Qu'est-ce que Mistral?

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👀 Today’s Thing: Qu'est-ce que Mistral?

🤖 The streets of San Francisco are buzzing about Paris. Former DeepMind researcher Arthur Mensch is said to be raising upwards of 100 million Euro to fund his new startup, Mistral. Some are calling Mistral, “Europe’s answer to OpenAI.”

🎧 Are you all-in? Hear my talk with Deloitte’s Nitin Mittal on the importance of going all-in on AI, whatever industry your company is in.

📖 Backstory

☞ Former Facebook AI researcher Guillaume Lample is said to be Mensch’s co-founder at Mistral.

☞ Lample and Mensch are both experts on natural language processing (NLP), machine learning, and language models. Both have published a number of highly cited machine learning research papers.

☞ US-based equity fund Lightspeed is rumored to be leading the funding round. French billionaire Xavier Niel and Paris-based tech fund Eurazeo are also said to be involved in the round.

🔑 Keys to Understanding

🥇 Large language models (LLM) are fueling a generative AI surge, with OpenAI’s GPT-4 leading the way. Along with OpenAI, companies including Anthropic, Baidu, Cohere, DeepMind, Eleuther, and Google are working on their own LLMs.

🥈 While not much is known about Mistral’s potential plans, raising on order of 100 million Euro would give the company necessary resources to train and deploy an LLM. Current speculation places Mistral’s would-be valuation around one quarter of a billion Euro. For reference, OpenAI is said to be valued at $30 billion USD after their latest funding round.

🥉 Mensch’s LinkedIn profile lists his current occupation as the self-employed CEO and Co-Founder of Mistral, a position he’s held for only one month.

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Until the next thing,

- Noah

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