Mistral AI of France Launches Model to Rival Meta and OpenAI
Mistral AI, a French company, has unveiled its inaugural generative artificial intelligence model, aiming to rival prominent American AI players such as Meta Platforms Inc. and OpenAI, which is supported by Microsoft Corp.
The Paris-based startup is releasing a “miniature” language model with 7 billion parameters that is freely available to developers, it said in a statement on Wednesday.
“We have training methods that make us more efficient and twice as cheap to implement,” Mistral AI CEO Arthur Mensch said in an interview with Bloomberg. Large Language Models, or LLMs, are the basic infrastructure for generative artificial intelligence, a technology that creates content from videos to poetry with simple user commands.
According to Mensch, four French companies are testing the model in applications including customer service, chatbots, summaries and marketing content creation. An open-source model, called Mistral 7B, can work with English and code, and larger models and commercial offerings will follow, he said.
Since OpenAI’s ChatGPT debuted last year, investors have poured money into the potentially transformative technology. Microsoft has invested $13 billion in OpenAI.
Mistral, which employs 18 people, was founded this year by three researchers: Timothée Lacroix and Guillaume Lample – both of whom previously worked at Meta – and Mensch, formerly of Google’s DeepMind.
The company raised 105 million euros ($110 million) in its first round of funding, which it announced in June was one of the largest seed rounds ever for a European generative AI company.
