The French start-up Mistral AI specializing in artificial intelligence unveiled on Monday its new language model, Mistral Large, accompanied by a conversational assistant comparable to ChatGPT, reserved for businesses.
Called
“Le Chat”
, Mistral AI's conversational tool has been tested by some of the start-up's clients for several weeks, before being opened to businesses.
The Mistral Large model is available from Monday for customers of Azure AI, the Microsoft platform, with which Mistral is announcing a partnership.
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“This is an important milestone for us, as the unrivaled performance of this multilingual model continues to push the boundaries of what is possible with cutting-edge artificial intelligence
,” said Mistral AI co-founder Arthur Mensch. in a press release.
“This new model has unique reasoning abilities, masters coding and mathematics, and speaks five languages [French, English, German, Spanish and Italian] fluently
,” specifies Mistral AI in its press release.
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Compete with the Americans
This is the third model unveiled by the French company, one of the two AI champions in Europe, after the launch of Mistral 7B in September and Mixtral 8x7B in December.
Founded by three French AI experts, trained at X or ENS, hired by the American giants but returned to Paris, Mistral AI, valued at some 2 billion dollars, according to financial sources, continues the objective of proposing a European AI capable of competing with American models.
The launch of ChatGPT by OpenAI in November 2022, then the publication of other models by several digital giants across the Atlantic had in fact triggered a race against time on the European side.
“There is a subject of fairly strong cultural dependence”
vis-à-vis the United States, underlined the co-founder of the company Arthur Mensch on France Inter in October.
A desire for independence encouraged by the political sphere: while Mistral AI managed to raise 105 million euros in June 2023, its first fundraising, Emmanuel Macron proclaimed his wish to see France become
“champion”
in the field .