YouSaid · the spoken record

Arthur Mensch

lines on the record: 62
first: 2024-04-29
most recent: 2024-04-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Commercial and open source, and it has a very strong developer platform that allows to do everything that you need to create your AI application. That would be a good achievement.”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the depends on who you're speaking to. I think jobs are going to be displaced for sure. Some will be replaced. Some will open up. We're just trying to move humanity to a higher level of abstraction. So we can now talk to machines and machines can understand and answer in a human-like fashion. This is not so much of a bad change compared to what we were doing with computers. I think what's happening right now is that probably the speed in our elevation toward higher abstraction level is probably occurring at an unmatched rate in history. Though that means that the society adaptation is going to be more challenging and needs to be anticipated.”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's changing the way people work significantly in the sense that it requires to be more creative and to bring more value being what can be automated. So it's a very structural change on the job market, which means that there should be some adaptations that are taken pretty quickly in training, in education, that people can get a sense of what is going to be expected from them in their daily job.”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The amount of demand that we had to manage, which is too high for what we can handle, the brand success, the fact that people know us was a bit unexpected. We knew that it would be noticed. We had no idea that people would start using us that fast.”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Transparent feedback is actually super useful for a company, and so operating in an almost fully transparent manner has helped out growing without breaking.”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's the race of the planet hitting up and us finding solutions for it. I think AI is part of the solution. It brings more control. It brings potentially more efficiency in some of the processes. But there's effectively a race for survival. So I think this is something that we should be a bit more aware of.”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know them well. Is it too late? I wouldn't recommend going into the foundation layer business. I know Sam didn't recommend to do that one year ago, and we did, and it seemed to have so far changed a few things. So I think it would be arrogant for me to say that there's no chance for a new competitor to arise and beat us, for sure.”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They all delivered. We were surprised by Kohir recently, came up with new good models, and I think that was a surprise for us. And obviously, OpenAI and Entropy and my friends at Google are also doing a good job. So it's a competitive landscape, and we respect all of them. We also all work in the same direction. And eventually with the same higher goals, so it's great to have respect for one another.”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess the startup is always fundraising. It's a field where for the years to come, the investments are going to exceed the revenue by design because you do need to scale and you do need to stay relevant as a frontier company. So effectively there need to be some investment. The revenue is ramping up. So there will be some revenue to reinvest. But today and for the years to come, the speed for developing research should be faster than the speed at which you can develop your go-to-market.”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe stage a bit more the product development and go-to-market development. We did start the go-to-market motion at the time where we had absolutely nothing to sell. It did work out. It did create some brand awareness despite the absence of anything. I think it might have been slightly simpler to stave things maybe a little more, developing the product a little before developing the go-to-market. But since it's such a fast-moving field that we did start everything a bit together with some organization that was a bit lacking. And now we are solidifying it on the fly. It has worked out. It hasn't been optimal for sure. And so in hindsight, you can always give you, I could give me like a few tactical advices on who to hire when. Generally, I think the strategy we had one year ago hasn't changed much. We did realize that we need more capital and that we could not operate only from Europe and that we needed to go to the US very quickly. Those were findings that we did on the way. I don't think they would have helped.”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mean we are learning on the job. Effectively, you have organizational challenges. How do you ensure that 45 people communicate well together? How do you manage your time in terms of representation time, in terms of business development time? Because we're still at the stage of the company where we get involved a lot in the deal making aspect. And how do you ensure that you set proper directions and maintain the team in a state of tranquility despite the amount of noise that there is on the competitive side, the fact that the direction is obviously going to be changing over time because there's a lot of uncertainty in that field? So this is, I think, the hard part. I don't think I'm doing it properly, but we are actively trying to find sources of information to learn new things, let's say.”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a chicken and egg problem. This could be nudged into the right direction if politics wants to do it, if a couple of companies show that you can actually have companies that grow fast in Europe. And that's what we are trying to do. I'm not too pessimistic. I find you too pessimistic. You should come to France. I think you will get more optimistic”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess in the seed round, no, it wasn't that different because it was a seed round for the series A, which was a big round, European funds were instructed to do the kind of deal that we were proposing. We didn't even have a lot of conversation because they just couldn't get their head around the investment that needed to be made, whereas we were approved of a new company. Yeah, I think what is lacking, and it's related to the ecosystem part in Europe are growth funds that are able to take huge bets with lots of conviction. And that in turn should improve over time, especially if we manage to use European wealth and channel it more into that growth funds than it is today.”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the engineering side and on the AI side we do, we have a team in the US though, which is working on specific topics. Like for senior AI scientists, you find them more in the valley than in France. For junior AI scientists, there's a wealth of talent in France, in Poland, in the UK.”