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Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

mistral.ai

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Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#21

Post by adcoleman6 »

greyb wrote: post #3

I truly do not see the USP for Mistral other than being based in EU. It's former USP of setting up their models on-premises for clients is now moot with the proliferation of open frontier models. I'd love to be proven wrong but I don't see a path forward for Mistral at this point, given how far they're behind and their overall lack of competitive advantages for an AI Lab like access to hardware, cheap energy or a mas…

Does ASML's investment portend a pivot to specialized, on-prem, enterprise models? No need to be the frontier general knowledge or even coding model, but instead an EU-based AI creator for things like chip design, pharma, automotive, etc?

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#22

Post by t43562 »

It's rather ridiculous to think that the world really wants to stick all its eggs in an American basket. Individual companies will pick whatever works best for them but I think the governments will be delighted to avoid a dependency like that.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#23

Post by mrtksn »

greyb wrote: post #3

I truly do not see the USP for Mistral other than being based in EU. It's former USP of setting up their models on-premises for clients is now moot with the proliferation of open frontier models. I'd love to be proven wrong but I don't see a path forward for Mistral at this point, given how far they're behind and their overall lack of competitive advantages for an AI Lab like access to hardware, cheap energy or a mas…

What is the USP of the countless others? They even converged on API.

Being in EU is actually a rather strong USP with history happening. Just the other day Korean workers building a factory in US were detained and publicly humiliated and sent back. At some point there will be an incident where ICE/TSA or military deployed to as a police will kill a family member(a mother that doesn't speak English, a father that looks islamic etc.) of prominent researcher or entrepreneur and the compensations will need to go even higher to convince that it’s worth the risk(like the people who work at refineries in warzones). Most of the AI researchers and developers are foreigners, some very prominent of them are Europeans and when the risk with Trump is realized it will be very important having place for them to return and this is a huge upside.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#24

Post by ojosilva »

greyb wrote: post #3

I truly do not see the USP for Mistral other than being based in EU. It's former USP of setting up their models on-premises for clients is now moot with the proliferation of open frontier models. I'd love to be proven wrong but I don't see a path forward for Mistral at this point, given how far they're behind and their overall lack of competitive advantages for an AI Lab like access to hardware, cheap energy or a mas…

Except that the risks of running open models from dubious, misaligned foreign sources (China primarily) make it nearly impossible for the enterprise to plug it into their infrastructures today. It's so easy to plug/poison a backdoor into these models, it's not even funny!

OTOH, Mistral may be confronted with the fact that enterprises are slow adopting tech, slower in conservative UE, and that for the time being, the current AI offering is already diverse, confusing and not time-tested enough to justify the investment in in-house GPU datacenters.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#25

Post by decide1000 »

greyb wrote: post #3

I truly do not see the USP for Mistral other than being based in EU. It's former USP of setting up their models on-premises for clients is now moot with the proliferation of open frontier models. I'd love to be proven wrong but I don't see a path forward for Mistral at this point, given how far they're behind and their overall lack of competitive advantages for an AI Lab like access to hardware, cheap energy or a mas…

They’ve built performance, enterprise utility, privacy, sovereignty, open innovation and strategic partnerships into their core story. It's quite a list. The models are opensource, Voxtral outperforms Whisper in terms of accuracy.

There is no AI company like Mistral.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#26

Post by aDyslecticCrow »

darkamaul wrote: post #4

I don’t really get why ASML is putting money into Mistral AI. ASML is specialized in lithography machines. Mistral, on the other hand, is yet another LLM startup. What’s the actual synergy here? The closest angle I can imagine is that AI workloads drive demand for more chips, but I believe ASML is already selling everything it can make.

Quite complex algorithms are used to compensate and tune for pattern clarity and focus in high end semiconductor production.

Its a field that has used neutral networks before. (As people pushed down the size pre-EUV, apparently alot of wierd techniques were layered to produce features at or smaller than the wavelength)

But mistral just makes llms. There is no reason to believe experts in llm would be at all competent at quantom scale physics simulation and prediction.

It feels more logical to invest on the existing researchers and companies in the nanotechnology design field to adapt newer AI techniques.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#27

Post by bakugo »

armarr wrote: post #11
greyb wrote: post #3

I truly do not see the USP for Mistral other than being based in EU. It's former USP of setting up their models on-premises for clients is now moot with the proliferation of open frontier models. I'd love to be proven wrong but I don't see a path forward for Mistral at this point, given how far they're behind and their overall lack of competitive advantages for an AI Lab like access to hardware, cheap energy or a mas…

Do they really need to be anything more than the best European option to be successful?

Are they the best European option, though? I haven't checked, but surely there's at least a few services hosted in the EU offering DeepSeek etc inference.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#28

Post by ktallett »

greyb wrote: post #3

I truly do not see the USP for Mistral other than being based in EU. It's former USP of setting up their models on-premises for clients is now moot with the proliferation of open frontier models. I'd love to be proven wrong but I don't see a path forward for Mistral at this point, given how far they're behind and their overall lack of competitive advantages for an AI Lab like access to hardware, cheap energy or a mas…

I understand your thoughts regarding pace but I don't think that places like ChatGPT will improve at the same rate especially if their rather disappointing recent release is anything to go by.

Hardware can be bought or rented, and AI talent isn't US centric or anything, it exists in many industries and will easily be found. Any knowledge that is missing will be learned. Possibly even better than competitors as there are many flaws in existing options.

Many USPs are out there, from focused use cases, to accuracy all of which could be extremely useful.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#29

Post by apexalpha »

Good news! ASML has a very strategic position. We are essentially all downstream of this one company.

Personally I see this investment as much more political than technical. ASML wants to be a real 'European' champion; not just Dutch. The Dutch and German government are on board; now the French are too.

See also: new CEO is French.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#30

Post by rdos »

Tehnix wrote: post #2

With investments of these huge amounts (similar to Anthropic's recent investment), do they actually get a full 1.7B€ deposited into their bank account? Or does it work in some other way?

Anthropic has much more funding than that. Most recent one was at $13B at the one before was at $3.5B. Now imagine that GPT recieved $40B in one round!
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