Mistral, the most advanced Artificial Intelligence in Europe, wants to rub shoulders with the big guys and embody the “digital sovereignty” promoted and financed by the European Union. But the French company has many challenges ahead. In three years of existence, it has not even reached 80th place in the AI rankings, with an abysmal difference compared to the top 10, North American and Chinese.
Now its ML4, launched last week, is four times more capable than the previous model, with a trillion parameters. It is close to Chinese applications from DeepSeek or Moonshot but still far from products from OpenAI or Anthropic that are five or ten times more powerful.
Mistral has redesigned its product to compete with the leading edge and is committed to open source. It will be free for certain uses and will allow downloading of the programming and data that make it work without accessing closed servers, like the American models. It is the same strategy followed by China to conquer a third of the AI market.
Since it was founded in 2023 by former French employees of Google and Meta, Mistral has been adding investors and clients. The Dutch ASML, world leader in chip lithography, the consulting firm Accenture and Microsoft have invested in the firm that, in September, made a capital increase of 3,000 million euros led by Samsung.
Mistral is already worth 21 billion and, although its models are not very popular, it has corporate clients such as Airbus, BMW, BNP Paribas, HSBC, IBM, Capgemini, Cisco or Ericsson. It is, by far, the European AI champion but has yet to gain a relevant place in the global arena.