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It’s VivaTech week in Paris — “kind of our own Cannes festival,” one VC told me as we queued up yesterday for an early side event.
Set up a day before the official kick off of France’s biggest tech conference today, it wasn’t just any side event; it was the OpenAI à Paris one. The meetup in the popular cultural centre La Gaîté Lyrique in the heart of the French capital was for the maker of ChatGPT to connect with Paris’s AI developers and startups. Judging by the crowd that amassed at the entrance — mostly developers in jeans and trainers invited thanks to OpenAI’s “local connections”, according to the company — it was successful.
“There is a kind of fervour around OpenAI,” one founder told me. “Every time they go somewhere, it creates a buzz.”
On the menu, an opération séduction that saw OpenAI’s team provide wine from 12pm, a free lunch and a demo of the company’s best tools. There was also an intro video with CEO Sam Altman preaching about how “there’s so much talent in the French ecosystem”. He also pointed to Nabla, Photoroom and Dust — three of France’s hottest AI startups — as examples of companies building GPT-powered applications.
It’s the first event of this kind that OpenAI has organised in Europe outside of London and Dublin, where it has offices — and apparently not the last time the company will pay the French capital a visit. “You’re going to see more of us,” OpenAI’s head of developer experience Romain Huet promised on stage.
Could that be a lot more — in the form of a Paris-based office? “I would not be at all surprised if that were the case,” one VC told me at the event.
It’s not the first time I’ve heard it. For the past few months, investors and founders have been speculating, with varying degrees of confidence, that OpenAI is thinking about setting up shop in the French capital. And even more so since earlier this month, the company hired its first Paris-based recruit, Julie Lavet, to look after lobbying matters in Europe.
“I can’t comment on OpenAI’s future expansion plans,” an OpenAI spokesperson told Sifted.
Almost exactly a year ago, Sam Altman embarked on a big European tour with the objective of determining where OpenAI should open its first European office. He settled on London before expanding to Dublin — but since then, the French capital has started making a serious mark in the field of AI, most notably thanks to Paris-based Mistral’s quick rise to fame and succession of big rounds.
With Mistral commonly dubbed as one of Europe’s most promising competitors to OpenAI, there could be worse times for the US company to think about purchasing a few square metres’ worth of Parisian real estate.
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