'European ChatGPT' French Startup Mistral "Aiming for IPO, Not Sale"

French AI startup Mistral AI, which created the 'European version of ChatGPT,' announced plans to secure its independence through a stock listing.

Founder of French AI startup Mistral AI, Arthur Mensch. Photo by Yonhap News.

On the 21st (local time), Mistral co-founder Arthur Mensch revealed this plan in an interview with Bloomberg TV at the World Economic Forum (WEF) held in Davos, Switzerland.

Mensch emphasized that although major American competitors are aggressively trying to absorb the talent needed for AI development, Mistral is "not for sale."

He said, "We established the company in Europe, leaving behind the major US IT firms, to show that Europe can have its own voice," and when asked if they plan to go public, he replied, "Of course, we plan to."

After nine months of research, Mistral released Mistral Large, a large language model (LLM) with performance close to OpenAI's ChatGPT-4, in February last year. They also launched the chatbot Le Chat based on Mistral Large.

Mensch, who graduated from the prestigious French engineering Grandes ?coles ?cole Polytechnique and ?cole Normale Sup?rieure and worked in Google's AI division, quit his job and founded Mistral in April 2023 with two friends from engineering school.