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, I think, yeah, as I've said, it takes time for an ecosystem to build. So you have layers of entrepreneurs and investors that stack on top of each other. The US has 60 or 70 years of venture capital investments. I think Europe has only 20 years. I mean, it takes time. It takes an incompressible time to build an ecosystem. It takes also some willpower. And I think now we're seeing that willpower. We are seeing entrepreneurs creating companies. We are seeing this is like you not going to the US. Everything is positive. It just takes time. I'm adamant that we'll manage to do something interesting.”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, Europe is paying the price of not setting up a VC system in the 60s, but setting it up like 40 years later or even 50 years later.”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Guess the chance it has is that it's a revolution. It's changing the way we do software. And so as every revolution, it opens a lot of opportunity for new actors. And there's no reason why there shouldn't be an actor that was created in Europe that could grow pretty fast. And the mission that we gave ourselves, we have the talent, capital can cross oceans without too much problem. We have the market. The market is more fragmented than in the US, for sure. The ecosystem, the digital native ecosystem is definitely smaller, but it exists and it's growing. There's local opportunity for business development. On the talent side, we can hire 23, 24 years old people that we can onboard in four months and they operate as well as any software engineer in the valley. So people are quite talented here. And so we managed to keep them and to convince them not to go to the US. We have a lot of opportunities.”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good question. It depends on the term. China is a bit hard. For us, it's even hard to operate in China. I mean, we don't operate in China because you can't really operate in US and China without being a very, very large corporation. And so you need to make some choices”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess governance matters, though it is important for a young company like us is to be under the control of the founders because there's a lot of things to be invented and vision can only be carried by them. We have very good governance there, a very simple and clean governance that makes us a for-profit company growing a business to actually push the science frontier. This is something that we're very attached to, being able to control the company, leverage our funding partners appropriately to grow in different parts of the world, in the US, in the EU. It has been critical as well. So it does matter in the sense that we want to have partners that are supportive and long-term because we are in a field that is fast moving, where we don't know yet exactly where the value will accrue. And so being flexible and being smart is definitely a requirement when you raise money.”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can't really scale that much quicker because you can't raise like 2 billion on the seed round. I mean, at least you couldn't in 2023. Maybe you can today, but you can only hire that fast. You can only scale your infrastructure to manage more GPUs that fast, and you can only raise capital that fast. So there's some acceleration constraints that are pretty hard to fight and that are pretty much the first principles of starting a business.”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've had a few delays with our compute providers for sure that has been a barrier. So the last answer to your question is to be taken with a grain of salt. We are still bottlenecked by compute for sure, but that's because we don't have many of it. We have 1.5k 800, which is a few percent, I think, of the capacity of our competitors. And so that's definitely a bottleneck that is going to improve significantly in the coming months.”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the good thing is that capital is correlated to compute, that then compute is correlated with quality. It's not completely dependent on it. And as I've said, there's some strong opportunity for providing models that are the best of their class. They might be sufficient to actually solve certain use cases. That's where we're playing, in addition to being on the scaling part, because obviously you do need to keep, stay relevant. You need to keep your technical team motivated and to keep your technical team motivated. You need to give them the experimental bet they need to make new discoveries and to progress science. And that is where you need compute in addition to growing the model across time. I mean, we're growing our compute like every company's. We are convinced that we don't need to grow at the same rate because there's a lot of barriers that are not compute related, that are appearing on the way and that we're already seeing. We think we can scale and we are also convinced that on the efficiency”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's moving into core budget for customer support, for instance, where like areas where the application of AI is pretty obvious, it's definitely moving into core budgets. It's also at the experimental stage in many other functions. And for core applications in the industry, the telecom industry and in healthcare, this is still in the playground. But I think it's going to evolve in the next year.”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's a general phenomenon in tech that you always overestimate the speed but underestimate the impact. I think it's probably occurring today. It's slightly different in the sense that there's some executive support for pushing generative AI solutions even in Europe. There's some delay compared to the US market for sure. I wouldn't say it's very significant. It's one year maximum in terms of delay. The challenge here is that it's a technology that can take many forms.”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stop thinking about how they are going to change all of their product using AI as the premise. I think the existence of a very clever agents because you can build very clever agents today. Assuming that presence and working backwards to understand the consequence in terms of organization. Not thinking about generative AI as a way to increasing productivity in world processing, but rather as a way to change completely the way you operate your core business, which usually involves taking models and customizing them pretty heavily to create the differentiation that you will need in like five years' time when everybody will have adopted the technology in its core business.”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Depends on the enterprises, but some have been early adopters and are using a lot of mistral models in production. So for sure they're ready enough in order to bring them to the next level of putting things into large-scale production, et cetera. I think they're still lacking some product around managing correctly load balancing, customizing the models. Because you can do it with DIY solutions. But if you want to make it robust enough and scalable enough, it's actually not easy. And if you want to actually increase the quality of the models, the custom models, the recipe are a bit hard to set. The most technical savvy enterprises are definitely ready for it, and there's actually many use cases that are in production using open source models. Now, in order to widen the adoption, there's definitely some tooling to be brought to the market.”