Mensch on fire. Its name may not mean anything to you. And yet. Arthur Mensch, co-founder and CEO of Mistral AI, is the only Frenchman to appear in the top 100 most promising personalities in the world according to the magazine Time. A feat which is in no way artificial for the 32-year-old young man, who Challenges recently placed in 45th place among the 500 richest French people on the planet.
Mistral AI winner
After studying engineering at the École Polytechnique, Télécom Paris, then at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS), Arthur Mensch, born July 17, 1992 in Sèvres (Hauts-de-Seine), obtained his doctorate. Throughout his studies, he honed his passion for computational neuroscience, that is to say the study of information processing carried out by the brain. He worked for three years at DeepMind, Google’s artificial intelligence laboratory. “Working at DeepMind was a revelation, it was like looking into a technological kaleidoscope,” confided Arthur Mensch to our colleagues at Monde. Every day offered a new perspective on what AI could become! “. Then, in April 2023, with Guillaume Lample and Timothée Lacroix (two former Meta employees), he founded Mistral AI. A turning point in his young career.
Mistral AI is a company that specializes in generative artificial intelligence (AI). It develops large open source and proprietary language models. “I wanted Mistral AI to reflect our European values, combining innovation and respect for the individual,” explained Arthur Mensch to Monde. In just one year, the company has completed three successive fundraising rounds, for a total amount of more than 1 billion euros. Better still, it was recently valued at nearly 6 billion euros. Thus, Mistral AI is considered one of the world leaders in artificial intelligence.
This is America!
On February 26, Mistral launched “Le Chat”, a conversational agent that aims to offer more natural and intuitive human communication than Chat GPT. Before unveiling “Mistral Large”, a new language model capable of competing with GPT-4. Mistral also announced a partnership with Microsoft to make Mistral Large available on the Azure cloud. The American giant is taking a minority stake in the company’s capital. “Mistral Large” propels the company to the rank of world leaders in artificial intelligence. “This partnership with Microsoft Azure is a giant step for Mistral AI, allowing our innovations to reach a global and diverse audience,” rejoiced Arthur Mensch in an interview with Point.
Every month, Mistral AI offers, thanks to impressive fundraising, new AI models that are alternatives to the models of the American behemoths. “Arthur’s work as CEO of Mistral AI (…) has placed him at the intersection of key trends that will make AI more accessible to billions of people,” says Elad Gil, an entrepreneur who invested in the start-up and author of its portrait in the magazine Time.
Since the beginning of his adventure, Arthur Mensch has defended ethical and responsible artificial intelligence. “It is crucial that the development of AI is done with an awareness of the social and ethical impacts. We are committed to being transparent and accountable in all our projects,” he said. A year ago, Arthur Mensch even joined the generative artificial intelligence committee created by the Prime Minister at the time, Élisabeth Borne. In June, the little guy from Sèvres was alone with Emmanuel Macron on the stage of Vivatech, the major European tech show. With his ethical AI, Arthur all-inclusive AI.