Meet the French startup hoping to take on OpenAI

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.