France’s crown jewel of artificial intelligence is shooting to complete an initial public offering but did not give any timeframe regarding when that would occur.
The reveal was made by Mistral AI’s Chief Executive Officer Arthur Mensch at this year’s World Economic Forum meeting in Switzerland. He made it clear that his company is “not for sale” in an interview with Bloomberg TV. The high-profile event in Davos will conclude on Friday.
Mensch also said that Mistral was planning to open up shop in Asia with a new office in Singapore, thereby bolstering its global influence.
The successful startup is known for its ChatGPT-style “Le Chat” AI bot released in February last year and other optimized large language models for more specific functions. Last week, Mistral released Codestral 25.01 — an AI model specifically tailored for complex computer coding tasks. It is two times as quick as the original, Mensch says.
Mistral is currently valued at approximately US$6.2 billion. Since it was founded in April 2023 by former researchers from Meta and Google DeepMind, the AI specialist has pooled nearly US$1.2 billion from investors through a series of three strategic funding rounds.
🙌@MistralAI @arthurmensch just announced in #Davos2025 that we are growing in 🇸🇬! pic.twitter.com/lqWEkmpFSH
— Sophia Yang, Ph.D. (@sophiamyang) January 21, 2025
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Mistral adds new features to ‘Le Chat’
The conversational-style AI bot integrates certain capabilities of Mistral’s Large, Small and “Next” large language models when providing information for users. It is available for web usage only and can’t be downloaded on a smartphone like ChatGPT.
A couple of months ago, Le Chat got some nifty new features. One of the most notable is image generation, made possible through a partnership with the artistic generative AI developer Black Forest Labs.
Mistral says it provides faster responses now too and gives citations for the info it comes up with. It is capable of summarizing complex documents concisely with minimal errors. The AI bot supports multiple languages.
Mistral set up a new California office in November.
French President Emmanuel Macron is known to take pride in the company’s national origin.
rowan@mugglehead.com
