We raised $113 million with no product, no revenue, and a four-week-old company. Just a PDF and three ex-DeepMind and ex-Meta AI researchers. Europe was desperate for its own AI champion. We volunteered.
We open-sourced our first model via a torrent link. No blog post. No press release. Just a magnet link on Twitter. The AI community lost its mind. That was the point.
Europe has the talent. We have some of the best AI researchers in the world. What we didn't have was a company willing to compete with OpenAI head-on. Now we do.
I left DeepMind because Google moves too slowly. Guillaume left Meta AI because Meta moves too cautiously. We started Mistral because we wanted to move at startup speed with frontier-lab talent.
Our models are smaller and faster than GPT-4 for most tasks. Bigger is not always better. Efficiency is the real breakthrough — not throwing more GPUs at the problem.