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European AI. A playbook to own it

europe.mistral.ai

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Re: European AI. A playbook to own it

#41

Post by martin-t »

sva_ wrote: post #29

There's this sentiment in Germany that if you can't make in industry, you work for the government or - even worse - become a politician. It seems like Mistral took that to the next level; they can't compete so they do lobbying instead. Being European, I love the idea of European AI labs. But I wish there was more competition. That being said, as a German for example, I can't think of an AI company successfully traini…

In that case, hopefully the copyright mafia will take the money from US and Chinese LLM companies and redistribute it to the people who did the actual work fueling the models, such as myself.

I did not spend 10 years writing (A)GPL code for all of it to be stripped of its license, remixed and sold for profit.

Of course in a truly just world, the LLM companies who took my code without permission would beg with offers of owning a share of them because if I didn't consent their models would have to be destroyed.

Since my work is apparently so valuable that they just have to have it, it should count towards my retirement age too.

Re: European AI. A playbook to own it

#42

Post by imbus »

sva_ wrote: post #29

There's this sentiment in Germany that if you can't make in industry, you work for the government or - even worse - become a politician. It seems like Mistral took that to the next level; they can't compete so they do lobbying instead. Being European, I love the idea of European AI labs. But I wish there was more competition. That being said, as a German for example, I can't think of an AI company successfully traini…

I like the sentiment. Keeps a lot of people out of politics so the few can rob everyone else blind. No no, you don’t want this job it’s for loser hacks only.

Re: European AI. A playbook to own it

#43

Post by SyneRyder »

ks2048 wrote: post #33
dwedge wrote: post #9

I've tried Mistral a few times, at first it seemed promising (though lagging) but at some point it seems like they stopped focusing on AI and shifted their focus to being a mouthpiece for EU policy and pushing for regulation. I can't really take any of their announcements seriously anymore. A couple of weeks ago they were calling for a European AI tax to pay creatives.

Why do you say they "stopped focusing on AI"? I see a pretty consistent release of pretty good products - particularly in speech and OCR.

I used to use Mistral OCR, but found it was better just to write a program that sent the documents to Claude Sonnet to OCR instead. Claude is far better quality, better formatting and fewer errors.

I'm also using Voxtral TTS to try to replace OpenAI. It "works", but I've had problems with volume levels being radically different between different audio chunks. It doesn't seem to "understand the full text" the way OpenAI's voice models do, which can be more expressive. Voxtral sometimes sounds robotic in the reading. And some Voxtral TTS output contains music in the background occasionally, which suggests their training corpus isn't that clean. Try generating a personalized news podcast, and the intro may occasionally sound like the music for BBC News underneath....

As for not focusing on AI, there's this interview in the Big Technology Podcast 2 months ago, where the Mistral CEO says their main focus is on helping companies fine-train models for internal use, over being a general model builder.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxUTdyEDpbU&t=1357s

Re: European AI. A playbook to own it

#45

Post by well_ackshually »

SyneRyder wrote: post #43
ks2048 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you say they "stopped focusing on AI"? I see a pretty consistent release of pretty good products - particularly in speech and OCR.

I used to use Mistral OCR, but found it was better just to write a program that sent the documents to Claude Sonnet to OCR instead. Claude is far better quality, better formatting and fewer errors. I'm also using Voxtral TTS to try to replace OpenAI. It "works", but I've had problems with volume levels being radically different between different audio chunks. It doesn't seem to "understand the full text" the way Open…

"I sent money to the god knows how many trillion parameters fully closed source machine built on billions of dollars and it worked better than the model that I can self host from the guys next door"

yeah, no shit ? All you're saying is that you're happily locking yourself in to models you have zero control over and that Anthropic can fuck you over at any time.

However, yes, Mistral is not in the business of providing you with a perfect, general purpose model. They fine tune from their base models for specific tasks.

Re: European AI. A playbook to own it

#46

Post by ____tom____ »

dwedge wrote: post #9

I've tried Mistral a few times, at first it seemed promising (though lagging) but at some point it seems like they stopped focusing on AI and shifted their focus to being a mouthpiece for EU policy and pushing for regulation. I can't really take any of their announcements seriously anymore. A couple of weeks ago they were calling for a European AI tax to pay creatives.

Sounds like the tax on recordable CDs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy

Ridiculous, and it didn't take money from the right people or give it to the right people. I would expect the same from an AI tax.

Re: European AI. A playbook to own it

#47

Post by enejej »

sixhobbits wrote: post #16

58 Minute reading time. I read the first dozen pages or so and I'm not sure what the goal of this thing is, why they wrote it, who they wrote it for? Is it aimed at European governments? Or companies? Or people? Or something else? > This playbook provides a clear, actionable framework to position Europe as that powerhouse, accelerating AI development and adoption, attracting and retaining top talent, simplifying regu…

It’s a load of nonsense.

They essentially want a bunch of stuff and most importantly funding from the EU and using the FOMO angle to get them to act. This of course is not on merit. They see that no other lab in Europe really exists and are trying to seize an open opportunity.

Re: European AI. A playbook to own it

#48

Post by taurath »

sva_ wrote: post #29

There's this sentiment in Germany that if you can't make in industry, you work for the government or - even worse - become a politician. It seems like Mistral took that to the next level; they can't compete so they do lobbying instead. Being European, I love the idea of European AI labs. But I wish there was more competition. That being said, as a German for example, I can't think of an AI company successfully traini…

Nobody can compete with trillions of dollars of capital if it’s a race for capital.

Re: European AI. A playbook to own it

#49

Post by zmmmmm »

The glaring number to me is only 5% of VC funds vs 52% in the US. That's 10x more opportunity despite roughly comparable economies. As long as that is true, it seems like it will always be impossible to get an organic startup industry working in the EU. Any startup that is any good will almost certainly end up getting a round of investment from the US and most likely move their base of operations there.

I wonder if recent US actions will start to influence this as there now appears to be more risk in sending your money to the US or founding your company there as a foreign entity than there used to be.

Re: European AI. A playbook to own it

#50

Post by peyton »

ForHackernews wrote: post #26

I don't understand why European providers can't just host open-weight models developed by the Chinese, or distill Google/OpenAI/Anthropic models to produce their own models on the the cheap. Nobody acts like you need to invent steel to have a steel mill.

I don’t know either, but playbook item #20 has:

> The mechanism consists of a revenue-based levy applied to all commercial providers placing AI models on the market or putting them into service in Europe, reflecting their use of content publicly available online. This levy would apply equally to providers based abroad, creating a level playing field. The proceeds would flow into a central European fund dedicated to investing in new content creation, and supporting Europe's cultural sectors.

Presumably Mistral is putting forth the most pro-AI position possible for the region.

So it sounds like anyone doing what you described is at risk of a tax that will make their offerings uncompetitive.

So why even bother?

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