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think it's true. Distribution is very important. A shortcut to distribution is to create demand through open source models.”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of several months to go to market team goes faster, shorter cycles, let's say. But I think so far we've managed to go-to-market people that have some technical interest and technical people that have some business interest. And I think that's how you ensure that you don't have silos at the end of the day.”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think some important thing is to create empathy, so ensure that the science team also understands the problems that the users are facing. It improves the science because at the end of the day, the general corpus technology we are making is only general purpose if you identify the use cases. So that comes back to the earlier discussion we had. So ensuring that the science team has some relatively direct exposure to the product and to the business team is actually important to make them understand where the model is failing and how it could be improved significantly. And on the other side, the go-to-market team has to understand it's a very technical sales motion because you're selling not the product, but you're selling something that is going to power the product. So you need to tell the customer how these things should be used to actually make something that brings value to the business. And that only goes through strong enablement of the go-to-market team. So I think it's a challenge. They don't operate on the same scale. The science team has cycles.”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Opportunistically there was opportunity to grow the business using that asset as something that we were selling. It's still the case that we're growing our business on top of commercial models in particular. There's also a good way of cementing some strategic relationships with cloud providers. And it's going to be to continue to be the case. We still intend to be a leader in the open source part and to have some unique assets that we can license and to have some unique platform that developers can use.”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We also have large models that are open now. Depends on the threshold for small and large, but 8 times 22B is actually relatively large by any standard.”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It moves the value a little higher than the model itself. It moved the value to the platform and customization part, which is really, I guess, something that we're expecting. And it accelerates that process”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It looks like you're round tripping, yes. I don't know about that deal particularly, but it makes sense from both perspectives.”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Guess it's an important aspect. There is a strategic dependency from the AI layer on the cloud providers and on NVIDIA. The competition is heating up as well, but it's effectively important. It's effectively useful when you develop a software to also know the hardware provider because they can help you out in optimizing for the hardware. It's useful when you're selling your developer platform to enterprises to bring that platform through their usual provider, which happens to be a cloud provider. So there's definitely some important collaboration to be made there.”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think it is to be relevant in that space is a very hard topic. You need to be dominating on the cost by AutoFront. And there's only a few companies that are currently well positioned. So you can try and do something, but if it's not relevant, if it's strictly dominated by another model or another technology, then you have a problem. There's a few barriers that are pretty hard to face that you need to raise sufficient capital to have enough compute and be relevant. You need to have people that knows how to train models, which is still a scarce resource. And then you need to have a good brand because as you've said, it's highly competitive. And this is not something that comes out of thin air. So I think there's still a lot of defensibility on the market. Although there is a lot of noise, which is different.”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Usually the value tends to accrue where most of the difficult part is and most of the defensibility is. It was for a while it has been on foundational models. I think it's obviously evolving with time and there's no mode that isn't disappearing or evolving with time. That will remain the part where most of the innovation will be made and where most of the, well, at least a significant part of the accrued value will accrue.”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doing the most margin at the moment at that point. The cloud providers are pretty much at cost. LLM providers were not at cost, hopefully, but the margin that are known to be lower than the typical software margins. AI application makers, some of them, the ones that are most used, seems to be doing a pretty good margin. I think it's going to be quite a moving space. As I've said, the capacity of models makes the cost of making an application lower and lower. I don't think there's any way in which the marginal cost and the margin of the most important part of that technology, which is really the foundational layer, becomes zero because otherwise there's definitely going to be a fairness problem.”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Brand seems to be critical, and this is something that we have learned on the way Use certain models because they are known to be good. You can't afford to evaluate everything out there. And so having some form of community vouching is super important. The approach we took with APHD distributed models has contributed to what I think has become, well, at least a known brand. And we believe that it's definitely going to be important. Brand is important because trust is important in that domain. And open source brings trust in terms that provide some trusted brand.”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For instance, do care about ensuring that the procriot data they have is accessed in something that they can completely secure. And that's the reason why we deployed our platform on Azure and AWS, for instance, that is bringing the security layer that they need.”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They care about cost for sure. They care about customization, being able to modify the model that will on that aspect, I think we are only scratching the surface of what can be done, like the fine-tuning aspect that has been the go-to solution is probably a little too low level from what we should be doing. They care about being able to deploy anywhere. So they operate in a certain space, in a certain cloud. They might be operating on-prem. They might have some edge devices to deploy too, and they want to be able to put that technology there. And so they also care about portability, which in turn offers data control, usually LLMs, AI becomes very useful when you connect it to knowledge bases or to anything that is related to certain business. In that respect, it becomes a very sensitive part of your application because it sees everything. It sees all of the data you have. And so enterprise.”