On June 12, a day after OpenAI announced a partnership with Apple, its European rival, Mistral AI, an AI startup backed by Microsoft and Nvidia, also announced that it had raised €600 million in funding, bringing its valuation to €6 billion.

Reportedly, this investment was led by the renowned American venture capital firm General Catalyst, raising funds through a mix of equity and debt in a Series B round. The structure consists of €468 million in equity and €132 million in debt. The list of investors includes Lightspeed Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia, Samsung Venture Investment Corporation, and Salesforce Ventures.

Notably, a year ago, when Mistral AI was newly founded, it received $112 million in seed funding. By December of last year, this figure had reached €2 billion. After this round of financing, Mistral AI is valued at €6 billion, showing remarkable efficiency. According to Mistral AI researcher Devendra Chaplot, since December of last year, Mistral AI's valuation has grown about threefold; over the past year, Mistral AI's valuation has increased approximately 25 times.

Mistral AI, a newcomer in the AI industry, has just celebrated its first anniversary. The company was co-founded by alumni from Meta and Google DeepMind and is still developing foundational models. Their goal is to create products that can directly compete with leading models like OpenAI's GPT-4, Anthropic's Claude 3, and Meta's Llama 3.

Unlike OpenAI, Mistral AI conditionally offers open-source licenses. For example, its products Mistral 7B, Mistral 8x7B, and Mistral 8x22B all have Apache 2.0 open-source licenses. Apart from requiring user attribution, Mistral AI imposes no restrictions on users' use or replication of the code. Additionally, Mistral AI's most advanced product, Mistral Large, is considered a proprietary model for non-commercial use.

Of course, Mistral AI is not entirely philanthropic. One significant source of revenue for the company is API interface fees. Additionally, Mistral AI offers generative AI services and has a chatbot assistant named Le Chat, similar to other chatbots on the market, which is currently in a free trial phase. Mistral AI also provides cloud services, establishing a distribution network through partnerships with cloud service providers like Microsoft Azure to generate profit. Notably, Microsoft is also a minor shareholder in Mistral AI.

Regarding this round of financing, Mistral AI co-founder and CEO Arthur Mensch stated, "I am delighted to see our new and existing investors' renewed confidence in our business, providing new support for our expansion. This new round of financing places us in a unique position to drive the forefront of AI development and bring cutting-edge technology to everyone, ensuring the company's continued independence, fully controlled by the founders."

Interestingly, two weeks ago, Elon Musk also raised $6 billion for his startup xAI. Additionally, a few days ago, OpenAI received $13 billion in financial support from Microsoft. With multiple forces at play, perhaps the battle of large AI models is about to commence?