Mistral’s CEO thinks the world will go beyond AI models this year
One of Europe’s busiest artificial intelligence startups said they expect artificial intelligence technology to surpass large language models this year.
Arthur Mensch, CEO of French AI company Mistral, told CNBC that product focus will shift away from models by 2025 to “systems” that integrate models and contextual business data.
“I think the focus should shift to systems,” Mensch told CNBC’s Arjun Karpal in an interview Tuesday. “Models are part of systems, but systems are connected to data, connected to tools, able to do things on your behalf, able to act in a representative way.”
Founded two years ago, Mistral has quickly become one of Europe’s most daring AI companies, achieving a $6 billion valuation and backing from a US tech giant. Microsoft last year. The startup, which is considered to be OpenAI’s competitor, is behind the development of several open-source large-scale language models.
The past year has seen a lot of buzz in the tech industry about so-called AI “agents.” This refers to the idea of AI assistants that can take autonomous actions with some human control. Unlike AI chatbots like ChatGPT, models are mostly meant to run in the background.
Mensch sees the future of AI systems using integrated large-scale language models. By connecting models with relevant contextual information, they become better at providing customized solutions for different business needs, he said.
“That’s where this changes,” Mensch said. “It also means that the industry that’s adopting it will put that knowledge into those systems — and that’s where it’s really important to drive the value of AI into those industries.”
AI is the talk of the World Economic Forum’s annual forum this year in Davos, Switzerland. The event is known for bringing together influential leaders in business and politics around the world.
On the Davos Walk – the focal point of the annual event – major companies from Salesforce to Workday took over cafes, shops and restaurants, building temporary meeting and event spaces that displayed the word “AI” prominently.
