Samsung setting up a new AI research facility in France

Samsung has announced that it’s going to make France its third biggest hub for artificial intelligence research and development. The company has decided to set up a new artificial intelligence research facility in the country which will be its third biggest after the existing facilities in South Korea and the United States. Samsung will hire around 100 experts in Paris to staff this facility.

The announcement was made after a meeting between Samsung’s strategy chief Young Sohn and French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris. It’s part of the president’s bid to enhance France’s capabilities in artificial intelligence.

Expanding AI research to France

Samsung currently has a small team of around 15 in the Paris area which it will build up to 50 by the end of this year. The goal is to eventually have 100 people working on AI research and development at this new facility. Luc Julia will be leading the efforts in France, he’s the French researcher who once oversaw the development of Siri for Apple and moved to Samsung back in 2013 as a vice president in the company’s innovation lab in Menlo Park, California.

Samsung has gradually been increasing its focus on AI research. The company has also been acquiring smaller artificial intelligence companies to bring in more talent, recent acquisitions include Expect Labs and Vicarious.

Its acquisition of Egypt-based Kngine was confirmed just three weeks ago. This company created an artificial intelligence engine that crawls the web, books, FAQs, enterprise documents and even customer service logs to automatically create biologically plausible knowledge representations thus allowing the AI to effectively function like a human brain.

Samsung is also reportedly developing its own artificial intelligence chips known as Neural Processing Units. The chips would enable Samsung devices to process more AI-related data locally thus eliminating the need to use cloud servers to process and analyze data. A recent report claimed that Samsung’s AI chips will be more advanced than Apple’s and that the company is going to introduce its neural processing units in the second half of this year.

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