VC @eurazeo (ex @balderton / @xangevc / @laposte). Tweet about the #web #tech #startups #mathematics . Fan of Claude Shannon. #FOCS
Paris, France
Joined February 2008
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This is Claude Shannon. An absolute genius. I still don’t understand why this brain is not known more. Humanity owes him a lot. Let’s spread the word. I am a Fan of Claude Shannon. #FOCS
Nicolas Debock retweeted
Bringing voice to any device. With models that are getting smaller. and it's open-source.
A new frontier for on-device speech.
We're open-sourcing Phonon, a suite of TTS models under 50m parameters, setting a new standard for naturalness and accuracy across languages, with the broadest inference support to date.
Phonon-31m is available under Apache 2.0.
gradium.ai/phonon🧵
Nicolas Debock retweeted
I fact checked this and it is depressingly accurate.
Almost the entirety of the British Highstreet is now made up of 3 types of businesses:
1) Private Equity owned companies (Pizza Express, Burger King, Cafe Rouge, The Body Shop, Wagamamas, Zizzi, New Look, Bella Italia, Boots, WH Smith, etc)
2) Foreign owned businesses acting as fronts for skilled visa migrant scams and/or money laundering enterprises (Hairdressers, Kebab Shops, Vape Shops, etc)
3) Charity Shops. Largely in existence to sell off items left when people die.
It's difficult to imagine anything more dystopian than this.
Nicolas Debock retweeted
Fastest model out there.
Gradium-TTS is #1 on the Voice Arena US English 🇺🇸 latency board: 68 ms to first audio at the median, the fastest model we have measured.
Gradium-TTS is the latest TTS model from @GradiumAI. It comes in ahead of SpeechifyAI's Simba 3.2 at 123 ms and Inworld TTS 2 at 168.5 ms, and more than three times faster than its own earlier 236 ms.
Speed without giving up quality: on the same board it ranks #10 of 21 at 1007 Elo from blind native-speaker votes, which puts it on the quality-versus-speed frontier with Simba 3.2, Inworld TTS 2 and Cartesia's Sonic-3.6.
We measure time to first audio the way a listener hears it, with leading silence counted and fresh text on every request so nothing is served from cache.
Congratulations to @GradiumAI on the release!
See below for the quality board, what raters said, and the exact audio they judged 🧵
.@lightpanda_io has been building the web browser of the future and it is now out of beta : it is dazzlinling fast and smart . lightpanda.io/blog/posts/lig…
Nicolas Debock retweeted
Our first build with Jev from @typesafeai: a support agent that design its voice from the call context.
What would you build?
gradium.ai/blog/voice-that-a…
Nicolas Debock retweeted
We just released our latest TTS model, time to first audio went from ~250ms to ~50ms 🚀. Co-designing the model architecture and a custom inference stack is what made such an improvement possible. If you want to make some GPUs go brrrr running some audio models, we're hiring!
Gradium TTS beta model is out now to define what fast means.
Less than 50ms TTFA, same quality. Most models are >100ms TTFA.
Try it now: studio.gradium.ai/?model_nam…
Nicolas Debock retweeted
September 24:
Our CEO @neilzegh Zeghidour will speak at HumanX.
humanx.co/europe
Our CTO @olivierteboul will speak at the AI Engineer Conference at STATION F.
ai.engineer/paris/2026
Our Chief Science Officer @honualx will speak at the Artificial Intelligence Marseille conference.
aim-marseille.com/en
What will the Financial Times front page look like in 2036? @blueyard's #CounterFactual event printed one, and we just spent two days debating headlines that sound absurd today. Thank you to the organizers and participants, this was great. The front page to give you an idea:
Nicolas Debock retweeted
100 years old. Still the sharpest mind in the room.
Jean-Pierre Serre, youngest Fields Medalist in history (age 27), first Abel Prize winner, and the “Mozart of mathematics,” turned 100 on September 15 and is still lecturing, still writing on the blackboard, still shaping the field.
Happy 100th to the greatest living mathematician. The rest of us are just trying to keep up.
Nicolas Debock retweeted
In this thread is a link to an AI creativity engine I've started working on. At university I switched from engineering to architecture and had to unlearn being over scientific and learn creativity.
Great point. AI-driven discovery can just look like running electricity through chips, on top of knowledge humanity built collectively.
Amazing work by the @GradiumAI team.
"let's a go" (prompt : Mario 64 accent "let's go").
Today, we’re launching Voice Design.
Write a prompt, create a voice.
Describe the accent, age, gender, and pace your use case needs, and get new voices in seconds, ready to use.
Live and free in the Gradium API and Studio. gradium.link/voice-design
Nicolas Debock retweeted
18x improvement in intelligence per joule in 16 months.
hard agree with @amasad —@JonSaadFalcon and my research indicates that intelligence efficiency (intelligence per watt) is rapidly improving and we will definitely *not* need data center scale compute to run agi!
links to research in comments below 👇
Nicolas Debock retweeted
Sad none of my "joke" proposals made the final cut.
Ten selected design proposals for the next series of euro banknotes have been unveiled.
Explore the proposals and tell us which ones you prefer.
Have your say surveys.ecb.europa.eu/10b/ec…
Nicolas Debock retweeted
This fantastic figure by @jburnmurdoch is Exhibit 1 of what an aging society means for the political game: public investment, which is choosing future rewards over present consumption, gets squeezed out.
Still not convinced this is a first-order challenge?
