Mistral AI, the parisian rival of OpenAI, just closed a $415 million funding round at a $2B valuation, after releasing an open source MoE (Mixture of Experts) m

Mistral AI, the parisian rival of OpenAI, just closed a $415 million funding round at a $2B valuation, after releasing an open source MoE (Mixture of Experts) model that beats GPT-3.5 and other SOTA 70B models like Llama-70B on most benchmarks. This is an impressive achievement for a 8 months old startup. I have to admit that I was a bit skeptical about Mistral when they first raised hundreds of millions in VC funding without any product. But now I am impressed. That’s why I decided to take a closer look at their strategy.