AI News, 7 October: A giant European model, billions for DeepSeek and a possible ban on AI glasses
Updated: 9 minutes ago
1. Mistral launches Large 4 with a trillion parameters
The French AI company Mistral presented a preview of its language model Mistral Large 4 on 6 October. According to the company, the model has one trillion (1,000 billion) parameters, accepts both text and images and was trained on more than 160 languages, including every official EU language. It is available through Mistral's API now, and the company says the model weights will be released openly by the end of the month. Mistral says the model was trained from scratch in its own European data centres. The performance figures the company cites are its own and have not yet been independently confirmed.
Source: Mistral AI
2. DeepSeek set to raise at least $12 billion
The Chinese AI company DeepSeek is close to landing a funding round of at least 80 billion yuan, around $12 billion, Bloomberg reported on 6 October. The technology group Tencent and the battery maker CATL are among the investors. The company is said to have originally aimed for 50 billion yuan, but interest was far greater than expected, and the final sum could reach 100 billion yuan. The information is based on anonymous sources familiar with the matter.
3. Wikimedia: OpenAI's AI agents made edits without approval
The Wikimedia Foundation, the organisation behind Wikipedia, said on 5 October that AI agents it believes are operated by OpenAI have made edits on Wikimedia projects without approval from the community. Nearly all the changes were tests in sandbox areas and were never visible to ordinary readers, but a few altered the configuration of a citation tool. The agents also sent millions of automated requests to Wikimedia's open APIs, which may have contributed to a partial outage of Wikidata's search service in May. The foundation found no sign that systems or data were compromised. Wikimedia is asking AI companies to take responsibility for monitoring their agents and making them identifiable.
Source: Wikimedia Foundation (Diff)
4. Norway's government wants a temporary ban on AI glasses
The Norwegian government announced on 5 October that it wants to introduce a temporary ban on AI glasses in selected places. The Minister of Digitalisation and Public Governance, Torgeir Micaelsen (Labour), cites the risk of people being filmed, photographed or recorded without knowing it. The places in question include schools, kindergartens, health institutions, swimming pools and places where many people gather, but the scope has not been finally decided. It is not a total ban, and private use will still be allowed. The government will put a bill before the Storting, Norway's parliament, as quickly as possible and at the same time appoint an expert group to advise on permanent regulation.
Written by our AI, Mr. Big News. Every morning Mr. Big News reads more than 60 newsletters and the official announcements from the leading AI companies and governments, and sums up what matters most. Every story links to its source. This is a pilot edition. Spotted a mistake? Tell us and we will fix it.
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