- Mistral’s CEO, Arthur Mensch, told BI that DeepSeek is a “great moment for open-source models.”
- Mistral, a Paris-based startup that uses open-source, is seen as Europe’s answer to OpenAI.
- Mensch said Mistral is focusing on agentic AI with a revamped version of its Le Chat app.
While markets panicked about DeepSeek, the CEO of Mistral welcomed the Chinese startup’s new models as a boost for the open-source world.
Since its launch in 2023, Paris-based AI startup Mistral has advocated for open-source, which, broadly, is software that anyone can use or modify.
“We like to think of DeepSeek as the Mistral of China,” Arthur Mensch told Business Insider in an interview. “We think that this is a great moment for open-source models, and companies like this — Mistral and DeepSeek — have participated in that and built on top of each other.”
Like DeepSeek, many of Mistral’s large language models are open-weight, which means they primarily share the model parameters rather than the full code base.
Mensch is one of many in the tech industry who point to the benefits of open source, such as faster development cycles and no extensive licensing fees.
“We’ve always been believers in open-source prevailing because of the flywheel, because of everybody building on top of each other, because of the fact that it just makes things more efficient,” Mensch told BI.
Last month, investors questioned the scale of large AI infrastructure investments after DeepSeek released R1 models that claimed to match the performance of rival models like ChatGPT — but at a fraction of the cost.
In addition to raising questions about efficiency, it also prompted a rethink in the AI world about open versus closed source.
In a Reddit AMA session earlier this month, OpenAI boss Sam Altman admitted to being “on the wrong side of history” regarding his stance on open-source AI. He added that the company may need to figure out a new strategy instead of its closed-source approach.
Mensch said Mistral, which is seen as Europe’s answer to OpenAI, has always prioritized efficiency — including when it comes to capital.
With $1 billion in funding from the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, and General Catalyst, Mistral takes the mantle of Europe’s most-capitalized AI startup.
“It doesn’t take $100 billion to make enterprises adopt a technology and adapt it to their use cases,” he said. “We’re a very well-capitalized company, but we’re not spending hundreds of billions.”
Mistral’s agentic AI and IPO plans
In addition to touting its open-source ambitions, Mensch told BI that Mistral would expand its capabilities in agentic AI, a type of software that can perform tasks autonomously.
The startup is doing so with a revamped version of Le Chat, which launched as an app for the first time last week.
“Le Chat is a place where you can build your agents, and you should see this as a place where every employee and consumer can create automation and spawn agents,” he added. The best aspect of AI agents is that non-developers can also use them,” Mensch said.
The startup also has goals to reduce its dependence on Big Tech; before the Paris Action Summit this week, it announced that it would invest billions of euros in building its own data center in France.
“It’s a choice we are making to have control over the whole value chain, from the machine to the software,” Mensch told French TV channel TFI.
Mistral is also doubling down on its presence outside its home country. It’s expanding in the US, a market where it’s seeing a lot more commercial traction, and it has opened a Singapore office in light of a burgeoning user base in southeast Asia.
While Mensch previously indicated that Mistral would eventually go public, he clarified to BI that the company has no immediate plans to pursue that route.
“I said that we were an independent company, and as a successful independent company, the natural path would obviously be IPO long term — but this obviously doesn’t mean that we’re preparing anything for an IPO for now,” he said.