A first fundraiser, valuing the young company at 240 million euros, which will in fact be one of the largest in France ChatGPT artificial intelligence takes its first victims on the stock market, a sector that requires large research resources- development and computing power. The round table, led by the American fund LightSpeed Venture, will bring together major French and European funds and individual investors, according to the same source.
Mistral AI will rely on some of the French AI specialists hired by the Gafa, starting with its co-founder and CEO, Arthur Mensch, polytechnician and normalien, expert in language models, former National Research Institute in digital science and technology (Inria), who has just spent nearly three years at DeepMind, Google’s artificial intelligence laboratory.
Arthur Mensch now presents himself on his LinkedIn page as director and co-founder of Mistral AI, a company in the process of being set up and which does not appear in the INSEE directory. According to Les Echos and Le Point, Arthur Mensch could be joined by Guillaume Lample, polytechnician and Facebook AI researcher, one of those behind the Meta group’s LLaMA language model unveiled in February. Also cited among future recruits, Timothée Lacroix, normalien and at Facebook for eight years.
The CEO of the online insurance start-up Alan, Jean-Charles Samuelian, will be one of his partners, according to Les Echos and Le Point. Asked about this, the latter did not deny the information. Several other funds and personalities also confirmed their participation, but declined to be named.
By way of comparison, the start-up Hugging Face, one of the most dynamic in AI created by the French, left to finance itself in the United States, raised last year 100 million dollars during a third round table. For Mistral AI, starting with a fundraising of nearly 100 million euros would make it possible to target higher amounts in future ones.
However, these amounts remain much lower than the billions of dollars spent by the American tech giants for their AIs, whether Google, Microsoft or Meta. Thus Microsoft would have injected 10 billion dollars in the company OpenAi, which designed chatGPT, and, according to the American press, OpenAI would consider raising up to 100 billion dollars.
