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Europe probes Microsoft's €15M stake in AI upstart Mistral

theregister.com

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Re: Europe probes Microsoft's €15M stake in AI upstart Mistral

#111

Post by dukeyukey »

anonylizard wrote: post #34
throwaway55671 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

385M USD is way too much for EU investors. They usually invest 10x-100x less. So the alternative without US investors would be to have no startup of this kind - great job, that will really help EU grow!

What makes US investors so uniquely ambitious and generous? I'm starting to appreciate the US financial sector more and more.

They have lots more money. Which probably originates to climatic and geographic reasons, but more recently due to the _massive_ destruction of wealth in the world wars. It's very hard to build up a wealthy middle class when every few decades millions die on the battlefield.

Re: Europe probes Microsoft's €15M stake in AI upstart Mistral

#112

Post by DANmode »

spidersenses wrote: post #38
mythz wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time will be the ultimate judge but Mistral's Co-founder/CEO is still committing to be a leading provider of open weight models [1]: > Clarifying a couple of things since we’re reading creative interpretations of our latest announcements: - We’re still committed to leading open-weight models! We ask for a little patience, 1.5k H100s only got us that far. - We have a reselling agreement with Microsoft, that we’re very…

Statements like these are only a momentary snapshot. As soon as sufficiently money is at stake the board might change their tune overnight. The whole Altman-fired-from-OpenAI-then-reinstated drama should be warning enough.

What do you think they got Sam to bend the knee on, out of curiosity?

Re: Europe probes Microsoft's €15M stake in AI upstart Mistral

#113

Post by JumpCrisscross »

anonylizard wrote: post #94
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If a Chinese company with massive government contracts had invested in OpenAI there is no way that the US would not start an investigation Sure, but if a European did we wouldn't. So if you start in America, you can access both continents. If you start in China, you can access Europe and Asia. If you start in Europe, you're limited to one. Granted, this is just a proble. But if it amounts to something, it's an asym…

Pretty sure the US explicitly restricts investment in Chinese AI companies now. The US has learnt its lesson investing in China too.

> the US explicitly restricts investment in Chinese AI companies now

Congress seeks to curb it but doesn't in practice. That may change. In any case, I was discounting access to American capital market for Chinese AI start-ups: they can tap both China and Europe.

Re: Europe probes Microsoft's €15M stake in AI upstart Mistral

#114

Post by JumpCrisscross »

kergonath wrote: post #96
throwaway55671 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has massive government contracts in literally every EU country. US is an ally, not antagonist/enemy.

… for now. Trump is very much antagonistic and has a good shot ant being the next president. Even if he is not, considering current American politics, whoever gets elected in 2028 could very well be worse than him in terms of working with allies. Recent history taught us to not take some things for granted.

> history taught us to not take some things for granted

Huge difference between not taking someone for granted and being antagonistic towards them.

Re: Europe probes Microsoft's €15M stake in AI upstart Mistral

#115

Post by JumpCrisscross »

wongarsu wrote: post #37
sanxiyn wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought EU had money a lot more than €15M (Microsoft investment), actually a lot more than €1.8B (Mistral valuation). Why didn't EU make an offer? If EU wants to own its AI future, it has enough money to buy one. They decided not to.

The EU generally doesn't act on the market like that. This isn't China or Soviet Russia after all, we are still operating under a form of capitalism. The EU does offer grants, but those are generally meant for projects that wouldn't get money on the free market

> EU generally doesn't act on the market like that

It absolutely does. The problem is it must then partition the work across the entire continent. America has this problem, too, e.g. the F-35, but the consensus model of EU politics makes it particularly insidious.

Re: Europe probes Microsoft's €15M stake in AI upstart Mistral

#116

Post by nerdponx »

TMWNN wrote: post #88
nerdponx wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because literally the entire world is betting on their technology right now. I can't imagine that being located in the US is the cause for Nvidia being in the right place at the right time with CUDA.

>That's because literally the entire world is betting on their technology right now. I can't imagine that being located in the US is the cause for Nvidia being in the right place at the right time with CUDA. Ah yes, feel free to name all the other European startups that are in the right place at the right time with their own technology. Maybe one of these days you'll acknowledge that there may be a reason why such co…

No, that's a good point. And no, I was not going to cite ASML.

My point is that maybe the US isn't better for causing wildly successful ideas to be rewarded by the market.

The US probably is better for starting tech companies. More rolls of the dice, more chances for success.

But it's not like Nvidia's founders were shopping around for a country to start Nvidia in either. If the Wikipedia history is to be believed, they were already accomplished engineers working at established computing companies in the US, so why would they found Nvidia anywhere else? The web of causality is deeply tangled here. Was the US in the 90s onward actually better for tech startups, or was it a momentum effect carried forward from the US already being a tech and computing leader in the 80s? Maybe a little of both.

Re: Europe probes Microsoft's €15M stake in AI upstart Mistral

#117

Post by nerdponx »

guhidalg wrote: post #67
nerdponx wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would have an anti-trust problem if somebody went out and bought all of the promising AI startups. So at what point in their buying spree do you cut them off? Do you wait until they've bought 90% of AI startups? 50%? Does it matter if there are 4 AI startups or 40?

It starts to matter when the broad public is adversely affected by the lack of AI diversity. I don’t think we’re there yet, let them buy.

The problem here is that, if you can see the adverse effects on the public, you're too late. So you need to anticipate them. That's not an easy thing to do.

Re: Europe probes Microsoft's €15M stake in AI upstart Mistral

#118

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Zambyte wrote: post #31
Filligree wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is "exit" always the goal? Why not go on growing?

Why is "growing" always the goal? Why not go on sustaining?

> Why is "growing" always the goal? Why not go on sustaining?

We're talking about a nascent field. Sustaining means holding the status quo while others lap you in capability and cost.

Re: Europe probes Microsoft's €15M stake in AI upstart Mistral

#119

Post by chmod775 »

kergonath wrote: post #97
chmod775 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't US/EU have a trade war just ~3 years ago?

They’ve had trade wars for much of recent history, but don’t read too much into that. Allies can still disagree on matters of trade.

Maybe ally/enemy is a spectrum and also not one-dimensional. "Not ally" does not imply enemy and my military ally might not be my ally in trade. Also most US allies have learned to not read too much into the word ally. The US makes for a rather fickle and sometimes insidious partner.

Trust in the US on military matters is rather high (despite some recent blunders), but in every other arena it is basically nonexistent. I don't see why the US should receive any less scrutiny than China in this instance.

Re: Europe probes Microsoft's €15M stake in AI upstart Mistral

#120

Post by geodel »

IanCal wrote: post #79
anonylizard wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't own what you can't sell. Any asset value will be massively reduced if its untransferable. Mistral isn't exactly some decade-long state funded national champion. Its a 1 year old startup whose core staff all come from American tech companies. With 0 revenue and minimal market share, there's like no conceivable metric in traditional antitrust theory to block this. Yet the EU prevents it from taking foreign in…

> Yet the EU prevents it from taking foreign investment all the same. No they haven't.

True. In Kafkaesque sense they haven't. They are just checking things are in order.
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