France's Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round at a $260M valuation to take on OpenAI

AI is well and truly off to the races: a startup that is only four weeks old has picked up a $113 million round of seed funding to compete against OpenAI in the building, training and application of large language models and generative AI.

Mistral AI, based out of Paris, is co-founded by alums from Google’s DeepMind and Meta and will be focusing on open source solutions and targeting enterprises to create what CEO Arthur Mensch believes is currently the biggest challenge in the field: “To make AI useful.” It plans to release its first models for text-based generative AI in 2024.