Paris-Saclay University and CNRS have established a new joint doctoral program in artificial intelligence, offering 40 fully-funded PhD positions annually. The program covers foundation model research, AI safety, and applied machine learning for scientific discovery. Students will rotate between academic labs and industry partners including Mistral AI, Thales, and Dassault Systèmes. The initiative aims to retain French AI talent that might otherwise leave for US tech companies.
The industry rotation model is smart — it keeps PhDs connected to French employers during the critical years when Google and Meta typically poach them. Forty positions is meaningful but still modest relative to brain drain scale.
Hugging Face has expanded its Paris presence with a dedicated research laboratory focused on multilingual and low-resource language models. The lab will employ 30 researchers and collaborate with French academic institutions on open-source model development. CEO Clément Delangue described the investment as a commitment to ensuring AI development doesn't remain English-centric, with initial projects targeting French, Arabic, and African languages.
Hugging Face doubling down on Paris is a vote of confidence in French AI talent retention. The African language focus hints at Francophone market expansion — a smart wedge against English-first competitors.