No Priors Ep. 40 | With Arthur Mensch, CEO Mistral AI

Open Source fuels the engine of innovation, according to Arthur Mensch, CEO and co-founder of Mistral AI. Mistral is a French AI company which recently made a splash with releasing Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size to date, and outperforming much larger models. Sarah Guo and Elad Gil sit down with Arthur to discuss why open source could win the AI wars, their $100M+ seed financing, the true nature of scaling laws, why he started his company in France, and what Mistral is building next.

Arthur Mensch is Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Mistral AI. A graduate of École Polytechnique, Télécom Paris and holder of the Master Mathématiques Vision Apprentissage at Paris Saclay, he completed his thesis in machine learning for functional brain imaging at Inria (Parietal team). He spent two years as a post-doctoral fellow in the Applied Mathematics department at ENS Ulm, where he carried out work in mathematics for optimization and machine learning. In 2020, he joined DeepMind as a researcher, working on large language models, before leaving in 2023 to co-found Mistral AI with Guillaume Lample and Timothee Lacroix.

00:00 - Why he co-founded Mistral
04:22 - Chinchilla and Proportionality
06:16 - Mistral 7b
09:17 - Data and Annotations
10:33 - Open Source Ecosystem
17:36 - Proposed Compute and Scale Limits
19:58 - Threat of Bioweapons
23:08 - Guardrails and Safety
29:46 - Mistral Platform
31:31 - French and European AI Startups