> It’s very early to talk about what Mistral is doing or will be doing — it’s only around a month old — but from what Mensch said, the plan is to build models using only publicly available data to avoid legal issues that some others have faced over training data, he said; users will be able to contribute their own datasets, too. Models and data sets will be open-sourced, as well.

Unless I missed it elsewhere in the article this part really glosses over something I have a hard time understanding. 113M seed round at a 240M valuation for a company that has no product yet and a plan to build something like something else that already exists. This feels insane to me.