Just a day after Google signed an agreement with the Associated Press, Mistral also announced a content agreement with Agence France-Presse (AFP) to improve the accuracy of answers in Mistral's chatbot product Le Chat.

This is the first such deal for the Paris-based artificial intelligence company. This shows that Mistral does not want to be seen as "just" a base model maker.

It also wants to create attractive products, starting with Le Chat. As far as I know, the company is also developing a dedicated app to access Le Chat to better compete with ChatGPT or Claude.

Going forward, Le Chat will be able to tap into AFP's daily reporting production. Given that AFP is one of the world's largest news organizations, its text volume is huge - publishing approximately 2,300 stories per day in six languages ​​(Arabic, English, French, German, Portuguese and Spanish).

Le Chat will be able to access AFP's entire archive going back to 1983. Photos and videos, however, are not part of the multi-year deal. As a reminder, Mistral focuses on large language models and does not provide image generation models.

OpenAI has been a leader in content trading. The makers of ChatGPT have partnered with companies like The Associated Press, Axel Springer, Condé Nast, El País, Financial Times, Le Monde, and others. It will be interesting to see if Mistral has more content partnerships.

"We believe improving the accuracy of (Le Chat's) responses is a critical step in deploying our technology, especially for enterprises," Mistral co-founder and CEO Arthur Mensch said in a statement. "With this In partnership, we offer our clients a unique multicultural and multilingual alternative.”

Today's collaboration is also a first for AFP. It couldn't come at a better time, with Meta just last week ending its third-party fact-checking program. AFP is one of the main partners of the Meta fact-checking system. "Through this partnership, AFP is further diversifying its revenue streams," AFP Chairman and CEO Fabrice Frith said in a statement.

While the AI ​​industry is looking to improve its products through these arrangements, there are two side effects that can be considered additional benefits. First, AI companies can position themselves as (financial) allies of news organizations. Second, these partnerships protect them from potential copyright infringement claims.