Is this the OpenAI of Europe?
Mistral will compete with Facebook's Llama-3 in 2024 for A.I. Open-source Supremacy. 🎈
Hello Everyone,
Nobody can dispute the impact open-source large language models (LLMs) have had on LLM development in 2023. What can a $415 million Series A do for you do you suppose?
Mistral is far less expensive than GPT4-turbo and with new funding based in France they will be in a unique position vs. Llama-3 to dominate open-source LLMs in 2024.
Whatever Microsoft backed and Sam Altman led OpenAI was supposed to be, today it’s certainly anything but open.
By firing their board members who were critical of them, it’s total chaos at OpenAI. Their entire corporate structure is now in doubt, including their commingled relationship with Microsoft, and all that it entails.
Mistral just finished its Series A, and is valued already at roughly $2 billion! Mistral was founded in May 2023 and has already seen exponential investment and growth. The company was co-founded by CEO Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample, and Timothee Lacroix, who have experience at Meta or Google's DeepMind.
Early funders French investment bank Bpifrance and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and French tycoon Xavier Niel. Who are both also involved in the AI Lab Kyuntai.
To call Mistral the OpenAI of Europe is fascinating considering OpenAI became a rather closed AI startup under the influence of Microsoft. Outside of Llama-3 by Meta (formerly Facebook) in 2024, Mistral could be the outright leader in open-source LLMs.
Silicon Valley has its footprints all over Mistral however, meaning the U.S. will have incredible leverage in Europe’s evolution of A.I. a16z (Andreessen Horowitz), Nvidia, and Salesforce have all set out funding commitments in Mistral’s initial Series A round of fundraising.
Bringing Mixture of Experts (MoE) Mainstream
Mistral latest model (Mixtral 8x7B) is also an MoE. Learn about what MoE is here.
Nvidia’s Unprecedented 2023 Investment in Generative A.I.
Nvidia I will note has had a shockingly good 2023 in terms of making bets in AI startups. Nvidia participated in 35 deals in 2023, almost six times more than last year. Nvidia basically 10x their investment just when it mattered the most.
My thesis is Nvidia, not OpenAI is the real winner of Gen AI in 2023. I like the analogy that Nvidia of the 2023 is like the Cisco of 2000.
As reported by the Financial Times, according to Nvidia’s latest quarterly filings, it made $872mn worth of investments in “non affiliates” — a line item the company confirmed included NVentures and corporate deals — in the nine months ending in October, more than 10 times as much as it invested in the same period last year. Nvidia recently published a paper in October comparing techniques for handling long context in large language models (LLMs) — the key algorithms behind today’s conversational AI.
Nvidia has Invested In:
Mistral
Inflection AI
Cohere
Databricks
Hugging Face
Just to name a few that pop out.
While OpenAI has an army of competitors, controversy and legal disputes ahead, Mistral’s open-source models have no peers nearing the end of 2023. Llama may have led the way, but it doesn’t end there.
Mistral’s ceiling is rather high due to the importance of open-source LLMs in the future.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to AI Supremacy to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.