I think it’s important to note that, at least for now, Mistral uses the big American cloud providers for inference [0].
Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
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Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
#22I am a Mistral Le Chat Pro subscriber. I specifically chose to test their offerings because they are European. I don't have the necessary local hardware to run really big models, therefore need to choose a cloud provider if I want LLM action. I find the antics of Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft distasteful and avoid their products where I can. After testing Le Chat and Devstral-2 for a while, I felt their offeri…
I use their API for several models, both for personal and professional use. I think their approach (smaller, specialised models that are well-adapted for specific tasks) is a very good fit for how I work. And even the more general-purpose ones, like the chat model, just... refreshingly good in a lot of ways. My "ruthless review" prompt, which I use for, well, ruthless, guided reviews of early technical drafts, has good technical results for early reviews and holy crap is it ruthless and does it know how to swear. By the time Claude or ChatGPT are done being honest about how right I am to push back and gently circling back, Mistral's large model has sent me back to the drawing board twice.
Being in the EU does smooth a lot of things in terms of compliance, payment processing and whatnot, but I also like that their data retention and privacy policies are pretty clearly spelled out. I need to know something, there's a good chance it's explained outright somewhere and I don't need to read between the EULA lines and wonder what it means.
I do hit limits in terms of capabilities sometimes, and I'm sure other providers' services offer better results for some things. But the businesses ran on top of those more capable models feel too much like a scam at this point and I'd rather not depend on them for anything I actually need.
Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
#23I am a Mistral Le Chat Pro subscriber. I specifically chose to test their offerings because they are European. I don't have the necessary local hardware to run really big models, therefore need to choose a cloud provider if I want LLM action. I find the antics of Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft distasteful and avoid their products where I can. After testing Le Chat and Devstral-2 for a while, I felt their offeri…
There is also risk from a US regulatory side as recent drama around antrophic showed. Don’t think it’s inconceivable that the clowns in power decide to limit api access out of the blue one day because someone whispered a conspiracy theory in someone’s ear. API blockade… See also the constant flip flopping on what cards NVIDIA can export - no consistency in stance or coherent policy
Changing your LLM inference provider is the easiest switch in technology I can think of. It's quicker than taking off the case of your phone and putting on a new one.
Enough hardware and good models exist now that if you do get blocked from one place that viable alternatives do exist.
Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
#24I think it’s important to note that, at least for now, Mistral uses the big American cloud providers for inference [0]. [0] https://trust.mistral.ai/subprocessors
Yes and they are open about it. That is why they are building their own data centers in Paris and other places.
Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
#25In my opinion, being "Not American" or "Not Chinese" is not a good business model long-term. At some point, businesses will choose the option that provides the most value. I'm very skeptical that Mistral will survive long-term. Edit: I hear the commenters to this post. However, Mistral still relies on American chips. If there is truly a divorce between Europe and the US such that relying OpenAI or Anthropic is not an…
Recent political events have demonstrated that "Not American" is a very valuable strategic attribute.
For Mideastern countries, it is paying off. For European countries, remains to be seen
Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
#26I support the US->EU movement but I've been put off Mistral's Le Chat. https://european-alternatives.eu/
I subscribed (and paid) for a year of Pro. They gave me 1 month on the basis that a payment was missed on the second month. They simply stopped providing Pro and continued to take a monthly subscription for the next year (Stripe allows subscriptions to be fixed in the background). I must have changed cards that specific month.
I spoke to customer service who told me any sort of refund or complementary tokens was impossible and that I should have been paying closer attention to how much money I was giving them. So I shut down the subscription and now pay Claude $200 a month and deleted the account.
Genuinely was shocked at poor customer service can be with EU services sometimes compared to US ones. That said I will keep trying and exploring EU options, hopefully a new EU LLM giant emerges in the next few years.
Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
#27Mistral has a very difficult scenario to navigate. Training models in Europe is difficult and expensive because of regulations and energy prices. Their own open models are lagging behind the Chinese ones. That means eventually they will turn into an inference-only enterprise running mostly Chinese open models, at which point any other European player could compete (Hetzner, OVHCloud, etc.)
Well, they can train in any country they want. It's the inference and data placement that counts for legal purposes
Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
#28In my opinion, being "Not American" or "Not Chinese" is not a good business model long-term. At some point, businesses will choose the option that provides the most value. I'm very skeptical that Mistral will survive long-term. Edit: I hear the commenters to this post. However, Mistral still relies on American chips. If there is truly a divorce between Europe and the US such that relying OpenAI or Anthropic is not an…
If the EU can't rely on Nvidia everything must have broken down already, no advanced semiconductor today could be produced by one country only. Unless there's some alternative to ASML and Zeiss the EU is part of that chain.
Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
#29I support the US->EU movement but I've been put off Mistral's Le Chat. https://european-alternatives.eu/ I subscribed (and paid) for a year of Pro. They gave me 1 month on the basis that a payment was missed on the second month. They simply stopped providing Pro and continued to take a monthly subscription for the next year (Stripe allows subscriptions to be fixed in the background). I must have changed cards that sp…
You should have asked the bank to do a chargeback of the transactions.
Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
#30In my opinion, being "Not American" or "Not Chinese" is not a good business model long-term. At some point, businesses will choose the option that provides the most value. I'm very skeptical that Mistral will survive long-term. Edit: I hear the commenters to this post. However, Mistral still relies on American chips. If there is truly a divorce between Europe and the US such that relying OpenAI or Anthropic is not an…
If the EU can't rely on Nvidia everything must have broken down already, no advanced semiconductor today could be produced by one country only. Unless there's some alternative to ASML and Zeiss the EU is part of that chain.
That's right. So if everything is already broken down, so will Mistral.
That's why this talk of independence is unrealistic.