By Or @ Adobestock.com
For the most part, “Big Tech” is dominated by American companies like Apple, Meta, Alphabet, and Microsoft, but Arthur Mensch, a French scientist who formerly worked for Google, thinks his new company, Mistral AI, and artificial intelligence in general, could be Europe’s launchpad into tech dominance. The Wall Street Journal’s Sam Schechner reports:
This time last year, Arthur Mensch was 30, still employed at a Google unit here, and artificial intelligence had just started to take off in the public consciousness as something more than science fiction.
Since then, so-called generative AI that can converse—and possibly reason—like humans has become the most talked-about technology breakthrough in decades. And the startup Mensch left Google to launch, now all of nine months old, is valued at slightly more than $2 billion.
The velocity of change reflects the frenzy—and fear—that surrounds the efforts to build and commercialize advanced AI systems.
Mensch’s startup, called Mistral AI, is challenging the conventional wisdom that the winners of the AI race will emerge from among the tech industry’s U.S. giants. Mensch, who founded the company with two engineering-school friends, doesn’t think enormous scale is essential—or that the U.S. will necessarily dominate.
“I’ve always regretted that there was no Big Tech in Europe,” Mensch, 31, said at Mistral AI’s Paris office. “I think this is our chance to become one.”
Mensch’s company, which has raised just over $500 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, remains tiny compared with the Goliaths of the industry. Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Alphabet’s Google are pouring billions of dollars into training the latest AI systems, leveraging their access to the specialized computer chips needed to build such systems and the fat balance sheets needed to pay for the electricity those chips consume.
Mistral, named for a strong wind that blows from France, is founded in part on the idea that a lot of that money is being wasted.
Mensch, who started in academia, has spent much of his life figuring out how to make AI and machine-learning systems more efficient. Early last year, he joined forces with co-founders Timothée Lacroix, 32, and Guillaume Lample, 33, who were then at Meta Platforms’ artificial-intelligence lab in Paris.
Together, they are betting that their small team can outmaneuver Silicon Valley titans by finding more efficient ways to build and deploy AI systems. And they want to do it in part by giving away many of their AI systems as open-source software.
“We want to be the most capital-efficient company in the world of AI,” Mensch said. “That’s the reason we exist.”
On Monday, Mistral unveiled a new AI model, called Mistral Large, that Mensch said can perform some reasoning tasks comparably with GPT-4, OpenAI’s most advanced language model to date, and Gemini Ultra, Google’s new model.
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