Under pressure from the US, Europe is looking for its AI champion. France’s ‘Le Chat’, fast, open and multilingual, is outlining a continental technological counter-offensive.
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Is the USA now Europe’s enemy? We don’t normally like to mention geopolitics at Upgrade Media, not least since we feel quality news publishing has enough problems to focus on without fighting off rogue superpowers. As the AI revolution picks up the pace for publishers, however, we now find we have to look at trans-Atlantic rivalries, and the results may not be quite what the occupants of the White House were hoping for.
When US Vice President JD Vance spoke at the Paris AI summit last February it was to critique, even threaten the European Union. “We need international regulatory regimes that foster the creation of AI technology rather than strangle it, and we need our European friends, in particular, to look to this new frontier with optimism rather than trepidation.”
Which, given the closeness of the tech bros to Trump might sound like Europe being told to lie back and like it as ChatGPT, Gemini, et al run riot.
But what if exactly the opposite is about to happen? What if Trump’s trade war backfires completely, and sees Europe turn its back on US tech?
We’ve already seen the Trump effect boost European arms manufacturers. Now we may see exactly the same for technology, and in the field of AI, in France at least, that means it’s time to pay closer attention to Mistral.
In a world where news publishers seem torn between signing and suing with AI, Mistral is mostly known for its deal with AFP. That’s no small deal, given the scale of AFP’s reporting and the potential it offers for Mistral to continue improving in a variety of languages. It goes further though, because by aligning with AFP Mistral is emerging as a cheeky champion of La France. It’s no accident that while its main product is Le Chat, a tip of the hat to the likes of ChatGPT, Mensch (CEO of Mistral), and Macron (same, but for France) both pronounce it as our feline friend. The M logo is also deliberately cat shaped. This chat is French, and thus European, and thus not only an agile competitor for the US, but a more reliable one in the current environment.
Now let’s leave geopolitics out of it for a moment, because while that will help with funding Mistral, the real benefits of Mistral over its rivals are more local, and more specific – if still retaining the approach of independence.
The key benefits for French publishers of Le Chat are its speed, which is a claimed 1000 words per second (faster than ChatGPT and Claude), and the fact that it is both open weight, and open source. Let’s take a step back there. Most of us in publishing have heard of open source, but open weight? Essentially this means that Mistral offers its products in different forms, either complete with everything you need (but at a price), or incomplete but ready for you to build on. Given that it supports around 80 programming languages, that means that there is a format for pretty much all pockets and levels of technical ability. Then there’s the issue of human language; it’s not just that it is multilingual in the normal sense (handy for Europe of course), but its model is more efficient at understanding language than the better known models where sheer size of training material is king. Bigger is better has largely been the mantra for LLMs, but Mistral’s cat-like agility could make it a better choice for smaller sized training data. Think what that could mean for smaller languages, or dialects.
So the more Vance/Trump and Silicon Valley puff themselves up, the sleeker and more interesting Mistral becomes.
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