# Guillaume Lample

> Guillaume Lample is a French artificial-intelligence researcher, co-founder and chief science officer of Mistral AI. After early work on reinforcement learning, unsupervised translation, multilingual models, symbolic mathematics and code translation, he became a senior author of Meta's original LLaMA paper. In 2023 he founded Mistral AI in Paris with Arthur Mensch and Timothée Lacroix, carrying a long-running research instinct - careful data and efficient training can make smaller models unusually capable - into a European AI company with global reach.

- **Role:** Co-founder and Chief Science Officer at Mistral AI
- **Organizations:** Mistral AI, Meta AI / Facebook AI Research, Sorbonne University, Carnegie Mellon University, École Polytechnique
- **From:** Brest, France
- **Nationality:** French
- **Education:** Engineering curriculum, mathematics, École Polytechnique, Master of Language Technologies, Carnegie Mellon University, Language Technologies Institute, PhD, Unsupervised Machine Translation, Sorbonne University / LIP6
- **Known for:** Senior author of the original 2023 LLaMA paper at Meta AI., Co-founded Mistral AI in 2023 and serves as its chief science officer., Demonstrated neural machine translation learned from monolingual corpora without parallel sentences in 2017 research.

## Career timeline

- **2011** — Entered École Polytechnique's 2011 class, where he overlapped with future Mistral AI co-founder Arthur Mensch.
- **2016** — Co-developed Arnold, a deep-reinforcement-learning agent for the ViZDoom environment, during his Carnegie Mellon period.
- **2017** — Received a Master of Language Technologies from Carnegie Mellon University and published early work on Fader Networks and unsupervised word translation.
- **2017-2019** — Conducted doctoral research at Sorbonne University's LIP6 in collaboration with Facebook AI Research on machine translation using monolingual corpora.
- **2019** — Defended his PhD thesis, Unsupervised Machine Translation, and co-authored Cross-lingual Language Model Pretraining (XLM).
- **2019-2020** — Published work applying deep learning to symbolic mathematics and translating functions among C++, Java and Python.
- **2023** — Served as the final-listed senior author of Meta's original LLaMA paper, then co-founded Mistral AI with Arthur Mensch and Timothée Lacroix.
- **2023-2024** — Co-authored the Mistral 7B and Mixtral 8x7B technical papers as the company established its open-weight model line.
- **2025** — Appeared on the Magistral reasoning-model paper and publicly argued that model customization is the product enterprises pay for.
- **2026** — Mistral AI announced a €3 billion Series D; Lample said the company would expand training and inference compute and grow its science team across six cities.

## Achievements

- Senior author of the original 2023 LLaMA paper at Meta AI.
- Co-founded Mistral AI in 2023 and serves as its chief science officer.
- Demonstrated neural machine translation learned from monolingual corpora without parallel sentences in 2017 research.
- Co-authored XLM, influential work on cross-lingual language-model pretraining.
- Co-authored work showing neural networks can solve symbolic integration and differential equations.
- Co-authored TransCoder research on unsupervised translation among programming languages.
- Contributed to Mistral 7B, Mixtral 8x7B and Magistral technical publications.

## Latest updates

- **2026-09** — After Mistral AI announced a €3 billion Series D, Lample said the funding would expand R&D, training and inference compute, and science hiring in Paris, Palo Alto, San Francisco, London, Zurich and Warsaw.
- **2026-07** — Promoted Mistral's work on open-weight speech models and shared the training approach behind Voxtral TTS.
- **2026-04** — Mistral AI published a European AI playbook as part of its expanding policy and infrastructure agenda.
- **2025-06** — Co-authored the Magistral paper describing Mistral's reasoning models, including an open-source small model.
- **2025-02** — Discussed Mistral's partnership with Helsing, training efficiency, open-source spillovers and the business value of customized enterprise models.

## Links

- Website: https://mistral.ai/about/
- LinkedIn: https://fr.linkedin.com/in/guillaume-lample-7821095b
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/GuillaumeLample
- GitHub: https://github.com/glample
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWUNlw-5TPs

---

Profile page: https://yespress.io/guillaume-lample
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-09-26