Ep 31: CEO and Co-Founder of Mistral Arthur Mensch on the Next Frontiers for LLMs, Why Open Source Will Prevail and AI Safety

Mistral AI is often seen as the startup challenging OpenAI and incumbents developing LLMs. On this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning, we sat down with CEO and Co-Founder at Mistral AI, Arthur Mensch. Arthur shared with us his view on why open-source will prevail, how Mistral gets LLMs into the hands of enterprises, the build vs. partnership decisions, the competitive landscape and future of LLMs, and how he’d regulate AI safety. 

(0:00) intro

(0:46) origins of the name “Mistral”

(2:20) logo origins

(3:06) closed-source vs open-source models

(6:31) “training models is what we do best”

(7:50) Mistral’s partnership strategy

(10:12) the next frontiers for LLMs

(11:47) Meta’s GPU announcement

(13:03) when will Mistral catch up to ChatGPT?

(16:00) NVIDIA chips

(16:55) AI regulation and EU AI Act

(20:07) who should handle AI safety?

(20:51) policy changes that Arthur would make

(22:52) foundation models around the world

(25:50) starting Mistral

(26:54) releasing Le Chat

(30:19) over-hyped/under-hyped

(30:32) surprises while building Mistral

(31:55) AI startups Arthur is excited about

(32:19) what application would Arthur build

(33:46) Jacob and Jordan debrief

With your co-hosts:  

@jacobeffron  

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health  

@patrickachase  

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn  

@ericabrescia  

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare)  

@jordan_segall  

- Partner at Redpoint