Paris-based artificial intelligence (AI) company Mistral AI has announced a new partnership with the Agence France-Presse (AFP) which will provide Mistral’s chatbot Le Chat with access to “the full range of AFP’s text stories”.
AFP is a massive, global news organization, and produces around 2,300 text stories per day across six languages (French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Arabic). This will allow Mistral to focus on one of its key benefits – it offers multilingual support.
Integration with current news and press output also enhances the “factuality” of Le Chat’s output, ensuring the chatbot’s responses to user queries are “grounded in reliable, up-to-date information,” according to Mistral’s statement on the partnership.
“Partnering with a globally trusted news agency like AFP allows Le Chat to offer reliable, factual, and up-to-date responses, verified by professional journalists,” said Arthur Mensch, Mistral’s CEO and co-founder in a press release. He added: “We believe improving the accuracy of these responses is a key step in the deployment of our technology, particularly for businesses. Through this partnership, we are providing our clients with a unique multicultural and multilingual alternative.”
The CEO of the AFP also spoke highly of the new partnership. Fabrice Fries said: “Through this partnership, AFP is further diversifying its revenue sources, reaching a clientele beyond the media sector and exploring new uses for its content in the daily operations of businesses. AFP is delighted with this first collaboration with an AI player that proudly embraces its European identity, recognising, especially in these challenging times, the value of verified, contextualised, and prioritised information.”
What is included in the partnership between Mistral and AFP?
The multi-year partnership between Mistral AI and the AFP includes all the text content produced by the media company. This includes its entire archive since 1983. However, images and video are not included in the deal, likely because Mistral is entirely focused on its large language model and text generation. Le Chat offers image generation in collaboration with Black Forest Labs and their Flux Pro model.
Mistral AI recently upgraded Le Chat to include its new Pixtral Large multimodal model, which includes a large 128k context window.
The update to Le Chat to include AFP context will be rolled out to all users in the coming weeks.
AFP was, until recently, a key partner in Meta’s fact-checking program. However, the company removed support for the program last week in favor of an X-style community notes system, citing the “political bias” of fact-checkers as a key issue.
Featured image credit: Midjourney