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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

#181

Post by KronisLV »

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?

The GPT-OSS-120B release was pretty decent and you could run it on vLLM, Ollama and a bunch of other stuff on day one, despite MXFP4, are you not entertained? I mean, it's even close to GPT-5 mini in some benchmarks: https://llm-stats.com/

As for the Chinese models, yes, there are quite a few good ones.

For programming and development, my current daily driver is the Qwen3 Coder 480B model: https://qwen3lm.com/

I have it running on Cerebras: https://www.cerebras.ai/pricing

Personally I think Claude still has the best results, but Qwen3 is loosely in the same ballpark and Cerebras inference is measured in thousands of tokens per second, in addition to giving me 24M tokens per day for 50 bucks a month in total. That was enough to get me to switch over.

Aside from that the GLM-4.5 is pretty good: https://glm45.org/

And so is ERNIE 4.5: https://ernie.baidu.com/blog/posts/ernie4.5/

Either way, happy to see what the future holds for Mistral, it's cool to have EU options too! Either way, more competition prevents complacency and stagnation, and should be a good thing for everyone.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#183

Post by mgaunard »

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,…

The EU is mostly a hotspot for leisure, tourism, food, fashion.

A lot of people enjoy living there, meaning there is necessarily some local talent that doesn't get captured by the global markets.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#185

Post by artemisart »

diggan wrote: post #158
nomad_horse wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> There are like 10 models that are smaller and faster and outperform both of them. As someone who is currently relying on Whisper for some things, what models are those exactly? I still haven't found anything that is accurate as Whisper (large), are those models just faster or also as accurate/more accurate?

Nvidia parakeet and canary are better and faster, here is a leaderboard: https://huggingface.co/spaces/hf-audio/open_asr_leaderboard

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#187

Post by jonasdegendt »

seper8 wrote: post #141
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.

How well does that stuff sell though? From what I remember when I worked there, services and the auxiliary hardware that comes with it, were a minority of revenue, although they wanted to more aggressively sell services to increase revenue.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#188

Post by diggan »

artemisart wrote: post #185
diggan wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are like 10 models that are smaller and faster and outperform both of them. As someone who is currently relying on Whisper for some things, what models are those exactly? I still haven't found anything that is accurate as Whisper (large), are those models just faster or also as accurate/more accurate?

Nvidia parakeet and canary are better and faster, here is a leaderboard: https://huggingface.co/spaces/hf-audio/open_asr_leaderboard

> Nvidia parakeet and canary are better and faster

Is that based on your own experience using those and also Whisper, comparing them side-by-side? Or is that based just on those benchmark results?

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#189

Post by sublimefire »

bakugo wrote: post #39
XorNot wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Why would anyone want to use Chinese tech is a mystery. There are too many geopolitical issues which makes it a risk. It is just not viable anymore to sign multimillion €$£ contracts with the companies originating from there. Scientific collab for sure but not more. I am not talking about toy applications here. Any significant deployment requires support etc from a provider. If data is very sensitive then doing confidential AI might be a better focus.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#190

Post by sunaookami »

f_devd wrote: post #148
epolanski wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

As long as the CLOUD act exists (which to their credit Microsoft fought) there is no privacy as long as there are US companies involved.
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