Arthur Mensch, the CEO at Mistral AI, recently dismissed claims put forward by western AI bosses that China is behind on developing AI technologies. He went on to highlight the country’s growing credentials in open-source systems.
Speaking to Bloomberg TV at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Mensch said it is a “fairy tale” China is lagging, adding many US CEOs would be “stressing” about advances made by the Asian nation around open source. He was responding to comments made during the event by Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and Anthropic counterpart Dario Amodei.
Bloomberg reported Hassabis claimed China was around six months behind western countries in frontier model development, while Amodei hailed a US policy of restricting the sale of Nvidia chips to China, which he claimed is slowing progress. Amodei added selling high-end AI chips to the country would be like “selling nuclear weapons to North Korea”.
Spearheading competition
Mensch insisted China “does well without Nvidia chips” and his company is spearheading competition against the nation in the open-source arena. He said it is important for Mistral to continue to develop open-source technology, with Europe having the ability to train its own models key.
“We don’t think we should rely on open-source Chinese models in critical applications. We need to be able to create our own models and sell to enterprises.”
During the interview, Mensch revealed Mistral AI has a $1 billion revenue target for 2026 and is due to spend the same amount on capex. As well as a big focus on enterprise clients, Mistral is also open to acquisitions, he added.
Source: Mobile World Live
Image Credit: Stock Image