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We are not a verticalized company. We started Mistral to bring value to developers and to bring freedom to developers. So when we started, there was basically one API out there, soon too. And the field of generative AI was starting to look like it would be very centralized around a couple of players. And we took this platform approach where the model that we're making and the technology that we are making, we are allowing developers to own it, to modify it. And so bringing freedom to developers and AI application makers is, I think, the best way in distributing generative AI as widely as possible, which is our objective as a company, making AI ubiquitous, bringing frontier AI into everyone's head is the reason why we started. We did a good job at it, but this open source part was, I believe, a good enabler for the community and made people realize that they could build very interesting technology by modifying the models themselves instead of depending on the APIs of a couple of providers.”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That the model part is still going to be big enough and that we need to build this platform on top of that because that's where we are going to enable all of the vertical applications that will be interesting for humanity.”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's two opposing directions. The first is that the models are getting better and better. So it means that creating a verticalized application, as long as you have the data for it and a good understanding of the use case you're facing, is going to be easier and easier if you have access to the tools that facilitate it. So that's the first aspect, which would make me think that the application layer is going to grow thinner and thinner. But then there's also the fact that the moles are getting cheaper and cheaper because we managed to compress them because we make a lot of improvement on their efficiency. And so that means that effectively this plus the competitive pressure there is on the model layer means that the price around the model, the dollar per intelligence unit, let's say, is definitely going to reduce. So there's these two aspects of growing ability, compressed price, which on one side says that the application layer is going to grow thin, and on the other side says that the model part is going to grow thin. So for us, the approach that we are taking”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a very hard job to make a specialized model. So it's actually very tied to the way you create a pre-trained model. And so bringing the tools that allow to do it in a fullproof way, so allowing developers to create a customized model that are performing very well at their task, but that doesn't require expert AI knowledge, which is hard to find, is definitely something where we're insisting.”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we believe that. And actually these vertical models are not going to be out there. They're going to be built by the application makers because the only way you can make a low latency model that is super good at a specific task is to get rid of the general purpose aspect because a general purpose model is a bit bloated. You can think about everything. But if you want your model to think thoroughly about a specific topic so that you can call it in your AI application while maintaining a good user experience with low latency”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And oftentimes you're a bit out of domain compared to the data you have. And that's where you should identify a gap and you should try and fill it out. Pushing the model capabilities become also a question of mapping where they're failing and figuring out ways of improving it. So for instance, they're failing at mathematics, how you improve their mathematic thinking, how do you improve the way they demonstrate theorems? The answer to this is very different from the way you answer the question to how do you improve medical diagnosis in French, for instance.”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the data quality is a constraint. How do you leverage the entire world knowledge and ensure that the model follows a certain path toward learning more and more complex things? That's a very important part. And I think it has been a neglected part. There's obviously compute, but given the amount of data you have, we have at hand, compute is already running into, is no longer the bottleneck. The bottleneck is more the data at that point. If you look at text-to-text models. And so the question is, how do you refine the data? And how do you feed very high quality data to the model itself in order to improve it over time? And I think in that setting, it becomes a bit one bottleneck that is associated to bringing better model performance is the question of how do you evaluate this performances. You need to have very good evaluation that targets very specific topics, like you want the model to be good at helping diagnosis in a hospital, but in French.”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Intelligence that you have to figure out what the application should be doing. And that is not commoditized at all. There's no recipe that allows to go from a general purpose model to a model that is super good and better than all of the others at your specific task. This is a missing piece in the puzzle. And that's one of the aspects where we're putting our strength on the product side.”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the end state is to have more features on developer platforms that allows to do customization, that allows to make low latency models that serve a certain purpose, that allows to evaluate them and to improve them over time. And so the model is only like a tiny part. I mean, it's a central part, but it remains a tiny part of an application. What you want to do across time when you deploy an application that you're exposed to users, you want to ensure that it works, ensure that its latency reduces over time, ensure that its quality increases over time. And so I think that's the end state models are effectively going to be a starting point for any AI application developer. They need to be surrounded by tools, by a lifecycle management platform, basically, and that's the one thing that we started to build. Like general purpose models are a bit undifferentiated, but the differentiation that you need to create for your application comes from the data you put into it, the user feedback that you gather.”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's an open question. I believe there is. I believe we can make models that are much better for a certain size. But it's as open a question as can you make a much better model on the same kind of data by making it bigger and training it for longer. Things you need to discover them also on the way. You can try and predict the kind of performance you reach out you will achieve. At the end of the day, you need to try it out. So that's the, I mean, it's really much a research field. You need to do the research and you need to try things.”
2024-04-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source