Profile
Background
Jean-Baptiste Kempf joined the VLC project while studying at École Centrale Paris in the early 2000s. He went on to help relaunch the project, created the VideoLAN nonprofit in 2008 and became its president. He remains one of VLC’s main developers today and maintains many open source projects related to video and codecs.
As much an engineer as an entrepreneur, he has founded several companies in multimedia and video games. He has also led technical teams at Shadow, Veepee and Scaleway, ranging from a handful of people to several hundred, working on streaming, cloud, performance and digital sovereignty.
He now devotes himself to Kyber, an open infrastructure for real-time remote control of robots, drones, vehicles and immersive environments. His path connects free software, distributed systems and taking demanding technologies to industrial scale.
Perspective
Digital and GenAI credentials
Jean-Baptiste Kempf speaks as a builder of the infrastructure that makes generative models possible and sustainable, rather than as a researcher working on the models themselves. His work on codecs, efficient computing, European cloud and ultra-low-latency systems gives him a rare perspective on the performance, cost, openness and sovereignty constraints of GenAI. At Scaleway, his work included driving a new generation of sovereign European cloud and AI services.
