Mistral signs deal with AFP to offer up-to-date answers in Le Chat

Just one day after Google the ink The Associated Press also has an agreement with Mistral announcement A content agreement with Agence France-Presse (AFP) to improve the accuracy of answers the catMistral’s chatbot product.

The deal is the first of its kind for the Paris-based artificial intelligence company. And it indicates that Mistral doesn’t want to be considered “just” a foundation model maker.

It wants to create interesting products starting from Le Chat. From what I hear, the company is working on dedicated apps to access Le Chat and better compete with ChatGPT or Claude.

Going forward, Le Chat will be able to tap into AFP’s daily production of stories And AFP is one of the largest news organizations in the world represents A significant amount of text — about 2,300 stories in six languages ​​(Arabic, English, French, German, Portuguese and Spanish) every day.

Le Chat will be able to query AFP’s entire archive since 1983. However, photos and videos are not part of this multi-year contract. As a reminder, Mistral focuses on large language models and does not offer image-generation models. Image generation in Le Chat is handled by Flux Pro from Black Forest Labs.

OpenAI is leading the charge in content deals. The creator of ChatGPT has partnership agreements with AP, Axel Springer, Condé Nast, El País, Financial Times, Le Monde and others. It’s going to be interesting to see if Mistral has more content partnerships in the works.

“We believe its correctness improved [Le Chat’s] Feedback is an important step in deploying our technology, especially for businesses,” Mistral co-founder and CEO Arthur Mensch said in a statement. “Through this partnership, we are providing our clients with a unique multicultural and multilingual option.”

Today’s partnership is also a first for AFP. And it couldn’t come at a better time, since Meta has ended its third-party fact-checking program Just last week. AFP was one of the main partners in the Mater fact-checking system. “Through this partnership, AFP is further diversifying its revenue sources,” AFP Chairman and CEO Fabrice Fries said in a statement.

While the AI ​​industry is looking to improve its products with these measures, there are two side effects that can be considered additional benefits. First, AI companies can position themselves as (financial) allies of news organizations. Second, these partnerships protect them from potential copyright infringement claims.