François Pachet on music generation with AI

Dr François Pachet is an AI researcher and musician, and one of the most influential figures in AI and music. His innovative contributions have defined the field over the past decades through creative systems such as the Continuator, and Flow Machines, among others. After leading the Spotify Creator Technology Research Lab and the Sony Computer Science Lab, he went on to create his own companies: Imagine All The People and Ynosound. In the context of IJCAI2025, he spoke about what deep learning changed, and what still remains wide open. He explains why tools like Suno and Udio--ChatGPT-like platforms for music generation--can produce astonishing results that still feel unsatisfying; why the next step for music generation requires combining sampling with search; and why the most important problems in artistic domains are, by nature, ill-defined--because there is no loss function to determine what is "good". Above all, he defends the importance of researcher autonomy: work on the questions that genuinely fascinate you, even when they fall outside prevailing trends--perhaps especially then. Thank you for joining me for this interview. Could you begin by telling us when was your first IJCAI and a memory related to it? I think the first IJCAI I attended was in Montreal in '95. I was there for a couple of workshops, one of them was about music and AI, and the other one I think was on advisor systems, something like that. And I remember there was a French colleague who was there also, at the time he was doing his PhD. And there was this researcher called Herbert Simon, who is a Nobel Prize pioneer of AI. I remember having chatted a little bit with this French guy who was very bold, and he just went up to Simon, said "Hey," and he started a conversation with him. And I was very impressed by the fact that you could meet those kinds of guys informally in a corridor or something at this conference.