Comment by IshanMi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IshanMi | Hacker News Reader

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I found some discrepancies when reading deeper into Mistral that felt a bit peculiar.

If you look at the Wikipedia page for Mistral AI [1] it lists the company as having 3 founders, one from DeepMind & 2 from Meta. This is consistent with what I thought- that it's an AI lab founded by engineers.

But if you go to Cedric O's Wikipedia page [2], it has Cedric O, a politician and former Secretary of State for the Digital economy, listed as a co-founder. The source cited is [3]. Furthermore, if you look at this post about Mistral's lobbying for the AI Act [4], Cedric O is said to be just an investor.

These discrepancies seemed a bit weird and suspicious to me; it felt like they might have been trying to downplay how close their ties were with the French government?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistral_AI [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cédric_O [3]: https://sifted.eu/articles/brunch-with-cedric-o [4]: https://www.euractiv.com/section/artificial-intelligence/new...

I don't know anything about the subject but it's worth noting that the article Wikipedia cites for listing the three founders, also specifically mentions Cedric as one of three additional "non-operational" co-founders.

My interpretation from the article cited on Cedric's Wiki page and published 6-7 months after launch is that he joined after and hence isn't one of the three original founders, maybe:

> O explains he was drawn to Mistral a few months ago first and foremost because of the ambition of its founders Arthur Mensch, Timothée Lacroix and Guillaume Lample, Meta and Deepmind alumni.

Not saying you're wrong. But "he's not listed on Wikipedia" is a bit weak? Consider just adding him and the others if you figure out who joined when.

I think you're right and I clearly read too much into the Wikipedia pages, instead of looking for more primary source documents like those others have posted. I will be more careful in the future. Thank you for pointing that out!

For a company of Mistral's age, the term founder is quite fluid - people may not have been at the very start (Musk joined Tesla 7 months after it was incorporated)

Others say there were 6 founders, for example:

> Three of Mistral’s six founders, and its technical brains—Mr Mensch, Timothée Lacroix and Guillaume Lample ....

https://www.economist.com/business/2024/02/26/meet-the-frenc... https://archive.ph/2GPNo

So all he has to do is sue Mistral for the founder title.

Their strategic memo created in April/May last year present a founding team of 6 people actually: https://philippeoger.com/documents/1/mistral.ai-strategic-me...

The memo in itself is a very good read.

Thank you for sharing- upon reflection I should have been looking for primary source evidence like this instead of reading too deeply into Wikipedia pages, as someone else pointed out. I will definitely be more careful in the future.

Could I ask how you would normally go about trying to find memos like this for other companies?

Well, you made a worthwhile comment that triggered an interesting discussion, which luckily I had some knowledge about. I simply brought up new information to you. I don't perceive anything wrong.

I work in data and I'm french, so Mistral.ai has been on my radar a little more maybe. I was familiar with this memo before Mistral even released their first model. It was discussed a lot in France as this was the base for their first seed round that gave them 100 million euros in investment.

More here if you're interested: https://philippeoger.com/pages/ai-scene-in-europe-last-week/

It's interesting that France's intelligence service in particular is known for skill in industrial espionage.

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