Journalist in Paris publishing The French Tech Journal newsletter 🇺🇲🇫🇷. Launching: The France AI Radar: https://xitter.cf/t.co/eqHvUDXOLA
Paris, France
Joined December 2007
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Chris O'Brien retweeted
Available now: NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB ⚡️
Our newest small open model is built for local assistants, interactive characters and robots that can carry on a conversation and use tools to get things done.
Watch Reachy Mini chat and move, with Bolt handling conversation and NVIDIA Cosmos handling vision. Both models run locally on Jetson Orin Nano 8GB.
Learn more: research.nvidia.com/labs/nem…
Chris O'Brien retweeted
I joined @CarlosDiaz and Frédéric Benqué again this week on the @siliconcarnesf podcast to discuss the BIG subject of the moment:
OpenAI at the heart of the AI bubble: can we avoid the worst?
The conversation got to the heart of what may be the bigger issue. As Carlos noted, @OpenAI is no longer an isolated startup. It's at the center of a giant infrastructure buildout. That means companies like @Oracle, @CoreWeave, @NVIDIA, and many others depend, to some degree, either directly or indirectly, on OpenAI's ability to keep growing.
For my part, I emphasized that we can be extremely optimistic about the technology while still being extremely concerned about how this race is financed.
Looking back at the telecom bubble of the early 2000s, the real issue was the disconnect between demand forecasts and debt financing.
So, could OpenAI really disappear before 2029?
Find the full conversation here: youtube.com/watch?v=vjANwplg…
“I think the startup company is called Pollen Robotics. I think it's like 10 people."
I haven't watched the whole keynote, but...does @JensenHuang not know that @pollenrobotics was bought by @huggingface? And that therefore, he is acquiring the company that makes Microducks? – at Saint-Ouen, France
Chris O'Brien retweeted
Our team scaled @Tesla Autopilot and Optimus, VL-JEPA at FAIR, RL post-training on Gemini, RL for locomotion.
Come work with us to push the frontier of AI in robotics!
Open roles in 🧵 -> Infra | Scientist | Engineer
$100 Kajillion spent on compute by @SpaceX, and Grok still doesn't know that Lady G is dead?
But this website keeps telling me Europe is doomed? – at Paris, France
It feels pretty fitting for @JensenHuang & @nvidia to end their European tour with Microducks on stage.
Microduck was designed and engineered in Europe (more precisely Bordeaux, France) by the @pollenrobotics and @huggingface teams. With American capital and ambition + Chinese manufacturing genius, it became the most popular robot of 2026 with over 15,000 sold all over the world!
I believe Europe has more opportunity to shine in AI than in any previous tech wave. We intend to prove it with @huggingface @nvidia and the whole open-source AI community in the coming years!
Let's go European AI 🇪🇺🇪🇺🇪🇺
In the end, @JensenHuang really did buy @huggingface for $12.9B for the Microducks...
After @pigment's $250M round, @FRTechJournal breaks down its funding history and analyzes the evolution of its agentic AI.
The new $2.3B valuation raises a bigger question: Can Pigment become the platform that runs corporate planning in the age of AI?
frenchtechjournal.com/pigmen…
The US is cooked... – at Paris, France
Today we’re announcing a new collaboration with @nvidia to bring AI to industrial engineering:
- faster simulation
- open benchmarks and supporting datasets for physics AI
- evaluations for agentic AI in CAE and EDA
More here: mistral.ai/news/mistral-nvid…
How did @bendingspoons miss out on this one?
YOU HAD ONE JOB!!!
Foursquare was acquired last month. The outcome was disappointing. It's taken me a while to write this, but I think I'm finally done grieving it. Here are some thoughts on our final years, an effort to honor the team who helped build & maintain FSQ's legacy, and my attempt to finally get some closure. teendrama.substack.com/p/som…
Chris O'Brien retweeted
At @MadronaVentures' Intelligent Applications 40 Summit, I joined @CarinaLHong, CEO of neolab @axiommathai, for a fireside chat: "Futuristic Math Will Power Agentic Swarm Coding."
I asked her: How should we think about the moat for a neolab like Axiom?
Watch our full conversation here: youtube.com/watch?v=NbbjvB1Z…
Chris O'Brien retweeted
The most built-upon model on the Hugging Face Hub isn’t Llama or Qwen.
It’s FLUX.1-dev from Black Forest Labs, a German lab: 43k derivative models.
Europe trained ~8% of the open-model compute on the Hub, but ~18% of what people build on top of it is European.
Build or surrender? Build, and build open. See you at GTC Berlin this week
I was just at the grand opening of the @getqonto HQ in late September. Absolutely gutted to see this.
Image saisissante des restes de l’auditorium flambant neuf de la banque Qonto, qui a inauguré son siège il y a 3 semaines bd de Bonne Nouvelle. Un salarié présent sur place est sous « le choc ». @Le_Figaro
Chris O'Brien retweeted
Shared my thoughts on @CoreWeave $CRWV and @nscale this week with @EdLudlow on Bloomberg @technology. The enormous debt financing the AI infrastructure boom is putting massive pressure on the neocloud sector, and investors are giving it much more scrutiny:
"I don't think that the market is impressed anymore by the scale of the contracted megawatts. The market wants to know: How much is this going to cost? Who is pre-financing what? And at what rates are the contracts that are up for renewal going to be renewed at? That's a big question mark right now."
cc: @business
3 fine-print disclaimers from Musk and Tesla about the new flying Roadster you should probably know about businessinsider.com/buy-tesl… via @businessinsider – at Le Pré-Saint-Gervais, France
Just to be clear: This is the genius who poured a ton of money into backing Trump, who is now funding anti-data center ads. But yeah, please, tell us more!
Marc Andreessen on why he thinks Europe actually wants to be left behind on AI
"Europe seems, I just take them at their word, determined to be left behind. They seem enthusiastic about being left behind. They seem to really badly want that"
"25 years ago, if you did a list of the 50 biggest tech companies in the world, a pretty significant number were European, probably 15 of the top 50. Today you're basically down to Spotify. Which is great. I love Spotify"
"I think they would be very happy if AI didn't happen inside the EU. I think they'd be very happy if social media didn't exist. I think they'd be quite happy to shut up the internet"
Brought to you by @a16z:
xitter.cf/obrien/status/21107457…
Crazy but true: A PAC controlled by notorious liberal Donald Trump is bankrolling anti-data center ads like this one:
popular.info/p/trump-praises…
