The article is about Kyutai, a French AI lab with an objective to compete with chatgpt and others with full open source (research papers, models, and training data).
They are aiming to also include the capability to use sound, image, etc… (according to this article (French) https://www.clubic.com/actualite-509350-intelligence-artificielle-xavier-niel-free-et-l-ancien-pdg-de-google-lancent-kyutai-un-concurrent-europeen-a-openai.html )
The post article also talks about some French context.
What did the CIA have to do with it then? I could have sworn early development was tied with US government research?
You could read the article. It was actually DARPA, from the department of defense and not the CIA, who initially created the first working network. But it was some time later that CYCLADES in France demonstrated the first inter-network with a lot of the working concepts that later would make the internet as we know it today. It wouldn’t go global until we invented the TCP/IP protocols, that was a joint effort of a lot of universities over in Europe and the USA.