What is Mistral AI? Everything to know about the OpenAI competitor
Mistral AI, which offers some open source AI models, has raised significant funding since its creation in 2023, with the ambition to “put frontier AI in the hands of everyone.”
Its chat and agent Vibe, formerly Le Chat, only has an ounce of ChatGPT’s brand recognition, and Claude is more popular than Mistral’s models even among founders based at Station F, Paris’ startup campus. On the other hand, casual observers tend to miss that the French decacorn is following the Palantir playbook, with forward-deployed engineers who help governments and large corporations adopt AI and tailor it for their use cases. This approach is also better suited for Mistral’s means. While the company is rumored to be raising some $3.5 billion at a $23.15 billion valuation, nearly doubling its current valuation, that’s still far less than U.S. frontier labs. But its revenues have also ramped up; in February, it disclosed that its annual recurring revenue was now above $400 million, up from $20 million just one year earlier, and claimed it was on track to surpass $1 billion in ARR this year. This has helped Mistral gain a seat at the table in places like Davos, and even in rooms where tech CEOs have a hard time getting their message across, such as the French Parliament. Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch has become a public ambassador for a certain vision of AI, but he still has some evangelizing to do when it comes to explaining his own company. In a lengthy LinkedIn post, Mensch broke down what the Paris-based company has been doing “for a living” — deploying its models and agent platform on the infrastructure of its Enterprise customers, and helping them build custom models with Forge, a platform that lets them use their own data for training. However, misunderstandings and bigger hopes around Mistral don’t stem out of thin air. Named after a wind, the company pursues a grand vision. “We exist to make sure that everyone gets access to the best AI systems, outside of centralized control exercised by states or corporations that feel the need to control in-fine deployment of AI,” Mensch wrote. This vision means that Mistral is looking beyond the enterprise. It also aims to keep on making big investments into research to keep up with foundational AI rivals — and Mensch’s post also covered where he thinks the company stands in that regard. “Today, we do not yet own the best language models, but we’ve constantly reduced that gap.
