Paris-based startup Mistral AI is ramping up its new focus on Industry 4.0 in a bid to embed generative AI in complex enterprise environments, starting mostly with IT-facing operations, moving eventually into more sensitive OT affairs. It has just signed with Italian automotive manufacturer Stellantis to start a “company-wide” deployment of a custom industrial version of its large language model (LLM) system, trained on domain-specific data from Stellantis.
The deal follows a year of pilots at the Italian firm, and comes on the heels of a new €1.7 billion funding round, headed by Dutch semiconductor equipment manufacturer ASML. The new money will finance its R&D work around “custom decentralized frontier AI solutions that solve the most complex engineering and industrial problems”, it said. Others in the Series C round included DST Global, Andreessen Horowitz, Bpifrance, and Nvidia, among others.
Mistral AI is in the process of embedding its own architects, engineers, and scientists within enterprise customers to develop domain-specific generative AI systems for them, which in turn embed their industrial and proprietary data and processes – as reported in The Wall Street Journal last week. Arthur Mensch, co-founder and chief executive at the firm, told the Journal: “At some point, the capabilities of the frontier model can only be increased if we partner.”
The point is that general-purpose frontier models from the likes of Mistral AI, alongside higher-profile US firms like OpenAI and Anthropic, have reached a “saturation point”, having practically exhausted publicly-available training data in a bid to “compress human knowledge and make models increase across the board”, explained Mensch. The new frontier, and the real monetization opportunity, is inside enterprises – and Mistral AI is going direct.
Source: rcrwireless.com
