Arthur Mensch, tall and thin with tousled hair, arrived for a speech last month at a sprawling tech hub in Paris wearing jeans and a bicycle helmet. He has an unmistakable look for someone European officials hope will help push the region into a high-stakes match with the United States and China on artificial intelligence.
Mr. Mensch, 31, is the chief executive and founder of Mistral, considered by many to be one of the most promising challengers to OpenAI and Google. “You’ve become the poster child for AI in France,” Matt Clifford, a British investor, told him on stage.
Many rode Mr. Mensch, whose company became famous a year after he founded it in Paris with two college friends. As Europe strives to gain a foothold in the AI revolution, the French government has chosen Mistral as the best hope to create a standard-bearer, and has lobbied European Union policymakers to help ensure the success of company.
Artificial intelligence will rapidly build upon the global economy in the coming decade, and European policymakers and business leaders fear that growth and competitiveness will suffer if the region cannot keep up. Behind their concerns is a belief that AI should not be dominated by tech giants, such as Microsoft and Google, which can create global standards that conflict with the culture and politics of other countries. At stake is the larger question of which models of artificial intelligence will end up influencing the world, and how they should be regulated.
“The issue with not having a European champion is that the road map is set by the United States,” said Mr. Mensch, who just 18 months ago was working as an engineer at Google’s DeepMind lab in Paris, developing AI models. His co-founders, Timothée Lacroix and Guillaume Lample, also in their 30s, held similar positions at Meta.
In an interview at Mistral’s spartan, whitewashed offices facing the Canal Saint-Martin in Paris, Mr. Mensch said it was “not safe to trust” the US tech giants to set the ground rules for a powerful new technology that would affect in millions of lives.
“We cannot have a strategic dependency,” he said. “That’s why we want to make a European champion.”
Europe has struggled to produce significant tech companies since the dot-com boom. While the United States produced Google, Meta and Amazon, and China produced Alibaba, Huawei and ByteDance, which owns TikTok, Europe’s digital economy has failed to deliver, according to a report by France’s Commission on Artificial Intelligence. The 15-member committee – which includes Mr Mensch – warned that Europe was lagging behind in AI, but said it had the potential to lead.
Mistral’s generative AI technology enables businesses to launch chatbots, search functions and other AI-driven products. It surprised many by developing a model that matches the technology developed at OpenAI, the US start-up that ignited the AI boom in 2022 with the ChatGPT chatbot. Named after a strong wind in France, Mistral quickly gained ground by developing a more flexible and cost-efficient machine-learning tool. Several large European companies are already starting to use its technology, including Renault, the French auto giant, and BNP Paribas, the financial services company.
The French government gives its full support to Mistral. President Emmanuel Macron called the company an example of “French genius” and invited Mr. Mensch in the Élysée presidential palace. Bruno Le Maire, the country’s finance minister, has often praised the company, while Cédric O, France’s former digital minister, is an adviser to Mistral and owns shares in the start-up.
The French government’s support is a sign of the growing importance of AI. The United States, France, Britain, China, Saudi Arabia and many other countries are trying to strengthen their domestic capabilities, setting off a technological arms race that influences trade and foreign policy, as well as global supply chains as well.
The Mistral emerged as the strongest European contender in global combat. But many question whether the company will be able to keep pace with large American and Chinese competitors and develop a sustainable business model. In addition to the huge technological challenges of building a successful AI company, the computing power required is very expensive. (France says its cheap nuclear power can meet its energy needs.)
OpenAI has raised $13 billion, and Anthropic, another San Francisco company, has raised more than $7.3 billion. So far, Mistral has raised about 500 million euros, or $540 million, and is earning “a few million” in recurring revenue, Mr. Mensch said. But as a sign of Mistral’s commitment, Microsoft took a small stake in February, and Salesforce and chipmaker Nvidia backed the start-up.
“This could be one of the best shots we have in Europe,” said Jeannette zu Fürstenberg, the managing director of General Catalyst and a founding partner of La Famiglia, two venture capital firms that invested in Mistral. “Basically, you have a very powerful technology that will unlock value.”
Mistral subscribes to the view that AI software should be open source, meaning the programming codes should be available for anyone to copy, tweak or reuse. Supporters say that allowing other researchers to see the code will make systems more secure and accelerate economic growth by accelerating its use in businesses and governments for applications such as accounting, services to customer and database searches. This week, Mistral released the latest version of its model online for anyone to download.
OpenAI and Anthropic, by contrast, keep their platforms closed. Open source is dangerous, they say, because it has the potential to be co-opted for nefarious purposes, such as spreading disinformation — or even creating destructive AI-powered weapons.
Mr. dismissed Mensch echoes concerns such as the narrative of “a fearsome lobby” that includes Google, Microsoft and Amazon, which he says seeks to cement their dominance by encouraging policymakers to enact rules that will make it harder for rivals. .
The biggest risk of AI, added Mr. Mensch, is that this will spur a revolution in the workplace, eliminating some jobs while creating new ones that will require retraining. “It’s coming faster than previous revolutions,” he said, “not in 10 years but more like two.”
Mr. Mensch, who grew up in a family of scientists, says he was fascinated by computers from an early age, learning to program when he was 11. He played video games avidly until age 15, when he decided that he could do “better things. in my time.” After graduating from two elite French universities, École Polytechnique and École Normale Supérieure, he became an academic researcher in 2020 at France’s prestigious National Center for Scientific Research. But he soon moved to DeepMind, an AI lab acquired by Google, to learn about the industry and become an entrepreneur.
When ChatGPT exploded in 2022, Mr. Mensch to his university friends, who decided they could do the same or better in France. In the company’s cozy workplace, a crowd of sneaker-wearing scientists and programmers are now busy tapping away at keyboards, coding and feeding digital text pulled from the internet — as well as reams of th -19th century French literature, which is no longer subject to copyright. law — in the large corporate language model.
Mr. Mensch said he was uncomfortable with Silicon Valley’s “very religious attitude” to the concept of artificial general intelligence, the point when, tech leaders like Elon Musk and Sam Altman believe, computers will overtake people’s cognitive abilities, with potential consequences. .
“The whole rhetoric of AGI is about God’s creation,” he said. “I don’t believe in God. I am a strong atheist. So I don’t believe in AGI”
A more imminent threat, he said, is what American AI giants pose to cultures around the world.
“These models create content and shape our cultural understanding of the world,” Mr. Mensch said. “And as it turns out, the values of France and the values of the United States differ in subtle but important ways.”
With his growing power, Mr. Mensch has stepped up his calls for lighter regulation, warning that restrictions will undermine innovation. Last fall, France successfully lobbied Brussels to limit regulation of open-source AI systems in the European Union’s new Artificial Intelligence Act, a victory that helps Mistral maintain a rapid pace of development. .
“If Mistral becomes a big technical power,” said Mr. O, the former digital minister who led the lobbying effort, “it will be beneficial for all of Europe.”
