Originally published here.
Dali Kilani is Co-Founder and CTO at FlexAI, delivering AI compute by rearchitecting infrastructure at a systems level. He’s also an angel investor and brings experience from Nvidia, Lifen, and BCG.
“There are dozens of companies similar to ours in Silicon Valley. We’re a bit special here, and that opens doors.”
What stage of AI investment and enthusiasm are we at right now?
We’re still in the early days of companies deriving real value from AI tools. And for most people, it’s still too hard to do anything. So it remains a curiosity, not a core tool. As soon as things become simpler, the demand is just going to explode. I’ve personally seen this in healthcare. We used AI to simplify workflows and track patient outcomes. The change was completely amazing – people refused to work without it afterwards.
Things have to plateau in certain use cases, but there are plenty of dimensions where we’re not good enough yet. Things like AI software developer agents are coming. We’re never done. If you give researchers more compute, they’ll find greater things to do.
What are the advantages of building your business in Europe?
I’ve lived in Silicon Valley and worked at Nvidia, and I see the advantages of living here in Europe. The key point is, you can’t build a Silicon Valley company in Europe, and you can’t build a European company from Silicon Valley.
We chose our headquarters in Paris for a few reasons. First, there’s strong talent here. Many of them have tasted the Silicon Valley spirit but are still European. They want to be here and build great things in Europe. People are starting companies here all the time, including in AI. Mistral has proved that you can go big from Europe in this industry.
There’s also a lot of institutional support. There’s this rich mix of VC community, government, partners, and academia. For deeptech that’s incredibly important. Their doors are more open here than elsewhere.
Finally, it pays to be in a small pond – for now. There are dozens of companies similar to ours in Silicon Valley. We’re a bit special here, and that opens doors.
What does it mean to be an AI infrastructure provider?
We’re fundamentally a solutions company. Even though we’re starting with software, we need to retool everything. This starts from the workload down: networking, storage, computers – everything.
It’s difficult to defend software in AI infrastructure. The hardware people will keep coming from the bottom and eating up the software. That’s why full solutions are the best approach.
Everybody is running on Nvidia today, but we’re going to see lots of specialization.
Full solutions and tackling use cases completely is where the game is played. Nvidia is now the leading networking and data center, with the best software stack, and they actually built their own systems. You could spend $50 million dollars with Nvidia today to build your AI stack, and not spend a single dollar with anybody else. That’s where the future is, and that’s what we’re focused on.
Are the climate change concerns with AI legitimate?
The energy required today is huge and unsustainable. But that’s because of the way we’ve built models today: we started with solutions that are generic enough to address all workloads. But you can have more customized workloads that optimize things by a factor of 10. There’s a massive movement towards more efficient models. New open source models are very efficient, and companies are now emerging to build the chips to power them.
And then there’s actually using AI to discover new climate tech. Schneider is doing this already here in France. We’re also seeing investment in nuclear energy for AI among the biggest players. The market is incentivized to be more efficient because energy is expensive.
The key thing is that AI is still so new and developing so quickly that the climate footprint today is much higher than it will be eventually. And one of the key imperatives in developing this tech is to make it more efficient. There’s already a huge emphasis on this today, and that will continue.
