Mensch said soldiers know better than companies how to use weapons – Copyright AFP\/File HENRY NICHOLLS<\/p>\n
Daxia ROJAS<\/p>\n
French AI startup Mistral would not weigh in on choices about how its technology is used by defence customers, its chief executive told AFP Thursday, laying out a clear position in an ethical debate stirring up the sector.<\/p>\n
Boss Arthur Mensch\u2019s comments came as Mistral announced a new focus on industrial customers like Airbus and BMW as well as governments\u2019 defence operations.<\/p>\n
\u201cChoices about deployment and usage are not our business,\u201d Mensch said on the sidelines of his company\u2019s first AI conference in Paris.<\/p>\n
Mistral\u2019s defence activities account for between 10 and 15 percent of revenue, with active contracts for the French, Singaporean and Luxembourg armed forces.<\/p>\n
The French firm offers a software platform with autonomous AI agents to which users can delegate tasks, able to aggregate large quantites of data from varying sources.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s very useful in a military headquarters or when faced with tactical coordination questions on the battlefield,\u201d Mensch said.<\/p>\n
A five-year partnership Mistral announced Thursday with Airbus will include the European aircraft builder\u2019s defence operations.<\/p>\n
Smaller AI models from Mistral could be built into weapons systems or other defence equipment, such as drones, that can be more effective if able to act autonomously.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe defence ministry has considerably more legitimacy (to make decisions) than us as a company supplying a particular technology,\u201d Mensch argued.<\/p>\n
\u201cWho are we to tell soldiers, who know their job and the dangers\u2026 what they\u2019re allowed to do?\u201d he asked, distancing himself from what he called \u201cideologues\u201d who take the opposing view.<\/p>\n
\u2013\u00a0\u2018Total sovereignty\u2019 \u2013<\/p>\n
Marketing itself as the AI developer most concerned with ethics, Anthropic attempted to bar the American government using its AI systems for mass surveillance or fully autonomous arms.<\/p>\n
The spat led to a legal showdown with the Pentagon \u2014 although the tensions have since thawed somewhat.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile staff at Google\u2019s Deepmind AI arm, one of the competitors tapped by Washington for defence contracts, have protested against their technology\u2019s sale to Israel and US forces, in a sign many tech workers are uneasy at their creations\u2019 military uses.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur responsibility is of course to choose who we work with,\u201d Mensch acknowledged, while guaranteeing \u201ctotal sovereignty over weapons operation.\u201d<\/p>\n
AFP has a deal with Mistral allowing the company\u2019s chatbot to draw on the news agency\u2019s articles to formulate responses.<\/p>\n
\u2013 Guardrails \u2013<\/p>\n
Also Thursday, Mistral said it was now working towards so-called Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) \u2014 a theorised future system that would match or surpass humans\u2019 intellectual abilities in all domains.<\/p>\n
The prospect of creating superintelligence has sparked fierce debate in recent years among AI developers, scientists and policymakers, who fear the potential harm such systems could cause if they escape human control.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe aim is to have the most intelligent systems possible so that afterwards, with the necessary adaptations, they\u2019ll have the greatest possible impact on businessses,\u201d Mensch said.<\/p>\n
The 30-something added that there was \u201cabsolutely no sense\u201d in the idea of AGI running amok.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe always deploy models and systems in environments where we can unplug them,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
Security nevertheless remains a top priority for Mistral, founded in 2023.<\/p>\n
Mensch said the goal was to ensure \u201cthat the model behaves the way you\u2019ve told it to\u201d, imposing guardrails that \u201cstop it from taking unreasonable actions\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is of fundamental importance to our clients\u201d.<\/p>\n
Mensch also confirmed that Mistral was working on a cybersecurity product aimed at companies.<\/p>\n
European firms such as major banks currently have no access to cutting-edge models like Anthropic\u2019s Mythos, supposed to be extremely powerful at finding and exploiting security holes.<\/p>\n
\u201cEveryone needs to have cybersecurity systems that can defend against attackers who are themselves equipped with AI,\u201d Mensch said.<\/p>\n
He added that Mistral\u2019s offering would be available \u201cthis year\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mensch said soldiers know better than companies how to use weapons – Copyright AFP\/File HENRY NICHOLLS Daxia ROJAS…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":55328,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[6744,24,3013,3522,13590,684,9507,174],"class_list":["post-55327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-agi","tag-agi","tag-ai","tag-artificial-general-intelligence","tag-defence","tag-discovery","tag-innovation","tag-management","tag-marketing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55327"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55327\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}