More on Mistral. They are going to have to hire some hyper-brains. Go to Toronto, go to Carnegie Mellon, get beyond ChatGPT and the large language models.
Elon Musk is trying to poach some OpenAI talent, time to follow his lead.
From Le Monde, December 12:
With prestigious researchers, strong political backing and €385 million in raised funds, this open-source start-up aims to develop language processing models capable of rivaling OpenAI, Google and Meta.
In the land of start-ups, Mistral AI's story has all the makings of a fairy tale. In June, the young French artificial intelligence (AI) company made a big splash by raising €105 million just a few weeks after its launch, when it still had neither products nor revenues.
On Monday, December 11, it impressed with a new €385 million round of financing, and a €2 billion valuation – already propelling it into the coveted realm of unicorns, those start-ups valued at over $1 billion. Its 31-year-old CEO, Arthur Mensch, has set his sights high: "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."
In other words, Mistral AI wants to launch language processing models capable of competing with those of American giants such as OpenAI – creator of ChatGPT – Google and Meta. US investment funds Andreessen Horowitz and LightSpeed Ventures led the new round of funding. They were joined by Salesforce, BNP Paribas and CMA CGM, plus first-round shareholders such as Bpifrance, the La Famiglia fund and Eric Schmidt (former CEO of Google).
'Lobbying'
Mistral AI's appeal stems from its team's prestigious profiles: The three co-founders combine French academic excellence in mathematics and computer science with experience working for leading American AI giants – Arthur Mensch graduated from two elite French universities, Ecole Polytechnique and Ecole Normale Supérieure, before working for Google DeepMind. Technical Director Thimothée Lacroix spent eight years at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and then joined Meta. There, he worked on LLaMA, the language processing model used by that same parent company of Facebook and Instagram, with Mistral AI's scientific director, Guillaume Lample, also a Polytechnique alumnus....
....MUCH MORE
Recently:
French OpenAI Rival Mistral Nears $2 Billion Valuation With Andreessen Horowitz Backing
This. This is what we've been pitching for the last five years as the way France picks up the economic torch from Germany....
