Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

But user-facing innovation is coming from the US. No EU Apple, Google, Amazon. And infrastructure R&D in China is unprecedented. They are reaping a multi-decadal investment in higher education.

The US has infinite VC money, a hypercompetitive environment that rewards first-movers, an appetite for letting these first-movers reap the benefits of their monopoly, and a political class that aligns with business interests. China has a coherent STEM education story and protections/state support for key industries. The EU sits at an awkward inbetween spot. It's raison d'etre is enabling free markets, and consequently it doesn't allow national champions and strong industrial politics. But it also doesn't have the same hypercompetitive culture as the US, and it's political class is less aligned with business interests.

The thing is, I don't really want the EU to compete with China and the US on these issues. If you have one system that makes people happy, but where eggs cost 1.20€ and iPhones have a smaller screen resolution, and one where people are miserable but eggs cost 1.10€ and iPhones have a higher screen resolution, then in a free market the system that makes people miserable wins.

I believe there are hard questions, no easy answers, and the EU, being a consensus mechanism for national states that hold the power, is not the best institutional set-up to tackle them.

I've seen zero cases so far where "physically present & managed in the EU but still owned by a US company" is sufficient to mitigate the typical US hosting concerns.

The threat is that AWS could be forced to a) suddenly pull services or b) spy on data by the US administration. That the DC is located entirely in the EU does nothing to reduce that risk if it's still fully owned by Amazon.

The was already a major concern for the last couple of years given the successful legal challenges against the privacy shield as sufficient data protection to give personal data to US organizations, and is way more of a concern after issues like Karin Khan and the ICC being suddenly cut off by Microsoft - it's clear that US companies literally can & will suddenly block key business services on administration whims. There's plenty of organizations where that's unacceptable risk.

2. FWIW as a business consumer of multiple APIs, Mistral models are absolutely excellent/fast/cheap compared to other offerings. The only real competitors they have is Google from all of our research. And we'd rather give money to Mistral.

3. Being EU-based is a strong USP as the 2020s are proving.

4. France has cheap energy and lots of AI talent. In fact, I would even argue that while american companies need to fight each other for the very same talent Mistral can get plenty of it just by being EU based. Believe it or not, most Europeans really don't want to live in the US and would rather make very high salaries here rather than extremely high salaries in US.