These new AI start-ups building LLM, no billions behind

3 innovation and digital news in 1 minute. Every Monday. Episode 356

Mistral AI out of the bush with Mistral 7B

Three experienced founders from Google DeepMind and Meta AI founded Mistral AI and got funding of €100m within 4 weeks. It was big in the tech news. Now, out with a first LLM called Mistral 7B, open-source on Apache. Commercial version is in work. Opinion: 7B means 7 billion parameters (words and word groups). This is lower than some competitors. However Mistral claims a high performance at the level of Llama2 13B from Meta AI. Still, not very clear what the USP is, apart from supporting a European champion. BTW: a completely new identity.

Is a new champion born?

Productivity gains, the pitch of newly founded Writer.

$100m is the founding ticket that Writer got (like Mistral AI). Writer builds its own LLM on top of NLP (Natural Language Processing) and ML (Machine Learning) models. Writer claims a comprehensive approach — in writing. Covers copywriting, summaries and compliance with editorial or brand style. Opinion: Writer is an enterprise API that can be integrated in any platform, from Word to Figma. Writer claims an impressive list of clients: Cisco, L’Oréal, Peleton, Intuit etc. An interesting discovery and alternative to the big players, in a specific area, writing.

Any one used Writer? Any feedbacks? Sounds like a great solution.

Imbue for reasoning

We are going a step further as far as generative AI is concerned — with reasoning. This is the ambition of Imbue, a research lab that gathered $200m to tackle logic. They have not published anything yet and declare to first select scope and areas where they can develop reasoning. Opinion: These areas are 3D and coding. It sounds mysterious altogether, but the ambition is big and reasoning is the very big next step for AI. Never ever feasible without a Large Language Model, which they do develop themselves.

Imbue — can you write and analyse our weekly news?