France‘s Mistral artificial intelligence, despite being a startup that is only four weeks old, has been able to face OpenAI in an unprecedented move and receive an initial capital of 113 million dollars in the construction, training and application of large language models and generative artificial intelligence.
Briefly about Mistral artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence startup Mistral is based in Paris and was founded by young scientists from Google’s DeepMind and Meta named Mensch, Lacroix and Lample. While targeting enterprises, the company’s focus is mostly on open source solutions to best utilize artificial intelligence as the biggest challenge facing us right now. Interestingly, the company plans to release its first models for text-based artificial intelligence in 2024. In addition to French investment bank Bpifrance and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, the main shareholders in the company are: Lightspeed Venture Partners, which leads and Xavier Neal, JCDecaux Holding, Rodolphe Saadé and Motier Ventures in France, La Famiglia and Headline in Germany, Exor Ventures in Italy and Sofina in Belgium, First Minute Capital and LocalGlobe in the UK.
The point is that according to reliable sources, the $113 million budget is equivalent to the $260 million value of Mistral’s artificial intelligence. Of course, this is the same number that was rumored in the French press about a month ago. That is why the founders of this startup saw this as an opportunity to do things differently. In fact, their goal is to build models that use available data to avoid the legal problems that others face during training.
As we said earlier, the focus of this company is more on open source solutions. In fact, one of the benefits of using open source is to create security and overcome exploits; But what’s important here is that this startup specifically focuses on a gap in the market to help customers figure out what they need to do and how they can do it. The best method in this regard is the use of artificial intelligence, which is very useful in some cases. Through this technology, tools can be provided to people by which they can create their products better.
Mistral’s AI success compared to others
“At Lightspeed, we had the chance to meet some strong technical teams who were looking to raise funds to build LLMs across India, the US and Europe,” says Antoine Moiraud, one of Lightspeed’s investors. “What was lacking was that while they were technically strong, they didn’t think about where and how the LLM could be applied.” He admires the work of Mistral’s artificial intelligence, saying of the startup: “Then we thought, who are the most credible people here? Until we met the founders of Mistral. This is a very talented team, as there are currently only 70-100 people in the world who specialize in language models and optimization. A co-founder of startup Mistral, Lample led the development of LLaMA, the large meta language model. He previously led the LLM team at Meta.”
Mistral, a promising startup
The noteworthy point is that AI startups use VCs to open their checkbooks and Google, Apple, Metas, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. will definitely play in this space, but the fact that young startups are active in this field, we makes him aware that everything is not over yet and power can shift. Mistral is actually like the north wind that blows in Europe and brings good weather in the following days. Of course, there must be a major effort from all over the world to build and own the way artificial intelligence is developed, and Mistral is partly responsible for this movement. To fulfill this responsibility, it is necessary to try to collect a world-class team using the budget, to create the best open source models.