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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

#81
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't get me wrong, I do wish Mistral's models were competitive with the Chinese ones. But right now, they simply aren't, and might never be in the future. If you want the best option available while keeping your data within the EU, running a Chinese open weights model on hardware within the EU is likely the way to go.

Competitive how? Is coding the only use case people talk about the best model?

Not even coding, in most stuff, Mistral models are as embarrassing as LLaMa, because they’re actually just LLaMa

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Why are they not?

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#83
post #53
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure Europe doesn't want to cede AI development entirely to China.

Europe has ceded development of all tech to China and the US, I don’t see why AI should be any different.

Has it though? Last time I checked EU still is the worlds main producer of semiconductor lithography - which is arguably the basis for all tech worldwide

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#84
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't get me wrong, I do wish Mistral's models were competitive with the Chinese ones. But right now, they simply aren't, and might never be in the future. If you want the best option available while keeping your data within the EU, running a Chinese open weights model on hardware within the EU is likely the way to go.

That's very short-term. Whilst using whatever models now, Europe should be investing in catching-up before the inevitable future enshitification of the US models and the future political collision with both the US and China.

Enshittification and Political BS has already happened to Mistral

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes. It's not like the model can spy on you, so if the model performs well on premise then it will be suitable irrespective of the origin.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#86
post #32
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…

Eventually with all technology you realise we need regional localised players who can cater to the regulations and nuances of those markets. Yes we'll continue to have global providers of AI technology like OpenAI but it's vitally important to have local players which over time might just offer a better experience to the EU or wherever else. We cannot be continually dependent on the US for everything. This also means…

AI slop

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#87
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.

Mistral models are not very competitive with other proprietary models. Their competition is mostly from OSS models, which 1. can actually be run anywhere and 2. frequently outperform Mistral models anyway (e.g. DeepSeek 3, Kimi K2, and Qwen3 all outperform Mistral in current LMArena rankings[1]).

Hell, you can host actual frontier models (e.g. Claude 4) on AWS Bedrock in the EU, so "in the EU" (from a hosting perspective) cannot be Mistral's USP. If the proposition is "support EU businesses", then ok, but that is a different thing.

[1] https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard/text

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#88
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hardware is definitely extremely important. Dig more into the topic and you'll understand where all those chips sold to Singapure went to.

Spoiler: they went to Thailand.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#89
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.

> There is no AI company like Mistral

Maybe because there shouldn't be?

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#90
I don't get it. "The collaboration between Mistral AI and ASML aims to generate clear benefits for ASML customers through innovative products and solutions enabled by AI, and will offer potential for joint research to address future opportunities" - so the idea is that ASML customers can somehow make use of Mistral AI?
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