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Artificial intelligence dominated the conversation between political and business leaders at the World Economic Forum this week, but a relative newcomer to the Davos toast was French AI startup Mistral.
The chief executives of three major tech companies told the Financial Times that the group's latest AI models ranked among the products available, according to technology benchmarks that companies use to assess their performance. Said it was one of the best.
One US Big Tech executive said nine-month-old Mistral was doing a “great job” competing with sophisticated models created by big US companies such as OpenAI and Google.
Mistral's interest in technology is linked to a two-way race for supremacy in generative AI (systems that spit out human-like text, media, and code within seconds) and a multibillion-dollar partnership between Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI. This casts doubt on the general view that there is a war going on. .
Growing interest in Mistral in Europe and elsewhere has reignited the potential for late entrants to capture a significant share of the fast-growing market as the computational costs of AI development steadily decline.
Mistral, which builds large-scale language models, the underlying technology that powers generative AI products such as chatbots, secured a valuation of €2 billion last month in a funding round worth around €400 million. But the company faces even better-funded rivals like OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, which is estimated to be worth $86 billion.
The French startup is backed by Silicon Valley heavyweights including General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz.
This week, the company welcomed Nvidia, considered the world's leading manufacturer of AI chips, as an investor and strategic partner. Florian Bressand, Mistral's chief business officer, told the FT that the move will give startups access to the chip company's latest innovations.
Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella recently announced that the Paris-based company was founded by a trio of former Meta and Google researchers Arthur Mensch, Timothy Lacroix and Guillaume Lampl. and was named as one of the innovators building AI on the Azure platform.
The comments come despite Microsoft having invested $13 billion in OpenAI to date, making it the San Francisco-based startup's largest investor. Last November, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was briefly fired by the board of directors, a move that shocked the business world and forced companies to consider diversifying their AI providers. .
“Companies can't rely on just one supplier,” says Mistral's Bressand.
He further added: “We work with large companies. We have 10 interesting proofs of concept working with companies not only in France but all over the world. Half of the usage of our platform comes from the US However, this is not surprising as the US is a more mature market.”
The company believes there is a current trend in the AI community between open source and closed source models, or systems where technical details are transparent to third parties, compared to systems that remain proprietary to a single company. illustrates the groove of
Mistral, whose founders helped build Meta's open source LLAMA model, says this will provide an advantage for companies that need to build customized functionality into their software.
The open-source model was particularly attractive to state-owned companies that want to experiment with generative AI but can't experiment with their own software for compliance reasons, according to Bressand, and to highly regulated companies such as defense companies and banks. .
BNP Paribas and Salesforce were also investors and were among the companies testing Mistral's model, he added.
The company's executives attended the WEF as part of a delegation of French startups led by President Emmanuel Macron. Other investors include French telecoms billionaire Xavier Niel and state investment agency BPI France.
Although the founders rejected job offers from U.S. AI companies and chose to return to France to start their business, Bressand said the startup is “acting at arm's length with public authorities.” He said he is fighting the perception that AI is becoming a matter of national interest. . He added that the French state “of course has no say in the governance of our country.”
