Month of May, 2023. A French startup company makes a serious request – to bring the giant OpenAI to its knees and become a leading player in the world of artificial intelligence. Founded in May by industry heavyweights, Mistral raised €385 million just a few months later in October 2023. As of December 2023, it was already valued at more than $2 billion. At the end of February this year, the company signed a contract with Microsoft.
Already with its appearance, Mistral quickly attracted the attention of American media, which defined the French startup as a potential rival of OpenAI and one of the big players in Silicon Valley.
Mistral builds technology that other businesses can use to implement chatbots, search engines, online tutors and other AI-driven products. Mistral is trying to make great strides in developing a generative artificial intelligence (LLM) model. The algorithm can execute multiple commands with near-human accuracy. The technology could practically change the way we interact with machines.
The Paris-based startup is one of the few companies that can rival the technology being developed at OpenAI, which kicked off the artificial intelligence boom with the launch of the ChatGPT chatbot. The company has just over 20 employees.
Mistral is also among the companies that believe in sharing this technology as open source software that can be freely copied, modified and used. The bigwigs in the game – OpenAI and Google – see this approach as a potential danger – they say open source could fall into the wrong hands and be used to spread disinformation and other harmful material.
Among Mistral’s backers are several American technology giants, including Salesforce, and according to industry sources, the Nvidia group, a world leader in the production of supercomputer chips.
The company was founded by 31-year-old Mensch CEO Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample and Timothée Lacroix – all with experience at US tech giants including Meta and DeepMind.
The deal with Microsoft
Microsoft is pouring billions into the turf war in the AI world. Last week, for example, it became clear that the company managed to attract a pioneer in the field, appointing the British Mustafa Suleiman to head the newly formed division Microsoft AI. Microsoft is trying hard to demonstrate supremacy over Google, which seems to be lagging behind in the battle of the techno giants.
Against the background of these multi-million investments, at the end of February of this year, it became clear that Microsoft poured 16.3 million dollars into Mistral. Microsoft says that this investment will officially become an equity stake in Mistral’s next round of funding, but at this stage there is no such stake.
Mistral AI and Microsoft also signed a partnership agreement to distribute Azure, Microsoft’s cloud service, which is likely to attract more customers. This also means that Azure customers can access Mistral’s models.
Microsoft’s large investment in Mistral caught the attention of the European Commission, which saw a danger of concentration of influence. Microsoft has already partnered with OpenAI.
