With America and China dominating the AI race, does Europe have a hope?
Arthur Mench thinks so.
The boss of Mistral, a French AI company,
wants to make sure that an AI duopoly doesn't lock the continent out of the future.
Will he succeed?
I'm Alex Hearn, and this is Inside Tech.
Some companies in your space are trying to build God.
Some companies are trying to cure all diseases.
What is Mistral trying to do?
Well, we are there to enable the industry.
I'd say we started the company three years ago.
Me, Guillaume and Timothée were researchers by training.
And we were training large language models at the time.
It turned out to be, even then in 2022, it was very powerful technology.
And we could see the potential it had to change profoundly the way economies would operate.
And we could also see that it was very much an oligopoly.
From the US.
But it turned out that we could gather a team to train models pretty good.
And we wanted to spread the technology in a way that is more open than what was previously proposed.
And the reason why we wanted to do that is that we still believe