According to a report by the Financial Times early this morning Beijing time, the AI startup headquartered in Paris Mistral AI has now raised 600 million euros in funding, with a valuation of nearly 6 billion euros (about 46.8 billion yuan before). The company is backed by Microsoft and Nvidia and has just been established for a year.Seen as a "potential challenger" to OpenAI.
The investment in the company has tripled its valuation since December. “From the beginning, we were told that … this is aWill never be overturnedBut we prove that this is not the case.Effectively subverted OpenAI’s business model.”
For Mistral, a startup based outside Silicon Valley that is working to build large-scale general artificial intelligence (AGI) models, the latest round of funding is a big step forward.FinancingIt isThe largest so farBecause Mistral plans to use the more than €1 billion raised to grow from European champion to global competitor.
Currently, Mistral’s co-founders Timothée Lacroix, Guillaume Lample, and Mensch are still the company’s major shareholders. They are all French AI researchers who have worked at Google DeepMind and Meta.
Mensch revealed,Mistral uses “slightly more than” 1,000 high-performance graphics processing unit chips needed to train AI systems, and spent tens of millions of euros to build a product that is comparable to the huge products built by global giants such as OpenAI, Google and Meta.
Two weeks ago, Musk also raised $6 billion (currently about 43.586 billion yuan) for his startup xAI, and competitors are eyeing the lead of ChatGPT developer OpenAI, which has received $13 billion (currently about 94.436 billion yuan) in support from Microsoft.