‘Godfather of AI’ Yann LeCun thinks that Mistral AI’s successful launch of its latest large-language model has set open-source AI models on the path to overtake proprietary ones from the likes of OpenAI, Google, and others.
What Happened: LeCun, Meta Platforms Inc.’s (NASDAQ:META) chief AI scientist, thinks open-source models could drive the future of AI.
“Open source AI models are on a path to overtake proprietary models,” LeCun said.
He was responding to a post highlighting the recent rise in open-source AI models, with the most recent success being Mistral AI’s latest model.
Mistral AI is a French company that raised $415 million in its latest funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Salesforce Inc. (NYSE:CRM), among others. The six-month-old AI firm’s valuation is estimated to be $2 billion.
See Also: It’s Not Just You, ChatGPT Has Indeed Become Lazier: OpenAI Says A Fix Is Coming
Mistral AI’s massive fundraising comes after the firm launched its latest AI model, eclipsing the Microsoft Corp.-backed (NASDAQ:MSFT) OpenAI’s GPT 3.5 launched in Jan. 2023.
The Paris-based AI company released the results of a benchmark that shows its AI model beats Meta’s Llama 2 as well as GPT 3.5 in several aspects.
This model is also more efficient and can be run locally on significantly less powerful resources – AI models are infamous for requiring extensive graphics power. Still, Mistral AI’s model can run on computers without a GPU.
Moreover, Mistral AI’s model has no guardrails whatsoever for users worried about censorship in AI models like GPT-4, Google’s Gemini-powered Bard, and others.
Why It Matters: With the AI revolution on a massive upward trajectory and companies like OpenAI and Alphabet Inc.’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL), Google increasingly resorting to closed-source AI models, the launch of a powerful and efficient open-source AI model is more important than ever before.
While Mistral AI still has a long way to go to catch up to OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo, Google’s Palm-2, and Anthropic’s Claude 2, its recent success excites AI experts.
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