Mistral AI’s Meteoric Rise: Inside the $14B Open-Source Gambit Challenging OpenAI
The Making of an Open-Source AI Juggernaut 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 (CEO, ex-DeepMind), Timothée Lacroix (CTO, ex-Meta AI) and Guillaume Lample (Chief Science Officer, ex-Meta) – left Big Tech research jobs to build foundation models on their own terms techcrunch.com techcrunch.com. The company’s very name (a “mistral” is a strong wind in Southern France) hints at its mission to blow fresh air into AI development techcrunch.com. Mensch and team saw that “proprietary [AI] was becoming