Softbank considers investment in Mistral AI

Japanese Softbank Reportedly considering investing in French artificial intelligence (AI) startup Mistral AI.

Tech giants are interested in Support Mistral Bloomberg News reported on Thursday (March 14), citing sources familiar with the matter, that the deal will be done in the next round of fundraising. The people said any deal could value Mistral in excess of $2 billion.

PYMNTS reached out to both companies for comment but did not receive a response.

As Bloomberg noted, Mistral, founded by Meta and Google veterans, is positioning itself as a European challenger to U.S. dominance in AI.

The company was rated as Approximately 2 billion dollars in December last year following a $415 million funding round.

Microsoft announced last month that it would invest $16 million in Mistral while also making the startup’s latest model available to users of its Azure cloud service.

This partnership attracted the attention of the European Commission, which announced that it would investigate Microsoft’s dealings with Mistral as follows: part of a wider investigation Toward partnerships between big tech and AI companies.

“What’s emerging is further proof that we don’t need to weaken our safety ambitions.” [general purpose AI] “Following legitimate but strong lobbying from companies like Mistral, a model with systemic risks was introduced,” said Brando Benifay, a member of the European Parliament who oversaw the drafting of the EU’s AI law.

As for SoftBank, the company is led by Masayoshi Son, who last year predicted that it would be known as artificial general intelligence (AGI), a computer system that can: consistent with human thought And reasoning power will be ten times stronger than all humans by the end of the decade.

“Take advantage of it or be left behind,” Son said.

Meanwhile, PYMNTS wrote earlier this week about the growing popularity of AI small language models (SLMs), including Mistral 7b.

“One Advantages of a small LLM It’s their efficiency. “The increasing energy consumption of LLMs has raised concerns among experts and environmentalists,” the report states. “As these AI models become more sophisticated and widely used, the computational power required to train and deploy them will lead to significant increases in electricity usage, leading to an increase in the industry’s carbon footprint. I am.”

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