Just a day after Google signed a deal with the Associated Press, Mistral is also announcing a content deal with Agence France-Presse (AFP) to improve the accuracy of responses on Le Chat, Mistral’s chatbot product.
This is the first deal of its kind for the Paris-based artificial intelligence company. And it shows that Mistral doesn’t want to be thought of as “just” a foundation model maker.
It also wants to build attractive products, starting with Le Chat. From what I hear, the company is also working on dedicated apps to access Le Chat and better compete with ChatGPT or Claude.
Going forward, Le Chat will be able to use AFP’s daily production of stories. And given that AFP is one of the world’s largest news agencies, it represents a significant volume of text – around 2,300 stories per day in six languages (Arabic, English, French, German, Portuguese and Spanish).
Le Chat will be able to search the entire AFP archive since 1983. However, photos and videos are not part of this multi-year deal. As a reminder, Mistral focuses on large language models and does not provide image generation models. Image generation in Le Chat is handled by Black Forest Labs’ Flux Pro.
OpenAI has been leading the charge when it comes to content deals. The maker of ChatGPT has signed partnerships with AP, Axel Springer, Condé Nast, El País, Financial Times, Le Monde and others. It will be interesting to see if Mistral has more content partnerships in the works.
“We believe that improving the accuracy of responses (Le Chat) is a key step in deploying our technology, especially for businesses,” Mistral co-founder and CEO Arthur Mensch said in a statement. “Through this partnership, we are offering our customers a unique multicultural and multilingual alternative.”
Today’s partnership is also a first for AFP. And it couldn’t come at a better time, as Meta completed its third-party fact-checking program just last week. AFP was one of the main partners in Meta’s fact-checking system. “Through this partnership, AFP is further diversifying its sources of revenue,” AFP chairman and CEO Fabrice Fries said in a statement.
While the AI industry is looking to improve its products with these deals, there are two side effects that could be considered added benefits. First, AI companies can position themselves as (financial) allies of news organizations. Second, these partnerships protect them from potential claims of copyright infringement.
