Mistral AI’s Meteoric Rise: Inside the $14B Open-Source Gambit Challenging OpenAI
Founded in Paris in spring 2023, Mistral AI burst onto the scene with bold ambition: to challenge the likes of OpenAI and Google by doing things differently. Its three co-founders – Arthur Mensch, Timothée Lacroix and Guillaume Lample – left Big Tech research jobs to build foundation models on their own terms techcrunch.com techcrunch.com. The company’s very name hints at its mission to blow fresh air into AI development techcrunch.com. Mensch and team saw that “proprietary [AI] was becoming the norm” and believed there was an opportunity for an open-source approach techcrunch.com. As Mensch put it at the outset: “Open source is a core part of our DNA.” techcrunch.com