Although we've been pitching French startups as a potential engine of growth to supplant German dominance, and although we've made Artificial Intelligence one of the foci of the blog since 2013 - "Why Is Machine Learning (CS 229) The Most Popular Course At Stanford" - and although we began juxtaposing the two strands five years ago, I'm still impressed with this sort of money going into a company that was formed in the last five weeks.
From The Next Web, June 14:
Leading VC says new generation of global players will emerge from European ecosystem
The artificial intelligence hype shows no sign of fading just yet, and investors are practically falling over themselves to fund the next big thing in AI. Yesterday, Paris-based startup Mistral AI announced it had secured €105mn in what is reportedly Europe’s largest-ever seed round.
Mistral AI was founded only four weeks ago, by a trio of AI researchers. Arthur Mensch, the company’s CEO, was formerly employed by Google’s DeepMind. His co-founders, Timothée Lacroix (CTO) and Guillaume Lample (Chief Science Officer), previously worked for Meta.
The company has yet to develop its first product. However, on a mission to “make AI useful,” it plans to launch a large language model (LLM) similar to the system behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT in early 2024.
A large part of the funds raised will be used towards renting the computer power to train it. The idea is to only use publicly available data to avoid the legal issues and copyright backlash faced by others in the industry....
....MUCH MORE
That sub-head "Leading VC says..." brings to mind one of our (co-opted) theme songs.
Ladies and gentlemen, the Richter Scales:
