Power cuts out on stage as Mistral CEO and Mozilla president speak at RAISE Summit

At RAISE Summit in Paris, the power went out right on the main stage (Master Stage) during a public conversation about the reliability of open AI between Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch and Mozilla president Mark Surman.

What happened on stage

Mensch and Surman were discussing why open source code makes AI systems more reliable when the power on the Master Stage died mid-discussion. They had to wrap up almost in the dark, without lights and, apparently, without the stage's regular sound system.

• Venue: RAISE Summit, Master Stage, Paris
• Participants: Arthur Mensch, CEO and co-founder of Mistral, and Mark Surman, president of Mozilla
• Topic: the reliability of open AI
• The power cut came in the middle of the discussion, and the speakers had to finish it in the dark

Who the speakers are

Mistral is a French AI developer and one of Europe's most visible advocates of open-weight models: the company regularly releases open language models alongside commercial products and positions itself as an alternative to closed American labs. Mozilla is a nonprofit that has championed open source software for decades, from the Firefox browser to its current initiatives around open AI. That is why RAISE Summit organizers put the two on the same stage: both speak the same language when it comes to transparency and openness in technology.

Why it felt symbolic

The speakers were arguing that open AI is more reliable than closed alternatives just as the event's own infrastructure failed in front of them, a coincidence the audience could not miss. Strictly speaking, a blackout at a conference center has nothing to do with the reliability of AI models, but as spectacle the moment looked almost staged: a conversation about the fragility of closed systems was interrupted by the fragility of an ordinary power grid. Neither Mensch nor Surman stopped the conversation. Both kept trading remarks without lights on stage and finished the discussion in the dark, in front of the audience.

What happened next at the conference

The conversation with the heads of Mistral and Mozilla took place on the main stage of RAISE Summit, a major Paris AI conference where other tech executives also spoke the same day. Judging by the description, the blackout affected this conversation on the Master Stage specifically, not the entire event.

What this means

The incident has no direct bearing on the technology itself, but it became a vivid, if accidental, illustration that debates about AI reliability play out against far more mundane failures, down to a plain power cut in the middle of a dedicated conference. For an industry that discusses the fault tolerance of data centers and models, the moment served as a reminder that basic infrastructure remains vulnerable even at a venue that gathered the leaders of open-source AI.