🇫🇷 Mistral AI: a European AI Leader
The young French startup Mistral AI is often called a “rising star.” It is the first European company to compete with American tech giants. The Mistral Large AI model achieves the GPT-4 performance level in a number of tests.
The open-source model is natively fluent in English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian.
Mistral advocates transparency in AI technologies and gives free access to most of its developments.
💲In December, Mistral AI was valued at $2 billion. Now, the company seeks to raise $600 million in funding, tripling its valuation to at least $6 billion.
Mistral AI founder Arthur Mensch, 31, recently gave a large interview to The New York Times.
Key points:
📌 The whole AGI rhetoric is about creating God. I don’t believe in AGI.
📌 A bigger threat to humanity is the US tech companies’ domination in the AI market. AI models shape the cultural understanding of the world, and American values differ in subtle but important ways from the cultural codes of other countries.
📌 In the next two years, we‘ll face a major revolution in the labor market. Its pace and consequences will be far greater than the Industrial Revolution and other transformations in history.
📌 AI regulation is not always necessary and may damage innovation. France lobbied to limit the regulation of open-source AI systems in the EU's new AI Act. This has helped Mistral keep up a rapid pace of development.
A brief bio of Arthur Mensch:
⚪️He started programming at the age of 11 and graduated from two prestigious universities, École Polytechnique and École Normale Supérieure.
⚪️His doctoral thesis focused on scaling software to analyze 3D brain images.
⚪️Mensch worked for two years at Google DeepMind, where he developed the Chinchilla AI model.
⚪️He founded Mistral AI in late 2022 with two former classmates.
