In May, Nvidia, a US maker of the advanced microchips required to power generative AI, became the sixth company in the world to reach a market capitalization of $1 trillion. And, after a bruising 2022, stocks on the tech-heavy Nasdaq index have soared nearly 42% over that time, outpacing the broader S&P 500 index, which has risen less than 19%. It’s not just big-money private investors hoping to cash in on the AI boom: Flows into the world’s top five AI-focused exchange-traded funds have ballooned by an average of 35% since the start of the year. “There’s only a subset of maybe 80 to 100 people in the world who have had the experience training large language models… at scale,” Moyroud noted. Moyroud’s venture capital firm - which he would only say contributed a “significant portion” to the startup’s €105 million haul - was paying a premium for the three founders’ “unmatched” experience: Previously, they all worked with a type of generative AI called a “large language model ” two of them at Meta, Facebook’s parent company, and one at Google’s DeepMind. He doesn’t include Mistral AI in that group. “We’ve some people that haven’t necessarily spent a lot of time in the industry and are adding - if you could say so - a bit of generative AI sparkle” to their pitches, Moyroud said, noting that it takes time to tease out the “substance” behind some founders’ claims. He has seen an increasing number of founders mention generative AI in their pitches for funding - but he takes some of those pitches with a pinch of salt. The release of ChatGPT to the public in November was the catalyst for the current buzz, according to Moyroud at Lightspeed. (MSFT)’s $10 billion investment, announced in January, in OpenAI, the developer of popular generative AI chatbot ChatGPT.īut even excluding Microsoft’s bumper deal, the value of VC investments in generative AI was up by almost 58% compared with the same period in 2022. The bulk of this sum comes from Microsoft In the first six months of 2023, they plowed $15.2 billion into generative AI companies globally, according to Pitchbook data. The investment into Mistral AI is just one of many this year by venture capitalists jostling for a seat aboard the AI rocketship. “I call it the ‘dot-ai’ bubble, and it hasn’t even started yet,” Mostaque said recently, referring to the “dot-com” bubble of the late 1990s, when speculative bets on nascent internet companies ultimately resulted in big losses for many investors. Arthur Mensch, CEO of Mistral AI, at the Viva Tech fair in Paris on JNathan Laine/Bloomberg/Getty ImagesĮmad Mostaque, founder and chief executive of Stability AI, a generative AI firm that also counts California-based Lightspeed among its funders, expects the current wave of investment in AI companies to create “the biggest bubble of all time.”
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