If you follow European AI news, you may have read that Finland’s Silo AI and Germany’s Aleph Alpha recently formed a partnership to offer “sovereign AI.” It seems Silo’s head of partnerships has been busy, as the company today announced a new collaboration, this time with investor darling Mistral AI.
Over the past few years, businesses have rushed to implement AI without knowing how to use it in practice, fearing being left behind. Without proper implementation and the right solutions and models, the promise of increased efficiency and added value that artificial intelligence can provide to organizations may not be realized.
Silo and Mistral announced that they will bring together Silo AI’s end-to-end AI capabilities with Mistral AI’s industry-leading, cutting-edge AI models to combine their expertise to offer joint services to enterprises that address the growing demand for value-creating AI solutions.
“We are excited to partner with a global leader in cutting-edge AI models. We have always had a common mission with Mistral AI to build world-class AI in Europe,” said Peter Sarlin, CEO and co-founder of Silo AI. (You can listen to an interview with Sarlin on the TNW podcast.) “We believe that combining their models with Silo AI’s platform and deep experience in large enterprises will create a powerful combination in the rapidly evolving AI market.”
Silo has been using Mistral technology for a year now, according to Sahlin, and the formal collaboration began after the two companies recognized their “complementary strengths and potential benefits” to address a “significant market opportunity.”
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Different models for different customers
These two companies are both at the forefront of AI development, but with slightly different focuses. Helsinki-based Silo calls itself “Europe’s largest private AI lab.” The company is keen to support the still-nebulous notion of European “digital sovereignty,” and has developed open-source large-scale language models (LLMs) with a particular focus on Nordic languages and other so-called low-resource European languages.
However, the company’s main commercial product is a platform for large enterprises. Paris-based Mistral AI, on the other hand, specializes in generative AI and has released open source models for developers, as well as several optimized commercial models at various scales. The company is focused on democratizing cutting-edge AI models.
Why partner with another company that specializes in generative AI when Silo has its own LLM? “Silo AI is focused on building best-in-class solutions for low-resource languages,” Sarlin told TNW. “We always believe that companies should use the model that best suits their specific use case. Different models make sense for different customers.”
Strengthening Europe’s AI capabilities
Mistral AI was founded by former Google DeepMind and Meta employees, including its CEO Arthur Mensch, who said the partnership with Silo “will significantly strengthen Europe’s AI capabilities.”
“By combining Silo AI’s technological capabilities with our cutting-edge models, we will not only accelerate the adoption of AI technologies across Europe, but also pursue our mission of making AI accessible to everyone,” said Mistral’s CEO.
In terms of funding, the two companies have taken very different paths. Founded in 2017, Silo has raised very little outside funding. Mistral, which only launched last April, quickly rose to the top of investors’ wish lists as a European challenger to OpenAI, which launched the GenAI boom with the release of ChatGPT in late 2022. The company’s latest funding round, Series B, raised $640 million and valued it at $6.2 billion.
As Europe races to catch up in the global AI race, we will likely see more partnerships aimed at taking full advantage of expertise spread across different parts of the continent. Collaboration will be the defining feature of the European AI landscape (and the EU’s regulatory ambitions), and it may be what will change the elusive “sovereignty” and, of course, competitive advantage.
“In a market that is growing as rapidly as generative AI, it’s no surprise that companies are looking for different ways to deliver value to their customers,” said Sahlin.
