French president Emmanuel Macron has spent years dreaming aloud of a homegrown artificial intelligence giant. The AI disruption is coming, he told WIRED in 2018, and “I want to be part of it.” After that interview, he campaigned hard to turn France into a startup nation, home to the kind of companies that could rival American and Chinese behemoths. Then in April 2023 an answer to Macron’s ambition appeared in the form of bushy-eyebrowed entrepreneur Arthur Mensch and the launch of his company Mistral AI.
Mistral’s ChatGPT equivalent, Le Chat, was met with feverishly high expectations when it launched in February 2024, and it did not take long for comparisons
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