Open Source fuels the engine of innovation, according to Arthur Mensch, CEO and co-founder of Mistral AI. Mistral is a French AI company which recently made a splash with releasing Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size to date, and outperforming much larger models. Sarah Guo and Elad Gil sit down with Arthur to discuss why open source could win the AI wars, their $100M+ seed financing, the true nature of scaling laws, why he started his company in France, and what Mistral is building next.

Arthur Mensch is Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Mistral AI. A graduate of École Polytechnique, Télécom Paris and holder of the Master Mathématiques Vision Apprentissage at Paris Saclay, he completed his thesis in machine learning for functional brain imaging at Inria (Parietal team). He spent two years as a post-doctoral fellow in the Applied Mathematics department at ENS Ulm, where he carried out work in mathematics for optimization and machine learning. In 2020, he joined DeepMind as a researcher, working on large language models, before leaving in 2023 to co-found Mistral AI with Guillaume Lample and Timothee Lacroix.

Show Links: 

• Arthur’s Linkedin
• Mistral
• Mistral 7b
• Retro: Improving language models by retrieving from trillions of tokens
• Chinchilla: Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models

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Show Notes: 

(0:00) - Why he co-founded Mistral

(4:22) - Chinchilla and Proportionality 

(6:16) - Mistral 7b

(9:17) - Data and Annotations

(10:33) - Open Source Ecosystem 

(17:36) - Proposed Compute and Scale Limits

(19:58) - Threat of Bioweapons 

(23:08) - Guardrails and Safety 

(29:46) - Mistral Platform

(31:31) - French and European AI Startups