Mistral AI, a French tech startup, has been in talks with investors to raise several hundred million dollars at a $5 billion value.
This is according to a report that citing a person with direct knowledge of the matter.
Cofounded by Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample, and Timothee Lacroix in 2023, the firm bills itself as an AI startup that provides developers and businesses access to open and portable generative AI solutions.
Newsng gathered that Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Ventures, Microsoft Corp. MSFT.O, and others are among Mistral’s current investors. Microsoft Corp has also supported the AI firm OpenAI.
Microsoft teamed with Mistral to make its artificial intelligence models available through its Azure cloud computing platform in February, after investing $16 million in the latter company.
The alliance drew criticism from the European Union, as MPs called for an examination into what they perceived as the digital giant’s consolidation of power.
According to the article, the business, which has just lately started to make money, raised $415 million in December. The last investment round for Mistral valued the company at two billion euros in December.
Mixtral 8x22B, a new large language model (LLM) and Mistral’s newest effort to take on the big boys in the AI space was recently launched by the French AI startup.
According to Gigazine, Mixtral 8x22B is expected to outperform Mistral’s previous Mixtral 8x7B LLM, which in turn showed indications of outperforming both OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and Meta’s Llama 2.
This development according to experts would boost confidence levels in investors as they aim to outduel previous models with more pioneering technology.
We earlier reported that despite escalating competition, Baidu said on Tuesday that Ernie Bot, their ChatGPT AI rival chatbot, has amassed over 200 million users, solidifying its position as the top chatbot in China.
CEO Robin Li, who is also co-founder and chairman of Baidu, disclosed this while delivering the opening speech at a conference in Shenzhen.
