Arthur Mensch

Last November, UK officials gathered government and technology leaders for the world’s first AI Safety Summit in Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing broke secret codes during World War II. The guest list was impressive. 

Those posing in a photograph at the gathering included US Vice President Kamala Harris, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, then-UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, 2019 Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis … and Arthur Mensch, the cofounder and CEO of AI startup Mistral—a French company that was barely a year old. 

Arthur Mensch standing on the top riser, second from the left, at the AI Safety Summit.
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European leaders have embraced Mistral as an alternative to OpenAI and other Silicon Valley tech giants. “We think that it's very important for Europe to have a voice in how [AI] technology is going to shape our societies,” says Mensch. 

Mensch, 32, is on a mission to make AI more decentralized and create more competition in a market dominated by Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Google. Mistral is doing that by offering many of its models for free along with their weights, which users can then tweak to customize the way these models generate results. Many of the models are released with licenses that let others do research and build commercial products with them. Mistral also allows a high level of portability by making its models accessible through different cloud providers. The algorithms of the smaller models are also efficient and can be run on a laptop. 

But perhaps most impressive is the fact that Mistral’s models perform as well on a variety of benchmark tests as the powerful models released by top US AI companies. That’s pretty good for a young company with just 65 employees, and it’s building these models with a fraction of the resources available to the world’s biggest AI labs.