After France, Meta's AI accelerator for open-foundation models expands to European startups

Once again, Facebook parent company Meta teams up with the popular AI platform Hugging Face and European cloud company Scaleway to further push AI use in companies.

The tech giant announced recently that it’s launching an AI accelerator program to lure European startup companies to integrate open foundation models into their products. These companies can then benefit from technical mentoring and support from the three companies.

The AI Startup Program, based in Paris, now opens applications for companies all around the EU until August 16, 2024. Meta hopes that “Through this program we can help European developers innovate faster, bringing growth to their markets and propelling the European ecosystem forward.”

The program’s HQ, the Station F startup campus in Paris, is yet another fruit of collaboration between the three companies. Meta, Hugging Face, and Scaleway also opened a similar program for startups in France to promote open and collaborative AI development nationwide, a move that major cloud companies like Microsoft and Google were yet to make at that time.

Meta has bypassed major cloud companies like Microsoft and Google, opting instead to partner with Scaleway, a smaller European player. Winners would then receive mentoring from Meta researchers, access to Hugging Face platforms and tools, and computing resources from Scaleway.

Hugging Face is a popular Hugging Face is a popular platform “where the machine learning community collaborates on models, datasets, and applications. So far, some of the popular models available are the recent Florence 2, OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Stable Diffusion families, Mixtral’s 8x7B and 7B v.01, Llama 2 70B, Microsoft’s Phi families, and more.