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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

#71
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They built a fork of LLaMA, claimed tech as theirs; the punishment: receive 2B as funding

isnt this awesome llama trained on pirated works? just checking this iteration

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#72
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…

Sovereignty. Having a European company means others can't as easily take it away.

This is one thing the EU can learn from China. Lots of "expert" smash China for duplicating/"copying" stuff that the west was already doing, better. They criticize that it's wasteful spending etc. They don't get it. It's about sovereignty, so you're not at the whims of whomever wants to sanction you for whatever frivolous reasons. The EU is now learning what it means when it can't rely on the US for everything anymore.

It doesn't matter that it isn't as good as the competition right now. Human capital takes time and effort to cultivate. There is strategic reason to keep Mistal alive even if it's not very commercially competitive.

I hope our EU leaders can see this too, commit for the long term, and don't just look at financial balance sheets.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#73
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…

That's a massive USP.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mostly only agree with performance due to their collaboration with cerebras - this is a true differentiator. I don't buy that they have an advantage in enterprise, privacy, sovereignty, open innovation and strategic partnership. OpenAI also has opensource models and so do the chinese models.

OpenAI has no serious open source software and are Chinese models really a serious alternative for western companies?

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#75
post #71
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They built a fork of LLaMA, claimed tech as theirs; the punishment: receive 2B as funding

isnt this awesome llama trained on pirated works? just checking this iteration

It’s piracy all the way down

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#76
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…

That's a massive USP.

Indeed, if they weren't using non-European infrastructure.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#77
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…

This would be great for us! We are building an AI agent tool and the biggest questions we get from potential customers are about the privacy issue of using non-EU providers. So having an actually good EU model would be perfect for us.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#78
post #9
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 generally share your skepticism, but didn‘t DeepSeek prove that one does not need a „competitive advantage“ in hardware? And if that does not hold for HW, it likely also doesn't hold for energy.

The competitive advantage of DeepSeek IMO were the engineers. Some pretty hard-core optimizations went out of their lab, and this is what I think is a major differentiator between success and failure. You can have all the HW you can wish for but if you don't have the right set of people you're not gonna make it. Many companies think that they have the right set of people but they don't.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#79

What does 1.7B euro buy in Europe? I ask sincerely since big players are throwing 10s-100s of billions at strategic problems these days.

Well, according to another comment the total they raised recently is closer to 40B. No idea if that true or not, but either way limitations can often lead to breakthroughs, as we saw with Deepseek. There's almost always many more ways to succeed than just throwing money at a problem.
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