It was about artificial intelligence and Cedille.ai, launched by our agency a year before the ChatGPT phenomenon. Watch the video interview (shown on RTS2!) , as a podcast or even with full text transcription!
The interview, on video
The interview, in audio
The full text transcript of the interview
Coraline Pauchard (CP): At the Ideas Forum, tonight we are interested in this artificial intelligence that helps us write, summarize and generate texts.
Good evening, Sébastien Flury, you are the director of the web agency Coteries, located at the EPFL Innovation Park, and co-founder of cedille.ai. This is the tool we are going to talk about tonight. What is Cedille.ai exactly, in a nutshell?
Sebastian Flury (SF): Cedille is a writing assistant based on artificial intelligence. As you said, it is to summarize, texts, to generate fantasy or fantastic stories. You can have a lot of fun with: paraphrase texts or rewrite in plain language, text messages for example. We can have fun doing that too. It's quite funny.
CP: And you launched this writing language model in November 2021? How? How did it all start? Who had the idea?
SF: We are an agency and besides, it's a team idea, it wasn't me who came up with the idea. We worked a lot for a client based in Singapore, on artificial intelligence, in English.
At some point, it was during the summer of 2021, two of our specialists came to me and said: “In French, it's a desert, there is nothing good, there are no language models that work, no artificial intelligence in French that works well. What if we started something? ”
We left for a bit there Flower with a gun. We didn't do any market research, but we felt that there was something we could do. And then, we said to ourselves: “let's go, we're going to test, we're going to try, we're going to try to train a model.”
A few months later, we realized that we were slightly outperforming all existing models, including the open.ai model in French.
CP: Was it a real success?
SF: At that time, it was a real success, already technological. We said to ourselves: we started the process, we arrived, we made comparisons, we saw that we were better and we said to ourselves: “Now we have to start”. Then we launched it on November 9, 2021.
CP: And, you were caught up by the American company OpenAI, how long after?
SF: We thought we were six months ahead of development. We were on GPT 2.5, from OpenAI, at the time. We were finally five months ahead of schedule. Five months later, they had a model that was... better.. You have to know that things are going very, very quickly. It's quite maddening how it has developed over the last few years. And then, it was popularized by ChatGPT in November 2022. As everyone knows, it was a tidal wave.
November 2021 is almost a year before. We were a bit, maybe, I'm not going to say too early, but we made a lot of noise.
CP: In any case, visionary!
SF: I don't know if you can say visionary, but in any case, we were at the right time, with the right tool, with the right elements that allowed us to create this artificial intelligence.
CP: It's true that ChatGP arrived in 2022 and took everything, somewhere. It has also democratized this artificial intelligence. You were left behind at that point. Could you have won by raising money, for example?
SF: So the question came up, the question really came up. We had a lot of buzz in the French-speaking world. We had streams on Twitch, videos, newspaper articles in French-speaking countries. It was not bad.
We have investors in artificial intelligence who have contacted us. I did 1-2 video conferences, I talked a bit with them, I quickly understood that it was going to take me a long time to raise money and that they were asking for some metrics European style, that is to say, finally, who are fair... But how many users? How much are paying, how much? The first discussion, we did not yet have a paid model.
We launched, we looked at how it worked and then we started to develop a paid offer, because we saw that it worked and that people were interested.
Afterwards, it would have taken months, then finally to lift, perhaps, with no guarantee of success. But when you look at the arms race right now...
CP: How much is raised? In general? How much are we talking about?
SF: In hundreds of millions. OpenAI had raised 20 million, then again after that, more, from Microsoft. But then I saw some news. Recently, a Parisian start-up, which raised 100 million in June, another 450 million, from Amazon. It's crazy and as a small Swiss business, we could have tried to get started, but I don't think we would have managed to get up, soon enough.
CP: And today, Sébastien Flury, how are Cedille and her language models doing? Because there are in French and in German. It must be specified anyway.
SF: Yes, we have two language models. We took the strategic option of stopping developing these language models, as we could not succeed at this level. We continued to develop the application and we made specific functionalities, really to generate text.
It's going quite well. We have a hundred thousand users, 3 to 5,000 new users every month. We have a large French group that uses our application, our tool, directly in its processes, to summarize texts. A major French media by the way. Besides, it drives quite well, yes.
CP: And maybe very quickly... There is a lot of talk about European artificial intelligence. Why not, to finally compete with artificial intelligence, especially American ones. In two words: possible or impossible in your opinion?
SF: Possible, because we have all the skills. We are no less clever or dumber than others. There are really skills. We also have a lot of people who worked at Google or Facebook on artificial intelligence models, who are European. This is also the case for this Parisian startup. They are former Google employees who are launching European artificial intelligence. There really is plenty to do.
But afterwards, it must follow, the markets must follow, we must also buy European. That is perhaps the most important thing, I would say!
CP: Everything is still to be done, but nothing is impossible. Maybe that's what we'll keep tonight. Sébastien Flury, director ofCoteries web agency and co-founder of cedille.
Thank you for coming tonight to talk to us about this artificial intelligence tool. A good evening to you!
SF: Thank you, good evening!
