- Mistral’s CEO, Arthur Mensch, said countries should develop their own AI infrastructure.
- Mensch compared AI’s economic impact to how electricity transformed the world.
- The French startup competes with LLM companies like OpenAI, DeepSeek, and Anthropic.
Arthur Mensch said that every country should set up its own artificial intelligence infrastructure because of what he expects will be a huge economic shift.
“It will have an impact on GDP of every country in the double digits in the coming years,” Mensch, the CEO of French AI startup Mistral, said in an episode of the A16z podcast uploaded on Thursday.
Gross Domestic Product is a common measure of the value of goods and services produced in a country.
Mensch said nations that don’t set up their own AI systems risk money flowing to other countries.
He compared AI to the advent of electricity: “100 years ago, if you weren’t building electricity factories, you were preparing yourself to buy it from your neighbors, which, at the end of the day, isn’t great because it creates some dependencies.”
The CEO added that AI also differs from electricity in some key areas. It is a content-producing technology that could pass on a country’s values and culture, which is why he said AI requires more involvement than electricity.
Mensch, who cofounded Mistral in 2023, appeared on the sovereign AI-focused episode with Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang. The two CEOs agreed that every country needs to find a national AI strategy and build its own AI capabilities because the technology will be used widely, including in public service, agriculture, and defense. Huang has made similar comments before, including directly to government officials.
Mistral, founded by former DeepMind and Meta researchers, is building large language models and has released a generative AI chatbot called “Le Chat.” It competes directly with OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek and says its models can run much faster than its peers.
One of Europe’s most valuable startups, Mistral was last valued at $6.2 billion in a June funding round that included General Capital, Lightspeed, and Andreessen Horowitz. In January, Mensch said he plans to take the company public instead of getting acquired.
Mensch also strongly advocates for keeping large language models open-source and reiterated his stance on the podcast. Those who support open source say it allows technology to develop rapidly and democratically since anyone can modify and redistribute the code. On the other hand, advocates for closed-source models, like OpenAI, argue that they’re more secure because the code is kept private.
“Between 2010 and 2020, there was an acceleration of progress because every lab was building on top of each other and that’s something that kind of disappeared with the first large language models from Open AI in particular,” he said. “Spinning back that open flywheel of ‘I contribute something and then another lab is contributing something else and then we iterate from that’ is the reason why we created Mistral.”
Last month, Mensch said Chinese startup DeepSeek’s new model was a boost for the open-source world.
