Mistral signs an AFP agreement for a reality-based chatbot for “free speech” competitors.

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French artificial intelligence startup Mistral has struck a multi-million-euro deal with Agence France-Presse to include thousands of media articles in its chatbot, cementing ties as Europe’s defense against fact-checking attacks from its rivals in Silicon Valley. .

The partnership between AFP, one of the world’s oldest news agencies, and Mistral is the first of its kind for the two Paris-based companies, while many media groups are decide to strike licensing agreements with AI companies or take legal action over copyright. a crime.

The agreement, announced on Thursday, will feed more than 2,000 people AFP News articles in six languages ​​every day on Mistral’s chatbot, Le Chat, which allows users to answer questions and help with writing documents.

“It is important to have such agreements to have a well-founded information on guaranteed issues,” Arthur Mensch, co-founder and chief executive of Mistral, told the Financial Times.

The companies introduced the partnership as a way to ensure that Mistral’s chatbot is based on verified information. It comes as Meta and Elon Musk’s X have gone way back in terms of measuring content and proclaimed the importance of “free speech”in the run-up to the inauguration of the incoming US president Donald Trump.

“What it tells us is that Europe must come together to protect its thriving technology sector,” Mensch said of the latest moves by Silicon Valley rivals.

“’Freedom of speech’ is being used a lot against Europe, and there is something offensive about Big Tech. European control,” AFP chief executive Fabrice Fries told the FT. “Exactly this type of sale, in the current situation, shows that the AI ​​player is betting on independent professional journalism, based on reality.”

On Wednesday, Google announced a similar partnership with the Associated Press, a longtime partner in its search engine, to showcase news feeds on its Gemini AI tool.

Mistral has raised €600mn in new money with a valuation of 6 billion euros in June last year, making it the most prominent AI company in Europe and the continent’s only startup creating large-scale language models that compete with OpenAI, Anthropic and Elon Musk’s XAI.

Mensch said Mistral offered a partnership model that was “more open” and “equally shared value” than its US competitors.

Fries said AFP has negotiated licensing agreements with several AI companies in recent months, “but only with Mistral did we have the impression that it was a real partnership, not just a sales agreement”.

The commercial terms of Mistral’s deal with the AFP, which spans many years, were not disclosed. But unlike similar deals struck between US-based OpenAI and other media groups, Fries said the deal “wasn’t a one-time solution” for those big data types. of the language in which it was trained.

OpenAI has established news partnerships with media groups including News Corp, Axel Springer and Financial Times. On Wednesday, the San Francisco-based group led by Sam Altman said it would support new US local newsrooms for online publisher Axios, with the proposal joining ChatGPT.

Fries said that dealing with AI companies “is still an open battle” and that he was following a US legal case between OpenAI and the New York Times over allegations of copyright infringement, which intended to provide a new model on the quality of work. contributors to AI modeling groups.

For the AFP, the deal with Mistral also represents an opportunity to make money that will be lost when its fact-checking contract with Meta expires.

The US social media group said last week that it plans to switch to social-based data analysis in the US. The AFP has 150 journalists working for Meta on fact-checking, according to Fries.

AFP has made around 20 million euros in revenue by 2024 from technology platforms, including monitoring the likes of Meta and content licensing deals with platforms including Google, which accounting for 10 percent of its business revenue last year.

“It is now clear that this fund that has helped us grow and show profitability for the past seven years is at risk,” Fries said. “It is clear that we need to find new players in technology as a source of income and AI actors can take the stage.”