Agence France-Presse (AFP) signed an agreement which allows, as of Thursday, the conversational robot of the French start-up Mistral AI to use the agency’s news dispatches to respond to requests from its users, when these The latest ones concern current affairs.
This is the first agreement of this type for the global agency, as well as for Mistral, a competitor to American giants like OpenAI which aims to become the main European player in the field of artificial intelligence.
In the world, this type of agreement remains relatively rare, even if things have accelerated in 2024. The Californian company OpenAI has notably signed with the British economic newspaper Financial Times, the French daily Le Monde and the German group Springer ( picture).
Neither the amount nor the duration of this “multi-year” contract have been revealed.
Thirty years and 38 million dispatches
From Thursday, AFP dispatches in six languages (French, English, Spanish, Arabic, German, Portuguese) can be used by Mistral’s conversational robot, soberly named Le Chat.
He will thus be able to draw on all of the agency’s text archives since 1983, but not on its photos, videos or infographics. In total, this represents 38 million dispatches, said AFP CEO Fabrice Fries.
When the question concerns current affairs, Le Chat will formulate its answers by drawing information from dispatches, that is to say information sent in text form by the agency to its clients.
Additional sources
A test phase takes place initially, with some of the users.
This usage targets “liberal professions, executives of large companies”, for example to “prepare memos” related to current events. But it will also be useful to the general public, more and more of whom are using generative AI tools for everyday life issues.
Two “complementary” uses, estimated the boss of Mistral, Arthur Mensch. For questions “which require verified information, it is the AFP which will provide” the basic material for the answers. And when the requests relate “to shopping or the weather for example, it’s more the web,” he explained.
“Add-on”
Mistral AI also provides a large language model (Mistral Large) specialized in text generation and specialized models capable of processing images or generating code.
However, unlike other agreements of this type, AFP content will not be used to train and advance these computer models, both parties assured, presenting the agency’s content as “a module that connects to our system and can be disconnected” when the contract expires.
Particular context
For Mistral, “the AFP provides a verified, journalistic source, which we think is very important”, commented Arthur Mensch.
The signing comes shortly after the Meta group announced the end of its fact-checking program, of which AFP was one of the main global contributors. And more and more voices are concerned about the shift of American platforms on the issue of disinformation, in the wake of the purchase of the X platform by Elon Musk.
In this context, the two groups claim “firm European roots”, underlined Fabrice Fries.
jop with afp
