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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

#141

Post by seper8 »

ofrzeta wrote: post #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?

ASML not only sells the machines that makes chips (or analyses them like Yieldstar) but also makes software that customers use to work with the machine's - whether that is for designing, tweaking or analyzing chips.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#142

Post by diggan »

portaouflop wrote: post #74
simianwords wrote: post #50

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?

> OpenAI has no serious open source software

What's "serious" exactly? Codex is open source, is software, can be run with open/downloadable models/weights.

In my testing using Gemini, Claude Code, Codex, Qwen Code and AMP side-by-side for every prompt for the last two weeks, Codex seems the best of all of them so far.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#143

Post by epolanski »

BoorishBears wrote: post #132
epolanski wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. What you say can be applied to literally everybody. Literally. What is the USP of "insert literally any other company"? 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 provin…

I think catering to people who won't use the best version of an emerging tech is a losing strategy, but I guess we'll see.

No, the problem is that HN is blind to the fact that there are multiple definitions of "best".

It isn't just about "more powerful", it's also about "cheaper" or "faster".

Mistral models are faster than anything out of US (bar Gemini Flash) and are cost competitive with them.

For me, having to produce financial news in a short time span for tens of thousands of users speed and cost are important, and the fact that Opus 4.1 is "more intelligent" is worthless.

That's like telling me that a Ryzen Threadripper with 64 cores is faster than than my raspberry pi for controlling the appliances in my kitchen. It's irrelevant when it's much more expensive and energy hungry.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#144

Post by simion314 »

pu_pe wrote: post #138

I don't see any way, shape or form in which ASML needs Mistral. If they are interested in AI-based chip design, they should either partner with a leading provider or keep their cards open for buying a startup that focuses on that specifically. Mistral is not even a leader on the segment they specialize in (open-source LLMs).

Do they need a "leader" ? Things move fast and Mistral is not much behind and it seems they are making enterprise relations, they can get EU contracts that a Chinese or USA provider would not be allowed and the only downside you are max 3 months behind. So for vibe coding they need to catch up, for other stuff the differences are not that large to notice.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#145

Post by seper8 »

drexlspivey wrote: post #118
prof-dr-ir wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that a relocation might not happen, but the increasing Frenchification of ASML after their CEO became French does smell a little off.

Are Google and Microsoft “Indianified” because their CEOs are from India?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41785265

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#146

Post by nomad_horse »

decide1000 wrote: post #25
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.

> Voxtral outperforms Whisper

Can I stop you right here? Whisper is a few years old and it wasn't the best model for a long time. There are like 10 models that are smaller and faster and outperform both of them.

And these models existed before Voxtral.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#147

Post by impossiblefork »

saubeidl wrote: post #108
pembrook wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All sounds like classic marketing/positioning angles for an indiehacker bootstrapped saas tool. Problem is Mistral needs more than $10K MRR, and isn't going to make it by carving off a small niche when each model costs 10s of Billions to train and run. Europe has no solution to the energy problem long term unfortunately, and is actively trying to make it worse. I'm 100% certain some giant industrial companies in the…

Europe is the only one with a solution to the energy problem long term. https://phys.org/news/2025-06-wendelstein-nuclear-fusion.htm...

I think it's Renaissance Fusion (which is still in the EU, but is not Wendelstein 7-X) that has the solution, but it is as stellerator.

The only iffy thing are those little ceramic balls full of lead that they talk about letting float inside the lithium, but I suppose they lithium flow might be slow.

I don't see how Renaissance Fusion's proposed machine can fail to work.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#148

Post by f_devd »

epolanski wrote: post #134
pimterry wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 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 adm…

> 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. I did. Some of my clients by design host everything on German servers of Azure and call it a day.

To be fair Microsoft has put the most effort[0] of any US company I've seen in order to try and work around the issue. Not that I would choose it.

[0]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/trust-center/privacy/europea...

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#149

Post by pegasus »

Certhas wrote: post #123
portaouflop wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It hasn't. Multipolar world, expertise exists everywhere. 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,…

"a political class that aligns with business interests" - or is it the other way around, more recently? - Big tech firms bowing to Trump and all that.
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