French president Emmanuel Macron has spent years dreaming aloud of a homegrown artificial intelligence giant. Like Altman, Mensch was able to command vast amounts of capital: Mistral’s $6 billion valuation fell far short of OpenAI’s $80 billion price tag, but still—this was validation. Yet when Macron called a shock snap election earlier this month, the AI industry quickly began to …
SOME RACES are over before they really get going. The tech giant will take a small stake in Mistral and make the French firm’s models available via its Azure cloud. This has allowed Mistral’s models to be much smaller: the statistical weights, or “parameters", of Mistral’s models count in the billions, compared with an estimated 1.8trn for OpenAI’s GPT-4. According …
