France's Mistral takes a victory lap

How the next wave of technology is upending the global economy and its power structures
Dec 13, 2023 View in browser
 
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By Derek Robertson

Arthur Mensch, co-founder and CEO of Mistral AI attends the UK Artificial Intelligence (AI) Safety Summit at Bletchley Park, in central England, on November 2, 2023. (Photo by TOBY MELVILLE / POOL / AFP) (Photo by TOBY MELVILLE/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

Arthur Mensch, co-founder and CEO of Mistral AI at the 2023 UK Artificial Intelligence Safety Summit in the United Kingdom. | POOL/AFP via Getty Images

Amid the scramble to finalize the European Union’s proposed AI Act, one company has managed to stand out as a voice for the bloc’s economic ambitions: Mistral AI, the Paris-based open-source AI company founded by a trio of alums from Google DeepMind and Meta.

Mistral has positioned itself as Europe’s great hope in the global AI competition, combining veteran Silicon Valley know-how with a civic-minded ethos that more suits the European regulatory landscape (and political climate). On Monday the company released a new language model, “Mixtral 8x7B,” named with a self-conscious lack of glamour and earning major plaudits from researchers who compared it favorably to ChatGPT.

“Only about a year after the launch of ChatGPT-3.5, I now have a GPT-3.5 class AI running on my home computer that is open source, free, reasonably fast, & doesn't require an Internet connection. Crazy advancement in such a short time,” Ethan Mollick, a professor who studies AI at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, wrote on X.

As POLITICO’s Gian Volpicelli told me in our conversation Tuesday about the EU AI Act, there are still plenty of technical kinks to be worked out in the bill’s text. For now, however, things seem to be going the European tech industry’s way — and especially Mistral’s, amid its product launch and a just-closed $415 million venture funding round that valued the company at $2 billion.

The same day Mistral confirmed the new funding and released Mixtral 8x7B, co-founder Cedric O. trumpeted in a Medium post that the company’s continuing success was key to preserving Europe’s place in world culture.

“When you ask a Frenchman who invented the airplane, there is a chance that he will answer [French aviation pioneer] Clément Ader,” he writes, pointing out that the American-made GPT-4 will say the Wright brothers.

“If all LLM providers are American and proprietary, then the tools that mediate our relationship with the world will all be ‘American-inspired,’” he continues. “This is not bad in itself, but it carries the risk of very powerful cultural formatting.”

Judging from the preliminary political deal on the EU AI Act, Mistral — and the French government pushing for its success — have also achieved their goal of limiting proposed restrictions and requirements on what the bloc now calls powerful “general-purpose” AI systems. (Cedric O. personally pushed hard against limiting restrictions for foundation models.)

This victory, some experts say, gives the Paris-based company a unique opportunity to shape the pace of AI development.

“If they hold up their end of the bargain of offering good, free, open-source models,” Mistral can effectively achieve its goal of providing a more civic-minded yet still commercially viable competitor to the Silicon Valley AI behemoths, says Kris Shrishak, a fellow at the Irish Council For Civil Liberties who has closely tracked European AI development and the writing of the AI Act.

But how open is it, really? Shrishak criticized Mistral’s most recent release for not containing enough documentation to meet the purest definition of “open source,” and noted that at this point, somewhat ironically, it wouldn’t be likely to qualify for the planned exemption in the AI Act for fully open-source models. But he said the exemption could potentially level the AI playing field in favor of Mistral and even smaller companies, creating an economic incentive to create open-source products where there previously wasn’t one.

“Anyone who's looking at the landscape and saying, ‘well, we can do this if we have a clear set of rules,’ they can start doing it,” he told me.

Ars Technica’s Benj Edwards reported Tuesday on the technology behind Mistral’s nimble performance with its new model. The 8x7B model is a “mixture of experts” (hence the “Mixtral” moniker), which uses specialized components of its neural network to divide and complete tasks more efficiently, reducing the computer load. (Edwards notes that OpenAI’s GPT-4 is widely rumored to be based on a similar model.)

In the world of AI regulation, this level of wonky computational measurement really matters. The Biden administration’s executive order on AI placed a concrete threshold of 10^26 floating-point operations per second (or “flops”) at which a foundation model falls under its scrutiny, something no current model meets. The AI Act settled on a threshold of 10^25 flops, which currently only applies to OpenAI’s GPT-4.

Shrishak described that agreement on computation power as part of a victory by Mistral, France, Germany and Italy, which all pushed to negotiate more lenient AI strictures in Europe so it could better compete globally.

Pointing out how just two months ago the EU was planning significantly more restrictions for big general-purpose AI models, he said reducing them amounted to a “key victory” amid a good week for Europe’s AI dreamers.

 

Enter the “room where it happens”, where global power players shape policy and politics, with Power Play. POLITICO’s brand-new podcast will host conversations with the leaders and power players shaping the biggest ideas and driving the global conversations, moderated by award-winning journalist Anne McElvoy. Sign up today to be notified of new episodes – click here.

 
 
a voice in washington

Voice actors are the latest group of professionals turning to Washington to protect their livelihood from artificial intelligence.

Caitlin Oprysko reported in the POLITICO Influence newsletter on the National Association of Voice Actors’ effort to lobby Congress to regulate AI-powered impersonation of voices, something they say isn’t getting enough attention amid the conversation about visual deepfakes. NAVA hired Platinum Advisors to advocate on their behalf, which also represented SAG-AFTRA amid this year’s writers’ strike.

“We’ve been finding that voice specifically, or separately, was not getting the attention that we hoped it would” amid debates about copyright and likeness in entertainment, NAVA founder and President Tim Friedlander told Caitlin.

Friedlander also noted that this issue doesn’t just affect Hollywood, but Washington with next year’s campaigns on the horizon: “We know that synthetic voices will be used, they have been used, and it’s possible for anybody to use a synthetic voice for disinformation,” he said. “And no one, a voice actor or anybody in general, wants to be the recognizable voice of disinformation in this coming election.”

to the moon

The moon.

A brilliant full moon rises over the Launch Complex 39 area at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. | Kim Shiflett/NASA

The moon had a big year in 2023, and the nonprofit scholarly news website The Conversation put together a “greatest hits” of developments in lunar science and exploration.

That includes an announcement naming of the crew for the United States’ Artemis mission in 2024, a flyby where Americans will be the closest they’ve been to the moon's surface in more than a half-century. They also note the growing awareness of the importance of the raw materials on the Moon, which POLITICO’s Hannah Northey covered in DFD last month.

And there have been plenty of international developments, too: India became the first country to land near the Moon’s south pole in August, discovering unexpected sulfur. That, The Conversation’s Mary Magnuson writes, could be a helpful discovery in scientists’ efforts to determine how and when ice formed on the Moon’s surface — something NASA’s Viper mission will continue to investigate next year.

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