S4 EP8 - Why I Left NVIDIA for Mistral

Why leave NVIDIA to join Mistral?

In this episode, Neil Ashton explains his move to Mistral as VP of Computational Engineering, where he will work alongside Johannes Brandstetter on AI for engineering, physics foundation models and large language models.

Neil reflects on the career decisions that took him from Manchester and Formula 1 to Oxford, NASA collaborations, AWS and NVIDIA. He shares what he learned from moving between academia and industry, how open datasets became central to his work, and why the chance to keep learning and build something new made Mistral an exciting next step.

For students, researchers and engineers considering a change, the episode also offers a personal perspective on developing a specialism, keeping an academic mindset in industry, and staying open to opportunities without needing to plan your entire career in advance.

Topics include:

• Getting a first break in Formula 1
• Switching between academia and industry
• Learning HPC, cloud computing and product engineering
• Machine learning, open datasets and scientific collaboration
• NVIDIA's hardware, software and partnership ecosystem
• Why Mistral, and working with Johannes Brandstetter
• Career advice: expertise, continual learning and embracing change

Podcast archive: https://neilashton.co.uk/podcasts/

Chapters:
00:00 Podcast intro
00:39 From NVIDIA to Mistral
01:46 My new role: physics AI and LLMs
03:18 Starting out in engineering and motorsport
06:26 A PhD and finding a specialism
08:38 Getting a first break in Formula 1
09:52 Returning to academia
11:57 Oxford, HPC and NASA
15:21 Consulting, Formula 1 and the connection to AWS
19:39 Leaving Oxford and joining AWS
21:06 Product engineering, ML and open datasets
23:29 What I learned at NVIDIA
26:39 Why Mistral felt like the next step
29:51 Career advice: stay open to change
31:28 Becoming known for a specialism
32:41 Podcast plans and closing thoughts

Paper mentioned:
Fluid Intelligence: A Forward Look on AI Foundation Models in Computational Fluid Dynamics
Neil Ashton, Johannes Brandstetter and Siddhartha Mishra
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20455

These are personal reflections on my own career and experience.