Hard Numbers: Mistral gets money, Amazon’s investments, Disco time!, Wary of AI news

6 billion: Europe has just one major player in the generative AI space: Mistral. The French startup raised a new $640 million funding round last week that boosts its overall value to $6 billion. While OpenAI, Anthropic, and other startups have largely proprietary or closed-source models, Mistral has focused on open-source models, marking a more open approach that might suit regulators in Brussels better.

230 million: On Thursday,Amazon pledged $230 million to invest in generative AI startups. That number includes $80 million for its second Amazon Web Services Generative AI Accelerator program, designed to incentivise AI startups to use Amazon’s cloud services.

5: Disco Corp., a Japanese semiconductor company, has seen its stock quintuple since 2022 on increased demand for chip packaging services. The profit margins are thinner for packaging compared with other facets of the chip industry, but increasingly in demand with ever-shrinking chip sizes.

52: Roughly half of Americans are okay with news written by AI. Some 52% of US respondents told surveyors at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism that they’re uncomfortable with news largely written by AI. Even more respondents felt uncomfortable in the UK, with 63% shaking their heads at AI-written news. Trust in the media is at historic lows in the US, and ambivalence to whether it’s written by humans or machines may be the clearest sign yet.