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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

#261
post #242

Mistral cannot be “the EU AI company” if they don’t change their remote work policy. A truly “EU AI company” would benefit from the talent pool of all EU, not just from a couple of cities where they happen to have offices.

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It’s not like median (not mean) employee productivity at FAANGs and other major tech companies was ever particularly high. They always spent massive amounts of money hiring large amounts of people most of whom never provided that much direct value (due to structural/organizational reasons).

Same with AI. The business model is: spend massive amounts of money -> ??? -> success. Besides a handful of exceptions growing EU tech rarely were able to obtain enough funding without moving to the US.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#262
post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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Its not a "Europe" issue alone but even more locally. Saying this as a IT guy, we had way too many talks with banks about IT projects that in the US will have been way easier. But in specific EU countries was constantly met with "amazon does that, why bother" type of comments. Even on governmental level, talking about "innovative investments", it was like talking to walls. As you expect, a lot of companies (and peopl…

My experience in Europe is that investors look for teams of three: a CEO, a CTO, and one more person whose full-time job for the first two years will be filling out funding applications. That's a 50% overhead from day one.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#263
post #242

Mistral cannot be “the EU AI company” if they don’t change their remote work policy. A truly “EU AI company” would benefit from the talent pool of all EU, not just from a couple of cities where they happen to have offices.

So by that logic: Google is not an US AI company, since they have the same rules, requiring ppl to come into offices?

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#264
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI, Inc. is a company, and it owns other companies including OpenAI Holdings, LLC and OpenAI Global, LLC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI

>In May 2025, the nonprofit renounced plans to cede control of OpenAI after outside pressure.

The nonprofit is OpenAI, Inc., a company: https://opencorporates.com/companies/us_de/5902936. Look at how many times the word "company" is used in the Wikipedia article.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#265

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.

Mistral's best models are actually not open-source, and the ones that are open are not particularly competitive with other open-source models these days. Their highest ranked open model on LMArena[1] (mistral-small-2506) ranks below: Qwen3, various DeepSeek models, Kimi K2, GLM 4.5, Gemma, GPT OSS, etc. All those things you listed as part of that story pretty much apply to any open model, so it's kinda a shite list i…

That’s true, but not very relevant. Mistral is not in the business of selling their free models. What they are doing for large companies is building datacenters and providing their proprietary models trained on proprietary and confidential internal knowledge and fine-tuned for specific tasks. No sane European organisation would let a Chinese company do this, and American ones are less and less appealing. There is a significant amount of money to be made there and they don’t need to hop on the AGI hype train. They "just" need to provide fast and competent specialised models.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#266

LLM companies are Nvidia wrappers, who is a TSMC wrapper, who is an ASML wrapper. So Mistral is just an ASML wrapper.

ASML in turn wraps a bunch of companies for lenses (Carl Zeiss), lasers (Trumpf), etc [0]

Given lenses and microchips are both made from sand, I'm gonna conspiracy theory that LLMs were invented by sand companies to sell more sand.

[0] https://www.robotsops.com/complete-list-of-all-suppliers-and...

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#269

Everyone is so negative here but we have reached the limit of AI scaling with conventional methods. Who knows Mistral might find the next big breakthrough like DeepSeek did. We should be optimistic.

I would make a wild guess that this is a policital invesment. It's hard to believe Mistral is the right choice to throw in 1.7B€ for economic reason.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#270
post #267

Sorry to be that guy, but think there's a decent chance that the people who make possibly the most complicated technology in human history save for the LHC or LIGO _might_ have done some thinking we can't wrap our heads around.

Intel Capital seems reasonable proxy for this kind of decision making
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