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Co-founder Arthur Mensch: “At Mistral AI we are making generative AI ubiquitous.”

Photo: Bloomberg / Getty Images

Le Chat is France's answer to ChatGPT.

However, the new, multilingual chatbot from the Parisian start-up Mistral AI is currently only accessible after registering in a beta version and does not yet have an internet connection.

The bot does not provide current information, which is why it cannot keep up with the market leader OpenAI for the time being.

At the same time, Mistral AI is only nine months old.

And practically at the same time as the announcement about Le Chat, the start-up was able to announce that it would receive future support from Microsoft.

This consists of infrastructure and $16 million in capital, reports “VentureBeat”.

Microsoft, which is OpenAI's most important partner, is making its AI data centers available to Mistral AI, among other things, in a multi-year program.

Mistral AI should be able to develop and deploy new AI models more quickly.

The French models are also offered in the Microsoft cloud Azure (more precisely: in Azure AI Studio and Azure Machine Learning), customers can try them out alongside the OpenAI models.

This could significantly simplify Mistral AI’s path to potential users.

In addition, Microsoft would like to cooperate with the start-up in the development of specific models for the public sector in Europe.

“At Mistral AI, we are making generative AI ubiquitous,” says co-founder and CEO Arthur Mensch, “through our open source models and by bringing our commercial models to where developers are active.” What Mensch is implying: The Cooperation with Microsoft means that Mistral AI is moving away from its original approach of publishing all of its AI models open source.

Mensch used to work at Google Deepmind, his co-founders worked at the Facebook company Meta.

They founded Mistral AI in April 2023 and received venture capital of more than 100 million euros in the summer, although Mistral AI did not yet have a product or an AI model to show.

Since a second round of financing in December, the start-up has been valued at more than two billion euros.