The Wall Street Journal reported today:FranceStartups Mistral AI is about to reach an agreement to raise funds at a valuation of US$6 billion (currently about RMB 43.38 billion).Compared with six months ago, this valuation level has almost tripled..
Mistral was valued at $2.15 billion in a funding round in December last year.
Existing backers General Catalyst and Lightspeed Venture Partners are expected to be the main investors in the new round of financing, which will raise Mistral about $600 million, according to people familiar with the matter.
In February of this year, Microsoft invested $16 million in Mistral AI and reached a cooperation with it, providing the latter's AI model through the Azure cloud computing platform. Almost at the same time, Mistral announced the launch of its AI chatbot Le Chat.This chatbot is seen as a strong competitor to ChatGPT, aims to become a "conversation portal" for users to interact with various models under Mistral (such as Mistral Large, Mistral Small and Next).
Le Chat also offers free and paid versions, but unlike ChatGPT Plus's fixed fee of $20 per month, it adopts a token-based pay-as-you-go model. Le Chat's pricing depends on the selected model, with the most affordable open-mistral-7b model input and output both costing $0.25 per million tokens, while the more powerful mistral-large-2402 model input and output costs $8 and $24 per million tokens, respectively.
In April this year, Mistral AI launched the Mixtral 8x22B open source model, which has 176 billion parameters and a context length of 65,000 tokens. It can be downloaded via Torrent. Mistral AI has been attracting much attention since its establishment."6-person team, 7-page PPT, 800 million in financing" continues to create legends, and entered the fast lane of development after receiving investment from Microsoft.