"Hardly more than half a year after its founding, Mistral AI is striving to become the world leader. After a short time, the French company is on a par with well-known competitors.
When people talk about Mistral in the French economy, they rarely mean the infamous downdraft in Provence, but rather the Parisian start-up of the same name, Mistral AI. Only founded in May, the company is already attracting a lot of attention. With its focus on developing new models of generative artificial intelligence (AI), which act as computer programs to create their own content such as text or photos, it quickly aroused great interest from investors.
The technology promises to revolutionize the interaction between humans and machines.
Just a few weeks after it was founded, Mistral AI collected around 105 million euros from well-known business people such as the French media billionaire Xavier Niel, the boss and owner of the Marseille shipping company CMA CGM Rodolphe Saadé and the former Google boss Eric Schmidt. The round was led by American venture capitalist Lightspeed. Other well-known investors such as Motier Ventures and La Famiglia as well as the French state development bank Bpifrance also took part.
The start-up delivered quickly. In September, its first language model called Mistral7B came onto the market.
While the interest rate turnaround has caused many young companies to have financing difficulties, Mistral AI has now announced its second capital injection within six months. This time there is 385 million euros. With an estimated valuation of around 1.9 billion euros, the French now enjoy unicorn status in start-up jargon. The second round of financing is once again led by Lightspeed, which this time is joined by Andreessen Horowitz, a second major investor from Silicon Valley. There are also the chip giant Nvidia and the cloud company Salesforce from the United States, BNP Paribas and, in addition to Lightspeed, a few other first-round investors.
“Clearly appeared on Americans’ radar”
Thanks to the reaffirmed investor confidence, Mistral AI is considered the greatest hope among European AI start-ups alongside Aleph Alpha from Heidelberg.
A few weeks ago, the Germans made headlines with a financing round worth almost 500 million euros. Like Aleph Alpha, Mistral AI is also working on large language models that can compete with the leading offerings from American competitors Open AI, Google or Meta. However, Aleph Alpha has been in business since 2019 and focuses primarily on the application of AI models in administration and industry.
Mistral AI, on the other hand, wants to focus primarily on development and is pursuing an open source strategy. It makes its work open to companies and developers and only wants to exploit it commercially later. Open AI, the creator of the chatbot ChatGPT, which has become rapidly popular, started in a similar way in 2015. “In communities, software infrastructure can be built cheaper, faster and more securely,” says Andreessen Horowitz. Most of the core systems that drive modern data processing are now open source, such as the Linux server operating system or the Javascript programming language.
Mistral AI aims to achieve similar heights to ChatGPT, and at a rapid pace. With Mixtral 8x7B, the “best model of an open language in the world” will be brought onto the market at the beginning of 2024, the French announced at the same time as the financing round. It is said to be six times as efficient as the currently most powerful product. The aim is to create “a European champion with a global focus” in the field of artificial intelligence, is the declaration of war by co-founder and managing director Arthur Mensch in a press release. “In some companies we have even displaced ChatGPT,” Mensch said even more clearly to the newspaper “Le Figaro”. "We have clearly appeared on the Americans' radar."
Promoting the local ecosystem
Like Aleph Alpha founder Jonas Andrulis, who was previously a senior developer in Apple's special projects department, Mensch also previously worked in Silicon Valley. After graduating from the elite French engineering universities Ecole Polytéchnique and Télécom Paris, the now 31-year-old spent almost three years at Deepmind, Google's AI laboratory, before becoming independent with his two compatriots Guillaume Lample and Timothée Lacroix and founding Mistral AI. Lample and Lacroix both come from Facebook parent company Meta. The former played a leading role in the development of the new language model LLama. The three founders remain the majority shareholders of Mistral AI.
Mathematicians and computer scientists from elite French universities have long enjoyed a good reputation in Silicon Valley. Yann LeCun, Meta’s deputy head of AI development, is French. France's government is trying to curb migration and promote the domestic ecosystem of AI companies. There are also efforts from the private sector.
The busy entrepreneur Niel founded the non-profit AI research laboratory "Kyutai" in Paris in November and gave around 300 million euros with other investors." [1, 2]
1. Das ist Frankreichs blutjunges KI-Einhorn. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (online) Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung GmbH. Dec 11, 2023. Von Niklas Záboji, Paris
2. Train and Deploy Mistral 7B with Hugging Face on Amazon SageMaker:
https://www.philschmid.de/sagemaker-mistral
See code:
https://github.com/philschmid/llm-sagemaker-sample/blob/main/notebooks/train-deploy-llm.ipynb
Komentarų nėra:
Rašyti komentarą