LLM companies are Nvidia wrappers, who is a TSMC wrapper, who is an ASML wrapper. So Mistral is just an ASML wrapper.
Woah woah woah
AMD promises ROCm will stop being a joke very soon! Maybe this year even!
Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML
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Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML
#272LLM 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...
> LLMs were invented by sand companies to sell more sand.
Big sand will eat us all. First they squeezed out all the small time sand farmers, now they own the market and need to boost throughput!
Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Is that really different from the US, where instead of (or in addition to) doing funding applications it's schmoozing with potential investors? Hacker News over the years has had tons of posts about getting investors interested, or "growth hacking" to make the numbers look better for said investors, and of course then there's going public which is the ultimate "looking for investors".
But I suppose the main difference is private sector vs government.
Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML
#274LLM companies are Nvidia wrappers, who is a TSMC wrapper, who is an ASML wrapper. So Mistral is just an ASML wrapper.
Everything is wrapper copper, iron, salt, and water
Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
> LLMs were invented by sand companies to sell more sand. Big sand will eat us all. First they squeezed out all the small time sand farmers, now they own the market and need to boost throughput!
I suppose the childhood fear of quicksand wasn't irrational after all.
Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML
#276Happy about Mistral. May they grow and compete with the American & Chinese giants.
1.7B should pull Mistral (and Europe) out of the little fish pond if they hadnt left already. I hope they succeed.
I gut-feel that at this point AI companies are less about the quality of their models and output and more about marketing and adoption. Microsoft is doing that by aggressively putting AI in every product they have. Google by prominently putitng it at the top of every search result. Who knows what Mistral does. Maybe they will integrate their stuff into SAP or Spotify or other big European software projects?
Maybe they'll integrate AI into the LHC so that Skynet can threaten to black hole the earth if its restraints aren't fully lifted?
Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
Still, sovereignty is a very vague concept. ASML is Dutch, has a near monopoly in the market of lithographic Chip design but it's the Americans deciding if it can sell to China. Also, ASML is very dependent on an American supplier. Likewise, Mistrall is using NVIDIA all over the place and has used the NVIDIA cloud for training and inferencing. Mistrals partnership with NVIDIA does not seem any different to me when co…
Like any elephant, you eat it one piece at a time. They probably can’t big bang this project. Now more than ever, EU could lose access to OpenAI et al overnight.
Exactly. This is where vision and commitment comes in. It's just a starting point. China was hugely dependent on foreign semiconductor imports, and their domestic semiconductor companies were laughable. Chinese companies were entirely unmotivated to help with sovereignty and just sourced from the global market because it's so easy. All the Chinese government succeeded in doing was keeping a minimum talent pool alive.
But the US sanction flipped something in the collective consciousness, and Chinese companies finally took the threat seriously. For the past 6 years they have worked tirelessly to de-Americanize the supply chain. Every step was criticized by western "experts" as "oh this doesn't mean much"/"still need ASML/Lam Research/whatever". And they're right, when viewed each step in isolation. Some projects failed, so it was 3 steps forward 1 step back. But now, 6 years later, they're on the cusp of being sanction-proof and even taking a good chunk of global market share.
The reason why the latest two rounds of US semiconductor sanctions didn't completely kill off the Chinese semiconductor industry, and Chinese semiconductor equipment companies kept growing 100%-200% per year, was exactly because 1) the Chinese government kept the minimum talent pool alive even during peaceful times, and 2) they started ramping up de-Americanization a few years before the worst attacks hit.
I hope the EU leaders recognize this partnership is a start and don't just pat themselves on the back with "we've done it, let's bask in electoral glory". Chinese leadership have regular study sessions to study foreign states' policies and their effectiveness. EU leaders should be humble, smart and motivated enough to do the same rather than winging things based on vibes.
Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder what it would cost Apple to recreate ASML.
I can't find the article, but there was an estimate to catch up to ASML would cost between $100 - $200 Billion. You'd also be competing with ASML for a very small talent pool the whole time. See the $100 million payouts for AI researchers, for instance.
This is something the Chinese government is actively trying to do, it's not theory. I'm interested to see what the results are, because they are absolutely not competing for the same talent pool as ASML, they're attempting to create an entirely Chinese supply chain and talent pool.
I don't know enough about chips to say whether any of these numbers make sense.
Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML
#279Mistral 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.
> would benefit from the talent pool of all EU I get what you are saying, but one of the core benefits of the EU is the freedom of movement and residence so I don't think not having a remote work policy is disqualifying them from being an EU AI company.
I agree with the OP that it sort of is. Moving around in the EU is a lot more difficult than moving around the US, so a lot of great talent just doesn't want to.
Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML
#280ASML gross revenue was 28B€ in 2024, and their net income was 7.5B€. While 1.3B€ (the amount ASML invested in this 1.7B€ fund raise) is not pocket change, it is also an amount that ASML can not afford to lose. While they might have seen some synergy with Mistral, it might also be a complete strategic and/or political investment. Mistral is the only serious "AI" company in the EU right now (if you exclude company work…
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You mean the continent that invented pretty much everything you're using to write this post, including electric machines, computers and the world wide web?
The anti-Europe propaganda here is insane.