Inria, a well-known French technological research center, spun up Probabl, a new French AI firm that uses scikit-learn, an open-source data science library.
Machine learning teams using tabular data utilize scikit-learn, which has over 45,000 stars on GitHub. For model fitting, prediction, cross-validation, etc.
You may be unfamiliar with scikit-learn unless you’re an ML developer. Massive firms like Spotify, Hugging Face, Booking.com, and Dataiku use the library.
Some contributors to scikit-learn and other Inria-backed open source libraries have formed a corporation to keep these projects alive and financed.
This initiative includes researchers Camille Troillard, Gaël Varoquaux, Olivier Grisel, François Goupil, Guillaume Lemaitre, Jérémie Du Boisberranger, and Fabien Gan. don.
Former Scaleway CEO Yann Lechelle was Inria’s Entrepreneur in Residence for four months on this initiative. He will become Probabl CEO after the Inria spin-off.
Lechelle informed me, “We are a software publisher, but our first commercial offerings will include professional services, training, and certification, specifically around scikit-learn. We will cover the whole data cycle, from organization and cleansing to machine learning and MLOps.
Probabl has three shareholder types:
Some shareholders include Inria Participations, the French government through Tech Souveraineté, Costanoa Ventures, and private donors. All members will contribute to the new organization’s governing body. Companies like Probabl claim industrial and digital autonomy. Thus, it intends to produce really open-source projects, which the AI sector hasn’t done lately. .
