A major global information player, the AFP (Agence France-Presse) and the French artificial intelligence company Mistral, which aims to become the main European player in AI, signed an agreement that will allow the start-up’s conversational robot to up use the agency’s information dispatches to respond to the requests of its users.
Neither the amount nor the duration of this “multi-year” contract has been revealed. This is the first agreement of its kind for the global agency, as well as for Mistral AI, a European competitor to American giants such as OpenAI (designer of the ChatGPT tool).
A first in AI
In the world, this type of agreement remains relatively rare, even if things accelerate in 2024. We learned that the Associated Press (AP), for its part, had signed an agreement with Google to provide a flow of information in real time that It would improve the results of Gemini, the search giant’s generative AI.
However, most of the contracts relate, for the moment, to OpenAI. The Californian company has signed with the British economic newspaper Financial Times, the French newspaper Le Monde and the German group Springer (Bild).
“This is the first agreement between two actors with global ambitions, even with a global presence as far as the AFP is concerned, but with strong European roots,” said the agency’s general director, Fabrice Fries, in an interview with journalists from the AFP.
This agreement will provide the AFPs with “a new source of income,” he stressed.
Free access AFP files
For Mistral, “the AFP provides a proven journalistic source that we find very important,” added the director of the start-up, Arthur Mensch.
Starting Thursday, AFP dispatches in 6 languages (French, English, Spanish, Arabic, German, Portuguese) can be used by Mistral’s conversational robot, Le Chat. It works like ChatGPT, which popularized these tools among the general public: the user asks you a question that you answer in a few seconds.
When the question refers to current events, Le Chat will formulate its answers using AFP dispatches, that is, the information sent in text form by the agency to its subscriber clients (media, institutions, companies, etc.) .
Initially a testing phase is carried out with only some of the users.
Le Chat can use all the agency’s text files since 1983, but not its photographs, videos or infographics.
In total, this represents 38 million shipments, produced at a rate of 2,300 per day, according to Fries.
Debates for a year
According to him, this use is aimed at “liberal professions, managers of large companies”, for example to “prepare notes” or any document related to current events.
In the general public, many people have different uses for these generative AI tools. They use it for everyday questions, to which these programs respond by extracting elements from the Internet.
The two uses “are complementary,” Mensch said. For questions “that require verified information, it is the AFP that will provide” the basic material for the answers and, when the queries refer “to purchases or the weather, for example, it is rather the web,” he explained.
The signing comes shortly after the announcement by the Meta group (Facebook, Instagram) of the end of its data verification program in the United States. Globally, the AFPs are at the forefront of this program.
“Our conversations with Mistral began a year ago, so they are not related to Meta’s decision,” said Fries, vindicating his “diversification strategy” with digital platforms while traditional media are affected by a serious crisis.
In 2023, the AFPs made profits for the fifth consecutive year, with a net result of 1.1 million euros, according to figures published in April 2024.
In addition to its commercial income, the AFP receives compensation from the French State for the costs linked to its general interest missions (113.3 million euros in 2023).
Unlike other agreements of this type, AFP content will not be used to train and advance Mistral’s computer models, both parties assured. This content is “a module that connects to our system and can be disconnected” when the contract expires, Mensch said.
“This is not a payment for the balance of any account, as is often the case in model training agreements, but for the development of recurring income,” Fries argued.
Source: BFM TV
