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Alexandre Zapolsky, President and co-founder of LINAGORA, appeared on Tech & Co (BFM Business). He talked about the eventful launch of LUCIE, LINAGORA's open source chatbot.
Presentation of LUCIE
lucie.chat is an artificial intelligence service based on the LUCIE Foundation model, went live on 21 January, just a few days before the AI summit in France. This Foundation model is a real success when it comes to creating truly open source AI. One of the main objectives is to have a dataset shared under an open licence with everyone. LINAGORA is the only company in the world to do this.
Let's be bold!
With LUCIE, the main obstacle is access to the data. Once the raw model has been trained, the AI needs to be trained further - this is the training phase. This is when the AI learns to interact with humans. To complete this phase, the AI needs thousands of questions and answers. LINAGORA has an ethical approach, which is why LUCIE was launched. The aim was for the community to carry out this question-and-answer exercise ; it was not intended that thousands of people should use and test the limits of LUCIE.
What's more, the issue is not whether LUCIE was released too hastily or not, or whether LUCIE is a failure or not. In fact, it is not a failure but a necessary step in the development of open source AI. To succeed, you have to learn to fail, to start again and to improve.
‘If you want to learn to run, you must first learn to walk, and if you want to learn to walk, you must accept to stumble’.
A truly open source model
Unlike other companies that claim to be open source without fully respecting its principles, LINAGORA aims to set an example.
‘A lot of people say they're doing Open Source, but in reality, it's just Open Weight’.
LUCIE, on the other hand, shares its training dataset under an open licence, an ethical choice that sets it apart from other AIs in the sector.
However, this positioning implies a major challenge: access to quality data. Unlike large companies that outsource the creation of datasets at lower cost, LINAGORA calls on its community, OpenLLM France, to enrich its model in a collaborative manner.
Despite this episode, LUCIE has no intention of disappearing. A new model, LUCIE Open-Weight, has been developed in the laboratory and is already ranked third in French language skills, behind Mistral and Llama. LINAGORA plans to relaunch an improved service within the next two months.
Ultimately, LUCIE is a symbol of France's technological ambitions: a bold project that has yet to prove itself, but which already has the merit of existing and making people talk about it. In the face of the torrent of mockery, Emmanuel Macron has also stepped up to the plate. The French President described the controversy surrounding LUCIE as ‘terrible’ and called for ‘the right to make mistakes’ in order to ‘bounce back’.
Watch the interview HERE
