Guillaume LAMPLE. Arthur MENSCH. Timothee LACROIX. Mistral. Paris. France. 05\/2023 \u00a9 david atlan<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Mensch (center), along with his co-founders Timoth\u00e9e Lacroix (CTO \u2013 L) and Guillaume Lample (Chief Science Officer \u2013 R), are all in their early thirties and have known each other since school, when they were all studying across the field of artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n

Mensch was working at DeepMind in Paris, and Lacroix and Lample were at Meta\u2019s Paris AI outpost; and Mensch said it was sometime last year that they got to talking about the direction they could see AI development taking.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe could see the technology really start to accelerate last year,\u201d he said in an interview today, most likely in reference to the leaps that OpenAI was making with its GPT model, which was a shot in the arm for a lot of people in AI and the wider world of tech.<\/p>\n

But while OpenAI has the word \u201copen\u201d in its name, it felt like anything but. Mensch, Lacroix and Lample felt that a proprietary approach was largely shaping up to be the norm, and they saw an opportunity to do things differently. \u201cOpen source is a core part of our DNA,\u201d Mensch noted.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s very early to talk about what Mistral is doing or will be doing \u2014 it\u2019s only around a month old \u2014 but from what Mensch said, the plan is to build models using only publicly available data to avoid legal issues that some others have faced over training data, he said; users will be able to contribute their own datasets, too. Models and data sets will be open-sourced, as well.<\/p>\n

And while some believe that open source has created a tricky landscape (and minefield) when it comes to areas like application security, \u201cwe believe that the benefit of using open source can overcome the misuse potential,\u201d he added. \u201cOpen source can prove tactical in security and we believe it will be the case here, too.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s also too soon to know how well its future products will resonate in the market. But what\u2019s interesting is the startup\u2019s singular focus on enterprise, not consumer, customers, and the idea that there is a gap in the market for helping those customers figure out what they need to do, and how they can do it.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the moment we have proof that AI is useful in some cases,\u201d Mensch said. \u201cBut there are still too many workers in different fields being asked to be creative [with AI], and we need to figure this out for them. We want to give them tools that are easy to use to create their own products.\u201d<\/p>\n