How Mistral Is Building Frontier AI for the Enterprise | NVIDIA AI Podcast Ep. 301

The benefits, for everyone involved really is that we will have a new, open source frontier model that everyone can build up on. Welcome to the NVIDIA AI podcast. I'm Noah Kravitz. My guest today is Tim LaCroix. Tim is cofounder and CTO of Mistral AI, and we're here to talk about Mistral's philosophy on open models, their collaboration with NVIDIA and the Neematron Coalition, and their new framework, Forge. Tim, welcome to the NVIDIA AI podcast. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us. Thank you for having me. So maybe we can start with you telling the audience a little bit about Mistral and about your role there, from the beginning as cofounder and, of course, as CTO. Sure. So we started Mistral about two and a half years ago, with Guillaume and Arthur. And at the start, we were all three of us fresh of our researchers role, in big tech and what we knew how to build were models. And so that was, what we started with, and we showed the world that we knew how to train models, that we could be efficient, with the infrastructure, and that we could deliver high quality models that we decided to release open source. So that's that was our our claim to fame. But our goal, as an enter as a company was to, provide the value of these models to enterprise. And so quickly, we realized that just chucking weights over the wall wouldn't achieve that. And so we went ahead and built, a service part of the company that would, go with our customers and help them realize value, with those models. We also started building a platform, to inference, those models and, enable our customers to really, actually use them. And that platform, has grown a lot over the years with, the industry, really. With the rise of, connections and, the need for more context, we've added MCP connections. We've added a lot of, nicely to the platform to handle authentication and things like this. With the rise of agentic AI, we're also adding a lot of hosting capabilities. So, our customers will require to be, easily, to easily deploy things like sandboxes, for their MCP microservices. They might also need, some sort of hosting and auto scaling there. And so we're really building up, that, those platform capabilities, in a way that stays, something that we can deploy on prem for the customer and where they have full control. And so through this, we've also seen the need, to, extend, at the lower layer, into infrastructure. And so June of last year, we also announced missile compute, which is our initiative, where we're building our own infrastructure and, standing up our own data centers. And we've started to train on them, and it's infrastructure that we can also, ship to our customers. Amazing. How how long has the company been around now? Two years and a half. Two years and a …