The meaning of MistralMeet the French startup hoping to take on OpenAIMistral unveils its latest large language model—and a deal with Microsoft. SOME RACES are over before they get going. So it can seem in the contest to make large language models (LLMs). These algorithms power ChatGPT-like “generative” artificial intelligence. OpenAI, the human-sounding chatbot’s American creator, appears leagues ahead. It has made the world’s most powerful LLM, called GPT-4. The firm is gobbling up talent, data and computing power to build cleverer models. That allows it to attract more users, and with them more capital to pour into even more sophisticated algorithms. But a French startup called Mistral is trying to throw a spanner in this AI flywheel. On February 26th it released a new LLM. Mistral-Large is smaller than GPT-4, measured by the number of parameters it uses (a common gauge of model power). Even so, it nearly rivals GPT-4 in its ability to reason. Mistral also unveiled a ChatGPT competitor, Le Chat (pronounced le shah, like the French word for cat rather than the English homograph). And it announced a deal with Microsoft, an AI juggernaut which already has a deep partnership with OpenAI. The tech giant will take a small stake in Mistral and make the French firm’s models available via its Azure cloud.Mistral is proof that the industry is becoming more open—and less American. If it can mount a serious challenge to OpenAI, this could show once and for all that in generative AI, size is not everything. “It’s no longer about being bigger—it’s about being creative and being fast,” says Arthur Mensch, Mistral’s chief executive.The French firm’s rise has been as brisk as the northwesterly wind after which it is named. It was founded less than a year ago and has[⋯]」 「hem on their own computers rather than in a vast data centre, which many proprietary models require.According to Mr Mensch, Mistral’s focus on data curation lets the firm use computing power, AI’s third crucial component, more efficiently than its competitors. Training Mistral’s latest model cost much less than the $100m that OpenAI apparently spent to develop GPT-4. Mistral’s approach also makes it cheaper for customers both to fine-tune its models with their own data and then to run them.In technical terms, startups like Mistral enjoy a “second-mover advantage”, benefiting from all the work OpenAI and others have done, argues Jeannette zu Fürstenberg of General Catalyst. Critically, in Mistral’s case these technical chops are complemented by political nous, which is helpful given many governments’ belief that home-grown LLMs confer economic and strategic advantages. Another of Mistral’s co-founders is Cédric O, a former French digital minister. Mr O retains a direct line to the country’s president, Emmanuel Macron. When a draft of the EU’s AI Act last year threatened to force Mistral to divulge its data recipe, Mr O co-ordinated, with Mr Macron’s backing, a Franco-German effort to oppose such provisions. These were duly[⋯]」 「then Mr Mensch’s talk of creativity and speed may ring hollow. Until then, Mistral’s story will continue to resonate.」