Mistral AI 's New Generative AI Result Of Ex-Meta Platforms, Google Employees Collaboration

As AI models are taking center stage in diverse industries, a European startup company is looking to get into the market with an AI model competing against Meta Platforms Inc META and OpenAI models.

What Happened? Mistral AI, a French startup, announced its first generative artificial intelligence (AI) model, Mistral 7B, a small-sized language model with 7 billion parameters that is available free to all developers, reported Bloomberg. The model was said to compete with U.S. leaders such as Meta Platforms and Microsoft Corp MSFT-backed OpenAI.

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The model can work with English and code, making it attractive for larger models and commercial offers. Four French companies are underway testing the model for customer service, chatbots, summaries and marketing content generation.

Why It Matters: “We have training methods that make us more efficient and two times less expensive to implement,” Mistral AI CEO Arthur Mensch commented, reported by Bloomberg. With its belief in creating more efficient and cost-effective training methods, Mistral AI poses as a stiff competitor in the AI market.

Mistral AI is looking to release new models bringing black-box and open solutions closer thereby making open solutions the best option for a wide range of enterprise use cases. The Mistral 7B is way ahead of all available open models up to 13B parameters on all standard English and code benchmarks.

The Paris-based startup company’s founders — Timothée Lacroix and Guillaume Lample — are former Meta Platforms employees while CEO Mensch is a former Google’s DeepMind employee.

Boosting the largest seed round funding by any European generative AI company, Mistral AI raised $110 million its initial financing announced in June 2023, valuing the company at around $260 million. The company claims French investment bank Bpifrance and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt to be shareholders. 

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