6 things to know about Mistral AI, the French little thumb that challenges the giants of AI

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Mistral AI is now considered the European champion of generative artificial intelligence (AI). Weighing in at €6 billion, the start-up rivals the American giants in the sector. Here are 7 things to know about one of the jewels of French Tech.

Mistral AI is only one year old

The company was founded in April 2023 by Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample and Timothée Lacroix. The three entrepreneurs already boasted solid experience. Mensch previously worked at DeepMind, Alphabet's AI entity, now under the aegis of Google. Lample and Lacroix worked at Meta. Mistral AI now has around sixty employees.

It has had a series of record fundraisings for a French start-up

Mistral AI's growth has been meteoric. The start-up acquired unicorn status in December 2023, just a few months after its founding. In June, it completed a €600 million funding round, bringing its valuation to €6 billion. In particular, it established a strategic partnership with Microsoft, allowing it to move into another dimension and enter the American market. Thanks to these various operations, its co-founders have risen to the top of the podium of the wealthiest start-up executives in France.

The start-up has benefited from strong political support within France. Emmanuel Macron has already expressed his desire to position the country as a “champion » of AI, aligning with Mistral AI's ambitions with national strategic objectives.

Mistral AI focuses on open source

Unlike AI from OpenAI, Google or Anthropic, the models developed by the young French company are open source. This means that they are made available to the public to be used, modified and distributed freely. This allows developers, researchers and companies to customize models according to their specific needs.

” We are at the forefront of the open source generative technologies market to bring trust and transparency to the field and promote the development of decentralized technologies “, the company explains on its website.

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Mistral AI develops different types of models, with a focus on professionals

This is one of Mistral AI’s specificities. Rather than focusing solely on large models, it develops lighter solutions that do not compromise performance, facilitating more accessible and flexible use.

Its models, available via La Plateforme, also meet specific requirements. While Mistral Nemo and Mistral Large are intended for general use, Codestral is optimized for code generation, while Mistral Embed is dedicated to extracting text representations. The start-up also develops AI designed for research. Mathtrsal is, for example, designed to solve advanced mathematical problems.

Mistral AI has also designed a direct competitor to ChatGPT called Le Chat.

The company has already established major partnerships

Mistral AI's technology is sought after, and its strategic partnerships with cloud providers allow it to reach a significant number of users. Its models are accessible via Microsoft's Azure AI platform, as well as on the Google Cloud marketplace.

Some of them are also offered on Amazon Bedrock, the Amazon Web Services (AWS) service for developing and deploying generative artificial intelligence applications. Mistral AI is also in partnership with Databricks, which integrates its models into its platform dedicated to data and AI.

Axa, Dassault Systèmes and BNP Paribas are also among the company's partners.

Mistral AI dreams of becoming a world champion in AI

« We are pursuing a clear trajectory: to create a European champion with a global vocation in generative artificial intelligence, based on an open, responsible and decentralized approach to technology “. These are the words of Arthur Mensch, spoken in December when Mistral AI's valuation reached one billion euros.

A few months later, the start-up has already come a long way and has a global resonance. And its growth continues.

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