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Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

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Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#381

Post by Wytwwww »

mattlutze wrote: post #306
benjiro wrote: post #241

Earlier 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…

It's very simple to found a company in the US that has access to the entire 50 states and all of the investors therein, with a single/simple accounting to manage. And you don't have to live in the US to do it. Europe/EU/EEA don't have a comparable setup. Found in one country, deal with workers in many, filings in all of the countries you're doing business, and more. The new proposed EU Incorporation would go a long w…

> found a company in the US that has access to the entire 50 states and all of the investors therein

Yes but tech companies and startups are still highly concentrated in a handful of locations.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#382

Post by jug »

Mistral teased Mistral Large 3 within weeks back in May but it never materialized.

If this doesn’t do it, I don’t know what…

I’m eager to see this one because Mistral models actually perform pretty well against top tiers in their class. It’s just that since 2025 they’ve been kinda small. Like, Mistral Medium 3.1 is probably a decent competitor to Google Gemini 2.0 or 2.5 Flash, but they have nothing against Pro.

If they release a large model later this year, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’ll be quite competitive for EU users. They’re pretty close to that threshold now that other large models are plateauing! It’s kinda tantalizing how close!

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#384

Post by littlestymaar »

Jackpillar wrote: post #363
jacekm wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just want to remind our overseas friends that the EU is not a country and Mistral is French company. The EU rarely bets on a single firm in a single country, there are always 26 unhappy countries when something like that is about to happen ;) I am European and I do agree that we should support the European companies but such decision are always results of lengthy deliberations. Does anyone know if there is any comp…

Pointlessly pedantic. Everyone knows EU is not a country. Also, ASML and Mistral are from two different countries. That aside, since the Draghi report last year (which was primarily about the innovation gap between the EU/US specifically in tech) and the overall lackluster economic projections, EU officials have been very vocal about losing out to the US (and this time China) in yet another race in a fledgling innova…

> Pointlessly pedantic. Everyone knows EU is not a country

Very few people in Europe understands how the EU works (do you?), I don't think it's reasonable to expect people from outside to understand it.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#385

Post by ath92 »

kaechle wrote: post #344
bondarchuk wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"While 1.3B€ is not pocket change, it is also an amount that ASML can not afford to lose." - The sentence is framed like a contrast but then instead it says the same thing twice.

I’ll see your pedantry and raise you ... more pedantry. The sentence may be a bit clunky, but there’s nothing grammatically wrong with it. And you’re leaving out the first sentence, which frames the comparison: > ASML 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 los…

You replaced “1.3B is not pocket change” with “1.3B€ isn’t a huge chunk of this”. Those have opposite meanings.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#386

Post by renewiltord »

touwer wrote: post #367
renewiltord wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ASML is "just a wrapper" for US technology licensed to them because Canon and Nikon were too close in size to each other to privilege one or the other. So we bestowed it on guy #3 (who bought guy #4) out of preventing anti-competition.

Sure, all technology is invented in the US. Only the US

Not all. Maybe the majority of modern inventions. And definitely EUV tech.

None of this wrapper talk is real but to the degree it’s true for TSMC it’s true for ASML.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#387

Post by greyb »

tensor wrote: post #349
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…

Every. Single. Time. a Mistral story hits the front page, a variation of this exact comment is posted. And every single time it is corrected. It almost feels like intentional misinformation. To repeat for the millionth time unique offerings for Mistral: - some of the best edge models. - some of the most cost effective in terms of cost per performance medium size models. - unique small language models. - unique OCR of…

I don't feel that your comment has corrected anything.

I like their OCR offering but it is suited for certain use cases, and would be overkill for many industry use cases. Mistral Saba is cool but there's no evidence uptake has been significant within the Global South compared to Chinese open weight models. Mistral Medium performs worse and costs double what gpt-oss-120B offers.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#388

Post by sharikous »

kaashif wrote: post #278
FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

China is decades behind the West in EUV technology. The attempt to create an independent supply chain is also a forced choice since all the EUV supply chain and knowledge pool are heavily protected by the West and are so complex and big that China cannot sidestep it even with a lot of resources.

Those numbers are realistic. EUV is the most complex machine ever built by humans

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#389

Post by artemisart »

diggan wrote: post #188
artemisart wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes for parakeet, but only comparing benchmark results for canary. Whisper also has severe hallucinations on silence and noise and WhisperX helps a lot, it adds voice activity detection i.e. a model to detect when someone speaks, to filter the input before running whisper. https://github.com/m-bain/whisperX

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#390

Post by booi »

Almondsetat wrote: post #10
darkamaul wrote: post #4

I don’t really get why ASML is putting money into Mistral AI. ASML is specialized in lithography machines. Mistral, on the other hand, is yet another LLM startup. What’s the actual synergy here? The closest angle I can imagine is that AI workloads drive demand for more chips, but I believe ASML is already selling everything it can make.

AI is being used more and more in chip design

I don't believe there are any "LLM"-style AI being used for chip design yet (if ever). It is a different problem space and the current RL and ML practices are still state of the art.
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