Sifted - Lost in transl-AI-tion

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The US has a head start when it comes to funding large language models (LLMs), with titans like OpenAI raking in billions of dollars to develop their AI models. But European upstarts like French competitor Mistral, which has raised millions from VCs and just struck a deal with Microsoft, highlight a continental advantage in the AI race: multilingual LLMs. Today, my colleague Orlando Crowcroft digs into the AI developers training models for other languages — and why there’s still lots of work to be done. 

Elsewhere today, we look at the startups developing AI chatbots to be your therapist, how founders should deal with tight-deadline term sheet offers and the top carbon capture startups to have on your radar. 

Plus, last call for founders: we’d love to hear how you’re doing. Take our (completely anonymous, and very brief!) founder mental health survey here. We’ll be sharing the results soon!

— Anne Sraders, senior reporter

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Lost in transl-AI-tion

Last week was a big week for multilingual language models as Paris-based Mistral, which has trained its LLM in five languages (English, German, French, Italian and Spanish), signed a landmark deal with Microsoft — putting the spotlight on one area where Europe is outpacing its Silicon Valley rivals. 

As we’ve explored in these pages before, huge amounts of compute is not the only thing you need to train an LLM — you need large swathes of language data too, all of it scraped from the internet. Over 52% of the internet is in English, with Spanish in second place at 5.5%, Chinese at 1.3% and Arabic at just 0.6% by share of websites, according to data from Statista. 

But startups — and governments — are trying to make sure the LLM-fuelled future of AI isn’t in one language alone. 

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez announced a new public-private partnership to develop an open-source language model trained in Castilian, Basque, Catalan, Galician and Valencian at last week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

To make the LLM as inclusive as possible, Sanchez said Latin American countries would also be invited to take part. But there is a commercial angle too: the move will potentially open up these massive markets to Spanish AI startups. 

In November, Finnish startup Silo released the first results for a model trained in both Finnish and English. It has access to an EU-funded initiative, the High Performance Language Technologies (HPLT) project, which has amassed 7,000 terabytes of data across 80 languages. 

Silo cross-trained the model using English and Finnish data: it is fed text in both languages and then learns how they relate to each other. It can field a question in Finnish, use English training data to come up with the answer, and then give an answer in Finnish. 

“You're able to generate code in Finnish even though the model has not seen any Finnish code,” Silo cofounder and CEO Peter Sarlin tells Sifted. 

But what about outside of Europe? In a report last year, the US-based Centre for Democracy and Technology (CDT) warned that in the Global South there are often few, if any, examples of high-quality text for many of the languages spoken by millions of people. 

That’s a problem, says the CDT, because a system where an LLM is translating a query in one language into English, finding the answer in English, and then translating that answer back into the first language is never going to sound natural to a native speaker. As any language learner will know: fluency is when you are able to think in a language. 

But I wonder: How strong is the commercial case for an Arabic, Chinese or Swahili-speaking ChatGPT? Why would a startup create one, or an investor back one? 

I’d love to hear from readers about startups working on multilingual LLMs. What are the challenges? What are the opportunities? Shoot me an email. 

— Orlando Crowcroft, commissioning editor

👩‍⚕️ Europe has a shortage of mental health professionals: can AI chatbots fill the gap? Startups like Berlin-based clare&me and London-based Limbic Health are using conversational AI therapists to support patients, the latter is in partnership with the UK’s National Health Service (NHS). “We take pressure off the whole system,” says Emilia Theye, cofounder of clare&me. “The person doesn't even enter the clinical healthcare system because they have got the support from another source.”

• But there are risks. Chatbots struggle to pick up on signals of suicidal intent versus ideation, or signs of self harm, says Catherine Knibbs, a psychotherapist and spokesperson for the UK Council for Psychotherapy. Other startups focusing on mental health are yet to pursue the AI route due to the existing risks. “There’s no proof that care can be delegated to machines,” says Javier Suarez, cofounder and CEO of Oliva, which provides companies with access to therapy services as an employee benefit. 

🤯 Founders, here's how to deal with exploding term sheets.

🦾 The 13 deeptech communities in Europe you need to know, according to VCs.

👀 The 47 carbon capture startups to watch. 

🤝 The 16 mental health startups to watch, according to VCs.

🤔 Sponsored by Founders Intelligence: Why — and how — economic uncertainty can benefit bold leaders.

🥊 France and Germany love a good old numbers contest — so Franco-German VC Iris has put together some data to compare and contrast the two tech ecosystems. And while the overall picture is very similar (France raised $8bn in 2023, Germany $7.8bn), the devil is — as ever — in the details.

• In France, it’s all-in on AI. Six out of the 10 biggest rounds in the country in 2023 were raised by AI startups, including two by buzzing gen AI company Mistral. Germany, on the other hand, saw a wider variety of sectors represented, from climate tech and SaaS to AI and fintech.
• The report also notes that Germany can count on the support of several large local corporations that are active investors and acquirers — think LeanIX’s $1.2bn deal with German software giant SAP. French startups, on the other hand, can rely on few local players outside of public bank Bpifrance, and remain heavily dependent on large US VC firms.

🤖 On March 12, news editor Tim Smith will be hosting an editorial conference call, exclusively for Pro subscribers, alongside founders and investors who are working at the bleeding edge of automation in the AI economy. Join us to learn where AI can drive new opportunities and efficiencies — as well as where its limitations still lie. RSVP.

💸 On March 13, editor Amy Lewin will bring together a panel of experts from Octopus Ventures, FaceIt, Latham & Watkins and Bloom to discuss what's in store for M&A activity and how startups can prepare. RSVP.

🇸🇪 On March 14, our Europe editor Mimi Billing will host Sifted’s first intimate breakfast meetup in Stockholm alongside Magnus Nilsson, cofounder of Zettle, to discuss the highs and lows of selling his company. Be part of the discussion — apply to join.

Copenhagen-based Orbis Medicines, which is developing drugs to treat conditions that can be taken as pills, raised €26m in seed funding. Novo Holdings and Forbion led the round. 

Stockholm-based Plexigrid, which develops software that supplies grid operators with real-time insights, has raised €6.5m — of which €4m is equity and the remainder is grant money. The European Innovation Council Accelerator Programme led the round. 

London-based Heat Geek, which helps train and support heat pump installers to help decarbonise peoples’ homes, raised €4.3m in seed funding. Transition led the round and was joined by investors including Triple Point Ventures.

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