What is H? Here's everything we know about the French AI start-up backed by Europe's richest person

The French start-up H is making waves in its mission for artificial superintelligence (ASI), another buzzword for AI capable of surpassing human intelligence by manifesting cognitive skills.

H was previously called Holistic and was founded by the veterans of Google’s DeepMind AI lab. 

Here is everything we know about the Paris-based company.

What is it in the headlines?

H released its first product this week – an AI agent for businesses and developers that will focus on tasks such as business process outsourcing, quality assurance, and robotic process automation.

Agentic AI models do not just process information but also try to plan and complete tasks and solve problems. 

"This is about empowering people to harness AI like never before. Runner H allows users to automate workflows, streamline tasks, and own the web," said H CEO Charles Kantor in a statement. 

The product is now out for testing, the company said in a blog post. 

H is not the only AI company to develop AI agents. Microsoft also announced new plans for its AI agent this week. 

Anthropic is also developing autonomous agent tools. 

But H says that its compact AI model outperforms Anthropic’s "Computer Use" (based on WebVoyager benchmarks) as well as models from Mistral and Meta. 

Who is in the company?

H was founded in late 2023, with the founding team consisting of Stanford University researcher Kantor and Google DeepMind alumnus Laurent Sifre (Chief Technological Officer).

It also included other DeepMind alumni Karl Tuyls, Daan Wierstra, and Julien Perolat. However, they left last year due to what H called "operational differences". 

H says it has around 50 staff based in Paris and London. 

How is H different from its competitors?

H does not have as many parameters for its large language model (LLM), which are the number of connections in a network needed to power it to process text.

H has about 2 billion parameters, while ChatGPT 3 has 175 billion. This makes H’s technology less expensive for companies. 

Who is backing it?

H is backed by Europe's wealthiest man, LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault, as well as Iliad founder Xavier Niel, Amazon, Samsung, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt among others. 

Before even selling a single product, the start-up raised $220 million (€210 million).