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French intelligence startup Mistral has struck a multimillion-euro deal with Agence France-Presse to include thousands of news articles in its chatbot, positioning the tie as Europe's bulwark against fact-checking attacks from its rivals in Silicon Valley. .
The collaboration between AFP, one of the world's oldest news agencies, and Mistral is the first of its kind for two Parisian companies, when many media groups decide to protest licensing agreements with AI companies or take legal action regarding copyright. crime.
The deal, announced Thursday, will feed more than 2,000 AFP news articles in six languages every day on Mistral's chatbot, Le Chat, which allows users to answer questions and help create documents.
“It is important to have such agreements to have a well-founded knowledge of the proven content,” Arthur Mensch, co-founder and chief executive of Mistral, told the Financial Times.
The companies presented the agreement as a way to ensure Mistral's chatbot is based on verifiable information. It comes as the Meta and Elon Musk's X have pulled back from content moderation together declared the main point of “liberal speech”in preparation for the incoming US president Donald Trump.
“What it tells us is that Europe needs to unite to protect a thriving tech sector,” Mensch said of the recent moves by Silicon Valley rivals.
“'Liberal speech' is being heavily leveraged against Europe and there is this Big Tech offensive on. European regulation,” AFP chief Fabrice Fries told the FT. “Precisely this type of agreement, in the current context, shows that the AI player has bet on independent, fact-based journalism.”
On Wednesday, Google announced a similar agreement with the Associated Press, a longtime partner in the search engine, to display newswire feeds in its Gemini AI app.
Mistral raised $600 million new funding at a valuation of 6 billion euros in June last year, making it Europe's most popular AI company and the continent's only startup to develop large-scale language models competing with OpenAI, Anthropic and Elon Musk's xAI.
Mensch said Mistral offered a partnership model that was “more open” and “shared value equally” than its US competitors.
Fries said AFP has discussed licensing deals with several AI Companies in recent months, “but only Mistral has felt like it was a real alliance, not just a sales contract”.
The commercial terms of Mistral's deal with AFP, which runs for several years, were not disclosed. But unlike similar deals between US-based OpenAI and other media groups, Fries said the deal is not a “one-size-fits-all” deal for the data on which the big language model is trained.
OpenAI has struck content deals with media groups including News Corp, Axel Springer and Times of Money. On Wednesday, the San Francisco-based group led by Sam Altman said it would fund new US newsrooms for online publisher Axios, as well as a feed from ChatGPT.
Fries said that dealing with AI companies was “still an open battle” and he was closely following the US legal case between OpenAI and the New York Times regarding claims of copyright infringement, which is set to set a new precedent for the value of the work. publishers in AI modeling groups.
For AFP, the deal with Mistral represents a revenue opportunity that will be lost as its virtual reality deal with Meta expires.
The US social media group said last week it plans to switch to community-based fact-checking in the US. AFP has 150 fact-checking reporters, according to Fries.
AFP has made around 20 million euros by 2024 from technology platforms, including viewing the likes of Meta and content licensing agreements with platforms including Google, which accounted for around 10 percent of its advertising revenue last year.
“Now clearly this pocket of revenue that has helped us grow and show profitability for the past seven years is in jeopardy,” Fries said. “Obviously we need to find new technology players as a source of revenue and AI players can replace platforms.”