Two French scientists from Facebook and DeepMind have reportedly been discussing a substantive funding round to build their own version of Open AI. The secretive startup Mistral is said to be in talks with Lightspeed, a US venture capital firm, to raise $80 million, which could value it at $200 million. French angels and technology venture capital fund Eurazeo are also suspected to be participating in the deal.
Mistral is the brainchild of Guillaume Lample, a research scientist with Facebook’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) division, and former DeepMind research scientist Arthur Mensch. Guillaume has written numerous papers on Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning with his work being highly cited on Google Scholar. He and Arthur have authored dozens of papers on ArXiv, an open-source scientific research site with an emphasis on language models. Arthur has added the post of CEO and cofounder to his Linkedin profile.
OpenAI, founded by entrepreneurs such as Sam Altman and Elon Musk, has had a major impact on modern society. Its most advanced language model, GPT-4, has passed a plethora of exams, composed children’s books, and raised concerns about the potential for human job automation due to AI. Internal documents from Google even suggested GPT-4 could become an entry-level computer coder at the search engine. OpenAI’s recent success has led to rising interest in similar products, prompting startups like Synthesia, Runway, and ElevenLabs to generate big money from private investors.
11 Little is known about Mistral as of now, though Lample’s and Mensch’s impressive skillset will most likely be valuable to the budding company. The details and funds in discussion might change, but this venture has the potential to rival the success of OpenAI if it succeeds in securing the funding round. Much of that stands in the hands of investors and the level of interest they may have in Mistral.
