Mistral is the only AI bot I haven’t blocked from my server.
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European AI. A playbook to own it
51–60 of 155 posts
Re: European AI. A playbook to own it
#52The 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 r…
The funding allocation is a reflection of different cultures really.
I’m from the UK but there’s no way there’s the same density, drive, and hunger to take risk, to the extent that you find in US. Also there’s a lot more synergy in the US vs a fragmented Europe.
Re: European AI. A playbook to own it
#53There'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.
I'm not sure about that. Post GFC the ECB printed plenty of cash as well.
Re: European AI. A playbook to own it
#54The 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 r…
Imagine all the great investments the US VCs are missing outside of AI.
Re: European AI. A playbook to own it
#55The 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 r…
Not just startups or funding. Google alone has more AI compute than China and the EU combined.
There's no shortage of capital in Europe. But nobody wants to take the risk. Meanwhile in the US, people are putting 10-100x the capital at risk. So you can say what you want about it looking scary to you to invest in the US, but the people with capital to invest clearly don't see it that way.
More often when you hear VCs give interviews, they are saying the opposite: that never-ending EU regulations introduce more business risk than anything the US president could possibly do.
Re: European AI. A playbook to own it
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Mistral OCR 3 isn't open weights and isn't available for download. It's only available via API, or to companies via paid consulting with Mistral.
"For organizations with stringent data privacy requirements, Mistral OCR offers a self-hosting option. This ensures that sensitive or classified information remains secure within your own infrastructure, providing compliance with regulatory and security standards. If you would like to explore self-deployment with us, please let us know."
https://docs.mistral.ai/models/ocr-3-25-12 https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-ocr-3
Re: European AI. A playbook to own it
#57The 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 r…
I don’t consider VC investments to be particularly beneficial to the world. This idea of “let’s use capital to make it faster for people to exploit others with the only goal of generating more capital” does more harm than good.
Re: European AI. A playbook to own it
#5858 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.
I hope one day soon EU politicians ask themselves why it might be that there is only one single domestic AI lab that is basically an also-ran at this point.
Re: European AI. A playbook to own it
#59The 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 r…
The funding allocation is a reflection of different cultures really. I’m from the UK but there’s no way there’s the same density, drive, and hunger to take risk, to the extent that you find in US. Also there’s a lot more synergy in the US vs a fragmented Europe.
Yet the UK did produce Deepmind. Which you can look at both ways since it got gobbled up by Google. But it at least came from the UK.
I assume the article excludes the UK, I feel like UK has much more of a startup and VC scene than Europe does and I wonder if that is part of the issue : if you do want to create a startup, the London is a better place than mainland Europe. So even startups that for whatever reason won't take US funding still land outside Europe.
Re: European AI. A playbook to own it
#60The 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 r…
Not just startups or funding. Google alone has more AI compute than China and the EU combined. There's no shortage of capital in Europe. But nobody wants to take the risk. Meanwhile in the US, people are putting 10-100x the capital at risk. So you can say what you want about it looking scary to you to invest in the US, but the people with capital to invest clearly don't see it that way. More often when you hear VCs g…
I’m not all that convinced on the regulation part.
Ultimately it’s all about investing money to create real assets that generate cash flows. One can side step regulations to some extent whilst developing a product (nobody cares/notices until you are actually growing fast) and then deal with regulations later. Uber already showed this and the leading AI firms are following the same act - having ripped off a lot of content but nobody threw a fit until a legit asset came out of it.