Mistral AI CEO Arthur Mensch: Open Source Enables Cost-Effective, Powerful AI

Arthur Mensch, co-founder and CEO of artificial intelligence (AI) startup Mistral AI, reportedly said Friday (March 7) that DeepSeek’s AI model contributed to the open-source realm that enables different companies to learn from one another and continually develop better versions.

“The story with open source is that you have different companies that are building on top of one another,” Mensch said in an interview at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Friday.

Mistral AI has embraced open source as a cost-effective way to develop increasingly powerful AI, according to the report.

Mensch said Mistral AI’s upcoming AI models will outperform the latest version of DeepSeek, per the report.

He added that Mistral AI has raised more than $1 billion, is “starting to have pretty significant revenue” and will continue scaling up.

“We’ll be looking at fund-raising in the coming two years, but we’re not in a hurry,” Mensch said, per the report.

Open-source models could democratize AI technology and foster innovation in commercial applications, PYMNTS reported last March.

“Open source models could lead to more competition and, potentially, lower costs for businesses looking to leverage AI in their operations,” Richard Gardner, CEO of tech consultancy Modulus, told PYMNTS in an interview posted in March 2024. “As the underlying models become more accessible, competition might shift towards the quality of data used to train them and the expertise in applying those models to solve specific business problems.”

DeepSeek shook up Wall Street in January when it released AI models that performed on par with OpenAI’s and Google’s top models but at a fraction of the cost and with far fewer of Nvidia’s GPUs.

Observers also noted that DeepSeek’s models are open source.

Meta Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun said at the time in a post on LinkedIn: “The correct reading is: Open source models are surpassing proprietary ones. DeepSeek has profited from open research and open source … They came up with new ideas and built them on top of other people’s work. Because their work is published and open source, everyone can profit from it. That is the power of open research and open source.”

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