'Godfather Of AI' Yann LeCun Believes Open Source AI Models Will One Day Overtake Closed Source Rivals Like OpenAI's GPT

‘Godfather of AI' Yann LeCun thinks that Mistral AI's successful launch of its latest large-language model has set open-source AI models on the path to overtake proprietary ones from the likes of OpenAI, Google, and others.

What Happened: LeCun, Meta Platforms Inc.'s (NASDAQ:META) chief AI scientist, thinks open-source models could drive the future of AI.

"Open source AI models are on a path to overtake proprietary models," LeCun said.

He was responding to a post highlighting the recent rise in open-source AI models, with the most recent success being Mistral AI's latest model.

Mistral AI is a French company that raised $415 million in its latest funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Salesforce Inc. (NYSE:CRM), among others. The six-month-old AI firm's valuation is estimated to be $2 billion.

See Also: It’s Not Just You, ChatGPT Has Indeed Become Lazier: OpenAI Says A Fix Is Coming

Mistral AI's massive fundraising comes after the firm launched its latest AI model, eclipsing the Microsoft Corp.-backed (NASDAQ:MSFT) OpenAI's GPT 3.5 launched in Jan. 2023.

The Paris-based AI company released the results of a benchmark that shows its AI model beats Meta's Llama 2 as well as GPT 3.5 in several aspects.

This model is also more efficient and can be run locally on significantly less powerful resources – AI models are infamous for requiring extensive graphics power. Still, Mistral AI's model can run on computers without a GPU.

Moreover, Mistral AI's model has no guardrails whatsoever for users worried about censorship in AI models like GPT-4, Google's Gemini-powered Bard, and others.

Why It Matters: With the AI revolution on a massive upward trajectory and companies like OpenAI and Alphabet Inc.'s (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL), Google increasingly resorting to closed-source AI models, the launch of a powerful and efficient open-source AI model is more important than ever before.

While Mistral AI still has a long way to go to catch up to OpenAI's GPT-4 Turbo, Google's Palm-2, and Anthropic's Claude 2, its recent success excites AI experts.

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