
Mistral Partners with AFP to Improve Accuracy of Le Chat
In a significant move for the AI industry, Paris-based artificial intelligence company Mistral has announced a groundbreaking partnership with Agence France-Presse (AFP), one of the world’s largest news agencies. This deal aims to improve the accuracy of answers provided by Le Chat, Mistral’s AI-powered chatbot.
The announcement comes just a day after Google finalized a content-sharing agreement with The Associated Press, signaling growing interest among AI companies to collaborate with major news organizations.
It’s the first time Mistral has entered into a partnership of this nature, traditionally a company known for its expertise in large language models. The deal shows that Mistral is more than just a foundation model maker and wants to be a leading player in practical applications of AI.
As part of the agreement, Le Chat will have access to AFP’s daily news coverage, which comprises about 2,300 stories published in six languages: Arabic, English, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. In addition, the chatbot will be able to query AFP’s archive, which dates back to 1983, providing users with a rich database of multilingual and multicultural information. However, the agreement does not include the availability of AFP’s photos or videos, as Mistral is not currently offering image-generation models. For images, Le Chat uses Black Forest Labs’ Flux Pro.
Fighting the AI Titans
Mistral’s focus on developing user-friendly and innovative products like Le Chat is part of its strategy to compete with AI heavyweights such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. The company is reportedly working on dedicated apps to provide seamless access to Le Chat, ensuring it remains competitive in the rapidly evolving generative AI landscape.
While Mistral is the first notable partnership AFP had with AI company, other companies already began partnerships with news outfits. OpenAI recently secured major outlet deals that cover The Associated Press, Axel Springer, Condé Nast, and Le Monde. As time goes on, such collaboration turns out to become a trend that AI firms find to boost output reliability, alongside minimizing risks posed through copyright issues.
For AFP, it is equally transformative. It comes at a time when the agency is searching for fresh revenue streams, particularly after Meta came to the end of its third-party fact-checking program, including AFP, among one of its key partners. AFP chairman and CEO Fabrice Fries underlined the importance of this deal, pointing out that it enables AFP to diversify its income stream, supporting innovation in AI.
Strengthening Trust Through Collaboration
The alliance exemplifies a wider trend in the industry where AI firms are seeking to position themselves as allies to news organizations, financially and strategically. In addition to increasing the reliability of AI-produced content, the collaboration protects the companies from any possible intellectual property dispute that might be raised by lawsuits.
Arthur Mensch, Mistral’s co-founder and CEO said, “Improving the accuracy of Le Chat’s responses is a critical step in the deployment of our technology, especially in business. By this partnership, we are providing our clients with a unique multicultural and multilingual alternative.”
With such collaborations, it can be assumed that the evolving AI industry might lead to establishing new precedents on how trusted content sources will engage with the generative AI platforms, benefiting creators and end-users.