The Economist.
When you think about the frontier of AI, the names that usually dominate,
Anthropic, Open AI, and Google DeepMind, are all American.
China is also part of the frontier race,
with labs at companies like DeepSeek and Alibaba.
But what about Europe?
There is one company holding the AI torch for the continent,
Mistral AI, based in France.
The firm isn't quite as brash as its international peers.
And though it builds frontier models, its boss, Arthur Mensch,
doesn't really sign on to the winner takes all race
that everyone else seems to be engaged in.
It's not going to be a god-like technology.
Whenever you run a business that is pretending that it will be anchored
to an exponential never-ending, something is wrong.
Mistral's models are open, and it even uses software from other companies,
including Chinese ones, in some of the services it sells.
Arthur Mensch hopes that in an increasingly uncertain geopolitical climate,
companies and countries will buy into his idea
to build AI systems that live closer to home.