Wonderful to have you here. You founded Mistral in April 2023, so it's less than three years old. In that time, you have built a company with I think 800 employees now.
About 800 employees. So, in the time that some people might do a PhD, you founded Mistral with a workforce of currently 800 people. Three co-founders. You yourself spent time with Google DeepMind in Paris. Guillaume Lample with Facebook, he did his PhD with Facebook, and Timothée Lacroix also a PhD student with Facebook. So Google DeepMind, Facebook. What did you three as co-founders bring from your experiences there to Mistral? What did you want to take from those companies and what did you want to differentiate?
Well, before I spent a little more than two years at Google, before that I was actually in the French academia. And so I would say most of the scientific things I learned were actually in the French academia. But what I learned at DeepMind, and what Guillaume and Timothée were learning one kilometer away from that at the Meta office, was really to train AI models at scale. AI is a capital-intensive R&D endeavor in that you need a lot of computation to actually train strong models and to train models that are big and running on a lot of GPUs at the same time to make them good. Well, you needed to have access to the GPUs. And so it turns out that Google had a lot of cash to invest already at that time and was providing with enough infrastructure to do interesting research in that domain. So that's what I learned, that's what Guillaume and Timothée learned as well. What we wanted to do in 2023 was to actually create a European champion on the domain of generative AI because we saw the wave coming of disruptive technology that would become critical for digital sovereignty, that would be critical for business continuity, and that would create a lot of value. And the way we saw it from the inside was that there was no alternative at the time and if we weren't to do anything to promote open source technology and to put Europe on the map, there wouldn't be any Europe on the map. So that's how what got us started in 2023. And then we started as a research lab and then grew the company and grew the business.
Yeah. You've mentioned the word sovereignty there. It's very, very important of course and something that does differentiate you is your B2B model. And you did have a meeting this morning with Luc Frieden, prime minister of Luxembourg. Sovereignty meetings with people like that. How do those conversations go?
Well, we don't really like to speak about sovereignty in that it's often times a term to describe lower technology in Europe. But on the other hand we speak about strategic autonomy. What we do, our technology is not differentiated because it's sovereign. It's differentiated because we engage deeply with enterprises, with states. We have state-of-the-art models on multiple domains and our team is able to adapt them quickly and to create business applications on top. So that's the true differentiation which is a global differentiation and I think that's the first learning we had at Mistral is that if you want to be a champion and relevant in the space you need to be exporting technology, you can't focus on just building domestic technology for Europe, you need to be an exporter. So that's the first thing. Now, to your point on sovereignty as a political topic and a political term, artificial intelligence is important for sovereignty I would say for three main reasons. The first one is economic sovereignty. A lot of the tasks that white collars are doing today are going to be more and more delegated to AI systems and so inherently this is creating a shift in where the value occurs across the industry and across the economy. And what that means if Europe remains fully dependent on US providers to an 80% extent which it is today, what that means is that the economic balance is going to continue shifting in terms of digital services. What that means is that the value that we send to the US is going to be reinvested on R&D and that's going to accrue the gap in between what they do and what we do. And so that's a big problem and that's eventually going to become a strategic problem because it creates dependency because they have turn off and turn on etc. So there's a question of economic sovereignty, there's a question of business continuity. AI is about running processes and it's going to run critical processes in our economy whether with utility companies, industry companies, public services, defense systems. And if you can't afford the business continuity, well you're going to depend on basically you're becoming a client state to the one that is providing you with the technology. So that's something we need to avoid and it applies specifically to defense systems. It applies to public sector but also to defense systems. And then the third pillar, so economic sovereignty, strategic sovereignty, business continuity. Third pillar is a cultural one. These systems you're building are generating content. Those are interaction machines. They behave in a certain way. They have a certain cultural biases. If you have centralized systems then you're basically trusting the central provider with whatever ideas or opinions he wants to push and we don't think that this is actually compatible with democracy. And so that aspect of customizing systems for every state, bringing languages, European languages to our models specifically is super important and I think it's going to play a critical role in the upcoming elections. This technology will play a critical role in upcoming elections because it's a major source of influence. We're a B2B company so we try and make sure that other companies can take our technology and serve end users but we're quite afraid of the concentration of AI for consumers and that's something we should really realize and consider as a risk.
