(B) I had the opportunity to listen first to Arthur Mensch, the CEO of Mistral AI, when he came for a talk in March at the Nvidia GTC conference. I spent my evening yesterday night listening to his audition to the French Senat. He was quite interesting, and in particular he discussed the following:

• He described the strategy of Mistral focusing on open source models
• He gave a fair description of the capability of language models today, and what we can expect from those models in the future
• He discussed the challenges of starting a high-growth start-up in France and Europe, and in particular:
  • The challenges of raising quickly large amount of funds from investors in Europe
  • The lack of flexibility of French and European labor laws that limit quick hiring of experienced professionals
  • Expectations and compensations should be the same for a high-growth French start-up and a Silicon Valley-based one
  • He believes that France has talents with its engineers from Grandes-Ecoles and their training in maths
• He touched many times on some of the reasons why Europe has lagged behind the U.S over the last 20 years (I would say the last 30 years) to develop a vibrant technology sector, and why AI as an inflection point in the technology industry might be an opportunity
• He shared his views of the value and benefits of language models in particular with examples in health care and education – his recurrent point is that AI is improving productivity for a number of tasks in many sectors, and that AI is assisting and augmenting the capability of human beings
• He believes that it is very important for researchers in the public sector to access ML models and so funding of public research is important, and having still nuclear power plants in France is an advantage to power data centers (it is unfortunate that none of the large providers of LLMs in the U.S. has really address the environmental impact of LLMs or even mention it as of today)

Here is the full audition:

Note: The picture above is Arthur Mensch.

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