June 13's Bloomberg story French Tech: "Mistral Fundraises at €5.8 Billion Valuation to Rival OpenAI" continued after the jump:
...France has become a European hotspot for AI development, tapping investor interest and local talent from tech companies such as Google’s DeepMind, who have gone on to found their own startups....
It looks as if Mistral is feeling confident enough about its leadership position to begin making policy demands. And akin to the sovereign AI pitch of one of their investors, Nvidia, Mistral has developed their large language models in different languages, meaning they want data centers in different countries.
From EuroNews, June 14:
French start-up also concerned about lack of diversity in language training models.
Europe lacks the data centres to train artificial intelligence models that match the current demand, an official from French AI company Mistral AI warned on Friday.
“We are reaching the capacity; we need to build datacentres and ensure there is enough electricity for the scale of AI development today. There is a huge amount of work to be done,” Audrey Herblin-Stoop, Head of Public Affairs at Mistral AI said at a conference organised by the European Court of Auditors (ECA).
Mistral AI, which was founded a year ago, used supercomputer facilities opened by the European Commission to train its models.
"The access to infrastructure is important, if you don't have this, you cannot build large language models. We could train the first ones on [EU supercomputer] Leonardo. We were lucky enough not being blocked access to computing, but this will come for other companies. The volumes that are needed for AI are incredible," she added.
The company announced a new large language model set to rival OpenAI's ChatGPT, last February.
The model, called Mistral Large, is fluent in French, English, German, Spanish and Italian. However, its strategic partnership with Microsoft, that is looking to invest €15 million in Mistral AI, faces scrutiny by the European Commission....
....MUCH MORE
Related:
- FrenchTech: "Mistral AI, Europe’s OpenAI rival, adds top LLM to Amazon Bedrock"
- Viking AI: "Silo AI launches Nordic LLM family to protect Europe’s linguistic diversity"
- FrenchTech: Mistral AI Is Cutting Deals Right and Left
- FrenchTech: "Critics question Microsoft's deal with Mistral AI, as EU set to look into it"
- FrenchTech: "Mistral AI's Bold Journey"
...As we said in the outro from February 18's "Venture Capital: "These 12 startups could be France’s next unicorns":
We'll have more on Mistral next week. Previously:
French Tech: "Mistral AI secures €105M in Europe’s largest-ever seed round"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.
"...Big Tech Alumni building AI startups in Paris""France's unicorn start-up Mistral AI embodies its artificial intelligence hopes"
French OpenAI Rival Mistral Nears $2 Billion Valuation With Andreessen Horowitz Backing
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Says AI to See ‘Major Second Wave (NVDA)
This. This is what we've been pitching for the last five years as the way France picks up the economic torch from Germany....AI to See ‘Major Second Wave,’ NVIDIA CEO Says in Fireside Chat With iliad Group Exec
NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang says sovereign AI a growing need for countries to reflect unique cultural, linguistic, industrial characteristicsEuropean startups will get a massive boost from a new generation of AI infrastructure, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang said Friday in a fireside chat with iliad Group Deputy CEO Aude Durand — and it’s coming just in time....