Thank you. Well, I'm going to come back to languages. I'm very glad that you mentioned that because we're sitting here in Europe and I don't even know how many languages are in this room. Scaling up at the rate that you have and talent. So, money, investment, we've been speaking about that for the last day and a half and finding the right talent at the right price. So, firstly, you said that you have learned everything you needed to learn at INRIA. That's where you were studying in France for your PhD. Wonderful. We have brilliant researchers across Europe. Where are you finding your best talent?
We find them across Europe actually. Historically our big headquarter is actually in Paris which has great engineering schools, great PhD programs. But we also find them here in Luxembourg. We find them in Warsaw. We find them in Germany. In Greece, we are, it's no longer part of the European Union but we have a fairly big team in the UK as well.
Your second biggest office is in the UK.
It's our second biggest office. Yes. But overall our strategy has been to open local offices and go for regional talent pools in Europe and Europe has a lot of regional talent pools. And if you give a researcher or an engineer the opportunity to stay in his hometown with the right compensation of course but also the right project, they would rather do that than fly to the US. So our strategy has been really to have these local offices and hire junior people because Europe is great at producing junior people and then sometimes relocate some of our fellow European citizens from the US to Europe and they bring a certain seniority.
Well, that's an interesting point that you're hiring junior people in Europe and I'm going to lean on that slightly because the salary tag, and I know this because I've got friends at Google DeepMind in London, they can get seven figures for the work they do. So why would somebody choose to work with Mistral as opposed to getting those seven figures in the US?
Well, first of all, they get similar salaries with us and especially what they see in coming with us is that we heavily incentivize them with options and shares. And so the equity trajectory we've had means that from a pure economic perspective, joining Mistral has been actually more interesting than joining Google. So that's how we work. It's actually something, the stock option regime is a bit of a nightmare honestly in Europe because you have 27 of them. And so unification of that would be great although it's very hard because it's basically fiscal.
Oh, you've touched on a topic of the day. Yes. So well that wasn't the first time something like that was brought to our attention yesterday with Elke König, former CFO of Mercer Group, and she was saying that well in a different way but similar with some of the EU legislation, country to country there are other tweaks put on top. So you've talked about shares but I imagine it might be the same with the hiring, the HR process. So, if you could put out a few recommendations for a company that's growing at the rate you're growing, what would make your life simpler and more efficient for companies to grow at the rate you are growing?
Well, I think the biggest problem in Europe are the notice periods. The fact that you can't just get some people from companies because they will need to stay there for three months. So the viscosity of hiring is much, much higher than in the US. So the biggest problem, and it applies to every country in different ways, some are worse than others, is the fact that an employee who wants to leave his company has to give a three months notice period and that's a full catastrophe. We should give more right to employees, make sure that if they want to leave their company they can leave their company in like a week. And that's the biggest source of, it's so, there are many things that are harder to build here in Europe than in the US. The viscosity of hiring is one of them. There are other things but I would say if there was one thing to improve it's really this.
What would the second thing be?
Well, I think there are things that inherently Europe cannot do much about because it's about time and depth of the ecosystem and accumulation of different companies that have already scaled. But the biggest hurdle we find ourselves in is to hire senior people, executives, people that have scaled go-to-market teams, people that have scaled marketing teams. So the talent shortage is not where you would expect it. So of course Europe is great at training engineers. And we have I think figured out how to retain those engineers and make sure they're not flying away to the US. But because the ecosystem is young, because there isn't that many companies that have already done the scaling journey all the way to IPO etc., you can't find, if I'm looking for a CMO, if I was in the Silicon Valley and looking for a CMO I could just like in a week I would interview 10 of them and the week after I would hire a CMO. Here there's basically zero CMO that actually can do what we need to do in Europe. And so there's a strong shortage there and nothing we can do about it because it's all about experience and it's all about having already the companies that have trained those people, those executives that will join younger companies.
You mentioned engineers. I know that you need engineers. Of course, we all know that in the room. Daniela Amodei, co-founder and president of Anthropic, very recently is famed in the media for saying humanities subjects are becoming more important than ever. What do you think about that? How many humanities degrees are you hiring?
