Arthur Mensch, tall and thin with disheveled hair, arrived for a speech last month at a huge Paris technology center wearing jeans and clutching a bicycle helmet. He had a low-key search for a person European officials are counting on to help the region in a high-stakes race with the United States and China over artificial intelligence.
Mr. Mensch, 31, is the CEO and founder of Mistral, which is seen by many as one of the most promising challengers to OpenAI and Google. “You’ve become the poster child for artificial intelligence in France,” Matt Clifford, a British investor, told him on stage.
Much is riding on Mr. Mensch, whose company has come to prominence just a year after he founded it in Paris with two college friends. As Europe tries to gain a foothold in the AI revolution, the French government has singled out Mistral as its best hope of creating a flag-bearer and has lobbied European Union policymakers to ensure the company’s success.
Artificial intelligence will be rapidly integrated into the global economy in the coming decade, and policymakers and business leaders in Europe fear that growth and competitiveness will suffer if the region does not keep pace. Behind their concerns is a belief that artificial intelligence should not be dominated by tech giants such as Microsoft and Google, which can forge global standards at odds with other countries’ culture and politics. At stake is the larger question of what AI models will end up affecting the world and how they should be regulated.
“The issue with not having a European champion is that the roadmap 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, building artificial intelligence models . Its 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 across the Canal Saint-Martin in Paris, Mr Mensch said it was “not safe to trust” the US tech giants to set ground rules for a powerful new technology that would affect millions of lives.
“We cannot have a strategic dependency,” he said. “That’s why we want to be European champions.”
Europe has struggled to build major tech companies since the dot-com boom. As the United States revealed that Google, Meta and Amazon and China produced Alibaba, Huawei and ByteDance, which owns TikTok, Europe’s digital economy failed to perform, according to a report by its Artificial Intelligence Committee of France. The 15-member panel — which includes Mr Mensch — warned that Europe was lagging behind in artificial intelligence, but said it had the potential to take the lead.
Mistral’s genetic AI technology enables businesses to launch chatbots, search functions and other AI-based products. It has surprised many by building a model that rivals the technology developed at OpenAI, the American start-up that sparked 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-effective machine learning tool. A number of major European companies are starting to use its technology, including Renault, the French car 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 had Mr Mensch for dinner at the Elysee presidential palace. Bruno Le Maire, the country’s finance minister, frequently praises the company, while Cédric O, France’s former digital services minister, is an adviser to Mistral and owns shares in the startup.
The French government’s support is an indication of the growing importance of artificial intelligence. The United States, France, Britain, China, Saudi Arabia and many other countries are scrambling to bolster their domestic capabilities, sparking a technological arms race that affects trade and foreign policy, as well as global supply chains.
The Mistral has emerged as the strongest European contender in the global battle. But many question whether the company can keep up with big American and Chinese rivals and develop a sustainable business model. In addition to the significant technological challenges of building a successful AI company, the computing power required is extremely expensive. (France says its cheap nuclear power can meet energy demand.)
OpenAI has raised $13 billion and Anthropic, another San Francisco company, has raised more than $7.3 billion. Mistral has so far raised about 500 million euros, or $540 million, and is earning “several millions” in recurring revenue, Mr. Mensch said. But as a sign of Mistral’s promise, Microsoft took a small stake in February, and Salesforce and chipmaker Nvidia backed the startup.
“This could be one of the best snapshots we have in Europe,” said Jeannette zu Fürstenberg, CEO of General Catalyst and founding partner of La Famiglia, two venture capital firms that invested in Mistral. “You basically have a very powerful technology that will unlock value.”
Mistral agrees with the view that AI software should be open source, meaning that programming codes should be available for anyone to copy, modify or reuse. Supporters say allowing other researchers to see the code will make systems more secure and fuel economic growth by accelerating its use among businesses and governments for applications such as accounting, customer service 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 argue, because it has the potential to be used for nefarious purposes, such as spreading disinformation — or even creating destructive AI-powered weapons.
Mr. Mensch dismissed such concerns as the narrative of “a fear-mongering lobby” that includes Google, Microsoft and Amazon, which he said are seeking to consolidate their dominance by persuading policymakers to enact rules that they will crush their opponents.
The biggest danger of artificial intelligence, Mr. Mensch added, is that it will spark 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, said he was fascinated by computers from an early age, learning to program when he was 11. He played video games avidly until he was 15, when he decided he could “do better things with my time.” After graduating from two elite French universities, École Polytechnique and École Normale Supérieure, he became an academic researcher in 2020 at the prestigious National France’s Center for Scientific Research But he soon went to DeepMind, an artificial intelligence lab acquired by Google, to learn about industry and become an entrepreneur.
When ChatGPT appeared on the scene in 2022, Mr. Mensch teamed up with his university friends, who decided they could do the same or better in France. In the company’s airy workplace, a corps of sneaker-wearing scientists and programmers now pound away at keyboards, coding and feeding digital text plucked from the Internet — as well as reams of 19th-century French literature that is no longer subject to copyright law — in the large language model of the company.
Mr Mensch said he was uncomfortable with Silicon Valley’s “very religious” fascination with the concept of artificial general intelligence, the point at which tech leaders such as Elon Musk and Sam Altman believe computers will surpass cognitive ability. of humans, with potentially dire 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 that American AI giants pose to civilizations around the world.
“These models produce 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 influence, Mr Mensch has stepped up his calls for lighter regulation, warning that restrictions will hurt innovation. Last fall, France successfully lobbied Brussels to limit regulation of open-source AI systems in the European Union’s new AI law, a victory that helps Mistral maintain a rapid growth rate.
“If Mistral becomes a major technical force,” said Mr O, the former digital services minister who led the lobbying effort, “it will be beneficial for all of Europe.”
