The story of Mistral is really the story of three co-founders. We are researchers by training.
That's Arthur Mensch, co-founder and CEO of Mistral AI, talking to my colleague Suri Agarwal about its origin story.
I spent most of my time in academia, let's say five years, and then spent three years at Google when I started to work on large language models.
So in 2023, Mensch and his fellow researchers and friends, Guillaume Lample and Timothée Lacroix, left big tech companies to launch Mistral in Paris.
We knew that it was a very important technology before, but we realized that the market concentration was accruing. We were, I think, maybe a little bored in the big tech companies we were working with. And so we saw the opportunity, we saw the needs, we saw that we could actually concentrate talent, which is the first thing you need to do as a startup, is just the right funding team.
And they started, like many AI entrepreneurs, with a research lab.
To be honest, in 2023 we had no idea how to build a business. We built a research lab first. Of course, we raised money and that means we had to build a business. We focused very early on on the enterprise sector, which meant that we then built the go-to-market function. We built a product function, which means my role has departed pretty significantly from being a researcher to operating multiple things. We've been lucky to hire people that are experts in their field and able to help grow the business.
Mistral AI builds high-performance large language models designed to give developers and enterprises more control in deploying advanced AI. The word control is important because in the last few years it has become Europe's boldest answer to American AI giants. Backing open-weight models and digital sovereignty, Mistral is challenging who controls artificial intelligence.
In this episode, Arthur Mensch answers the following questions: Is US AI dominance creating dangerous leverage? Can open models and sovereign infrastructure reduce dependency? And is the compute race financially sustainable?
Listen on. It's Saturday the 21st of Feb. I'm Aner Chadri. You're listening to the Morning Brief.
Good morning, Arthur. Thank you so much for speaking to the Economic Times. It's a real pleasure. Let me begin by asking you, you're here for the India AI summit, right? We've seen a lot of action over the last few days. Today is the last concluding day of the summit. What have been the key takeaways? You were there at the PM's plenary session yesterday.
So, it's a great pleasure for me to be here. Prime Minister Modi made a very interesting point on artificial intelligence being a technology that needs to be brought to everyone, which is something we truly believe in. And he made a very interesting point on self-reliance. He mentioned that this was too important a technology for them to depend on others. And so what that meant is that there should be Indian local infrastructure, there should be Indian models, there should be Indian applications, and so on. The entire stack, there needs to be a technology that is controlled by local businesses.
And so that's a point which truly resonates with what we have been building. It's a company that we started three years ago, and we've built the entire full-stack offering on artificial intelligence in a way where we can enable self-reliance in every country and for every business. So that's what I can say about the summit. We were pretty much the only European being represented, and we're very happy to be there because, as you could tell, the US was heavily represented as well.
In some way, do you feel that there's too much of concentration when it comes to technology creation in the United States? And that, you know, as a European company, do you feel that that puts you a little bit at a disadvantage in some ways?
That puts our customers at a disadvantage. The problem of market concentration is that it gives excessive leverage to your suppliers. If you're a business that is buying digital services, so our customers are at a disadvantage because some of their suppliers are coming to them and telling them, 'Look, your data is hosted by us. It's going to be more expensive for you.' And tomorrow, the problem is that it's not only the data which is going to be hosted by us. It's going to be the processes and the digital workers that are going to be operated by them. So it gives them immense leverage and immense control, and it's a control that can be used for geopolitical reasons as a way of pressurizing the states. It's also a control that can be used to just increase the economic imbalance. So at Mistral, I guess, does it put us at a disadvantage? I don't think so. It actually puts us at an advantage because suddenly our customers and all of the enterprise market and all of the states are realizing that the market concentration is currently too high and it needs to be reduced.
I think when I talk to some of the companies in India, they have a similar experience, right? Because it's the same issue of the imbalance that you spoke about, right? What is it that India can learn from the approach that you are promoting?
