A bit off topic, but I wanted to say that I have respect for French entrepreneurs.
How do you manage to start a company in France? I gave up.
It seemed to me that the environment is heavily against employers. A lot of taxes, regulations, especially those overly protecting employees, social charges, etc. Employers are held responsible for many aspects of employees’ lives.
Employers sometimes offer tenured jobs (CDI contracts), that in US can be found only in academia.
The total amount that the employer pays is apparently around 2.5X—3X of what the employee receives (accounting for the social charges paid to the state etc.). So overall, workers are just as expensive as in US.
Of course, there are a lot of positive things about France and Europe: health care, education, social safety nets, culture, WLB, etc. I didn’t account for those!
2.5x seems really high, but 2x is usual for software engineer salaries and up.
For example, an average software engineer can receive a gross salary of 50 k€ which translate to 34 k€ after social contributions and income taxes (in a worst case scenario) and a total cost of 71 k€ for the company [0].
Using this simulator, I can reach 2.5x by putting in a gross salary of 250 k€. Of course it's mostly because of the high income tax in this case.
There are also strong incentives for startups, most notably reduced social contributions during their first 8 years [1] and tax credit for a third of research expenses [2].
Admittedly, this is probably more complex than needed but I think it is still way less expensive than hiring in the US.
If someone from the company is checking in on this thread, it’d be interesting to know what’s being done physically. Is this a chip-based approach like lightmatter and others or something different?
Maybe I’m not looking hard enough, but I couldn’t find it on the site.
Our technology is different than the one used by Lightmatter and Lightelligence. We currently do not do integrated photonics.
We are starting from the ground up by first building a photonic co-processor that does one function (to be extended) of general interest to AI. the current function is a random projection. We believe that it will be complexified over time as we grow. But our particular focus is on those computations that are difficult to perform in electronics. In particular, our recent focus has been on Transformers/Large Language Models where we think our technology will be a game changer in the training and inference of these gigantic Machine learning models. For the training part, we published two papers at NeurIPS last year in the main conference. We also presented a more detailed one at one of the workshop: https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.06373
We are going to present a poster at HotChips this year about our foray in HPC: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.14429
Other papers in AI are listed at the LightOn AI research page: https://lair.lighton.ai/
Physically, speaking, the Optical Processing Unit fits into a 2U rack (currently our focus has not been to miniaturize yet, we avoid permature optimization) that is connected to a CPU bus through a PCIe connection.
The technology has been running for the past three years anf half in datacenters for the oldest prototypes (we just decommisioned one a month ago or so) with Machine Learning computation unit tests being performed every ten minutes during that time period.
