a staunch believer in diverse algorithms. When we met in July, before his ByteDance appointment was made public, he was preoccupied with the type of techno-nationalism rife in Europe, after two decades trailing American success. “I don't want my kids relying on US algorithms.” If there’s going to be bias, says Niel, he wants that bias to be European. “I love the US. That’s not the point. But we are completely different in our way of seeing the world.”....
....MUCH MORE
....Shades of Nvidia with their Every, town, every village, every hamlet, every wide spot in the road, should have their own (NVDA-powered) supercomputer.
NVDA's Jensen Huang is right with him on techno-nationalism:
March 5—Here's Nvidia's "Sovereign AI" Pitch (NVDA)
Because here at Climateer Investing "We Recycle" we'll re-use the introduction to the February 26 post Taking Nvidia's Jensen Huang Seriously: Paris-Based "Bioptimus primed with $35m to unravel disease biology using AI":
Two pitches that Nvidia's CEO will be making at next month's NVDA lovefest (Nvidia GTC Conference, March 17 - 21, 300,000 attendees in-person and online) are 1) sovereign AI, every country, even every city needs its own supercomputer powered by Nvidia chips and its own Large Language Model trained on those supercomputers and 2) digital biology - everything from rapid drug discovery to individually tailored gene therapy.
