According to a recent report, Mistral, a French company specializing in artificial intelligence, is in talks to raise $533 million in funding at a valuation of $5.3 billion. This investment would help the company double its current valuation, which was $2 billion as of December 2023.

Mistral's previous funding round, which took place in December 2023, raised $415 million and was backed by major venture capital firms such as Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and LightSpeed Ventures. This round helped Mistral rank among the top AI-related companies, including Google and Microsoft-backed OpenAI.

The new funding round would bring Mistral closer to OpenAI in terms of competition. While the names of the investors have not been disclosed, several of them have shown interest in supporting Mistral. The funds raised will be used to purchase chips needed for training and running Mistral's AI models.

Mistral's focus on generative AI is evident in its development of Large Language Models (LLMs) to create humanlike texts and code responses to natural language protocols. The company's chatbot, Le Chat, is a free, question-and-answer interface that understands and translates three different languages.

Le Chat's functionality is achieved through the use of three LLMs, which allow the chatbot to provide answers conversationally. It can understand questions containing up to 20,000 words in English, making it a formidable competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT. However, unlike ChatGPT, Le Chat is not entirely open-source.

Overall, Mistral's pursuit of generative AI and its development of Le Chat demonstrate its potential to compete with OpenAI and other major players in the AI industry.