French startup Mistral AI has received $113 million in seed funding to compete with OpenAI in building, training and applying large language models and generative AI. This is written by TechCrunch.
The startup is only four weeks old, but its value is estimated at $260 million. It was co-founded by people from DeepMind and Meta. The project will focus on open source solutions.
"We believe that the benefits of using open source can overcome the misuse potential," said the startup's CEO Arthur Mensch.
The company plans to release its first text-based generative AI models in 2024 and will target enterprise customers.
“At the moment we have proof that AI is useful in some cases,” Mensch said. “But there are still too many workers in different fields being asked to be creative [with AI], and we need to figure this out for them. We want to give them tools that are easy to use to create their own products.”
We will remind that in May OpenAI released a free ChatGPT application for iPhone in the US. It includes support for voice input using the Whisper AI speech recognition model and can sync chat history with the web version of the AI assistant. Thus, ChatGPT became an official mobile client for the first time.