A few weeks ago, Alexandre Zapolsky, Chairman and founder of LINAGORA, was a guest of CCI France as part of the 1001 parcours project. The theme of his talk was "Doing things together, succeeding together", in which he gave his entrepreneurial vision of the importance of Free Software and Open Source Artificial Intelligence (AI) in defending the digital commons, proving that technology can, and must, be a vector for cultural and social progress.

The foundations of LINAGORA and its commitment to Open Source

Alexandre opened his speech by once again repositioning LINAGORA as one of the French pioneers of Open Source, underlining the importance of this type of interaction in promoting Open Source values.

Like the activist and father of Free Software Richard Stallman, LINAGORA has always stood out for its rigorous adherence to Free Software principles: all our software is Free/Free under Affero-GPL3 licences.
 

"We're following Richard Stallman's line, so we believe that free software should be available to everyone, with no restrictions on use."

A rigorous and innovative approach that shows that a commitment to ethics can go hand in hand with economic success.
 

AI & innovation: from LinTO to OpenLLM

Today, Artificial Intelligence occupies a central place in LINAGORA's activities, notably with innovative projects such as LinTO, the automatic transcription and summarisation tool that has already been massively adopted by the European Commission. Alexandre Zapolsky reminded the assembly of the importance of this type of tool in digital inclusion and the large-scale deployment of this type of player.
 

"When I'm talking to you, we could have a little LinTO running to transcribe everything I'm saying.",

But LINAGORA's commitment to AI doesn't stop at LinTO! The company is behind the OpenLLM-France community, now OpenLLM-Europe: a network of more than 850 researchers and engineers dedicated to Open Source generative AI, recently supported by the France 2030 call for projects.
 

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Open Source AI in the service of cultural diversity

One of LINAGORA's major concerns through its AI initiatives is the cultural impact of the LLMs developed by the GAFAMs. Alexandre once again alerts his audience to the potential degradation of cultures in the face of American or Chinese models, if the latter are not anchored in more local contexts.

"It's a fascinating subject, AI is about language, language is about culture, it's about civilisations"

You can watch the video extract of his speech in full here, including a number of examples cited by our Chairman on the cultural biases that can be induced. These clearly demonstrate the importance of developing LLM models that respect all languages, all cultures and all the values of different civilisations.