Power goes out on stage at RAISE Summit mid-talk between Mistral CEO and Mozilla president

At RAISE Summit in Paris, the power went out 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 makes AI systems more reliable when the Master Stage lost power mid-discussion. They had to finish the conversation almost in the dark, without lights and, apparently, without the stage's regular sound system.

• Venue: RAISE Summit, main stage (Master Stage) in Paris
• Speakers: Arthur Mensch, CEO and co-founder of Mistral, and Mark Surman, president of Mozilla
• Topic: the reliability of open AI
• The power cut hit 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 prominent advocates of open model weights. The company regularly releases open language models alongside its 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 open AI initiatives. That is why the RAISE Summit organizers paired the two speakers: both speak the same language when it comes to transparency and openness in technology.

Why it looked symbolic

The speakers were making the case to the audience that open AI is more reliable than closed alternatives when the event's own infrastructure failed in front of them, a coincidence the room could hardly miss. Strictly speaking, a power outage at a conference center has nothing to do with the reliability of AI models. As spectacle, though, the moment felt almost staged: a conversation about the fragility of closed systems was cut short by the fragility of an ordinary power grid. Neither Mensch nor Surman stopped the talk. Both kept the exchange going with the stage lights out and finished the discussion in the dark in full view of the audience.

What happened next at the conference

The conversation between 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 that day. Based on the descriptions, the outage affected this particular session on the Master Stage, not the entire event.

What it means

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