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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

#31

Post by ben_w »

aurareturn wrote: post #5

In 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…

> 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 option, neither will relying on Nvidia and likely the thousands of smaller hardware and software suppliers that make Mistral work. That's why I don't think it's realistic to say that Europeans can't rely on OpenAI/Anthropic and that Mistral is free from American reliance. If you want true independence, you have to rebuild every single layer like what China is doing. That's hard and expensive.

American designed. The GPUs are made in Taiwan, the RAM in South Korea, using machines from the Netherlands' ASML.

True independence is indeed hard and expensive. But it's also not the job of Mistral to tackle all the layers at the same time, not even the state-owned corporations of western Europe in the 20th century (and the EU isn't (yet) even a state) tried to tackle every stage of an industrial process by themselves.

Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American

#32

Post by [deleted] »

trvz wrote: post #23
Havoc wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American

#33

Post by ben_w »

aurareturn wrote: post #30
samultio wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> That's why this talk of independence is unrealistic.

No, just really hard. Tackling one problem and thinking it done is the same error as taking one step and thinking you've climbed Mount Everest; the converse is the same, just as one cannot climb Mount Everest without the first step, one also cannot become independent without making the first independent replacement for one the links in the chain you rely on.

Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American

#34

Post by nairboon »

jeroenhd wrote: post #15
aurareturn wrote: post #5

In 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…

AI companies will find other ways to make money before global geopolitics find a new status quo. For the coming years, it seems like a perfectly fine business model. China isn't going to be friendly any time soon and so far America seems to be getting more in rather than less hostile. It wasn't that long ago that an American-Danish war was a realistic scenario.

> ... an American-Danish war was a realistic scenario.

Was a scenario? Isn't it still a possible scenario? As far as I know, the President of the United States has never formally recognized and apologized for this blatant violation of the UN Charter Art. 2.4. For all we know, in the absence of this realization, the US is still plotting to violate the territorial integrity of Denmark.

Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American

#35

Post by wongarsu »

aurareturn wrote: post #30
samultio wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Never let the perfect be the enemy of the good. And if I'm processing personal data, the threat profile of sending that to a US-based company for inference is very different than the threat profile of sending that data to the EU to run on American chips. One is almost certain to end up in the hands of US government agencies and has a low but real probability to end up in training data or a data breach. The other is has much less immediate threats to my data

Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American

#36

Post by mark_l_watson »

Indirectly I use Mistral daily: I like Proton’s Lumo private chat and that runs on Mistral technology. Something like Lumo is very much good enough to replace search and general information browsing and for me is very practical.

What is not so practical is my paying for Gemini Ultra, which has some practicality but is something I pay for because it is fun using strong AIs like Claude and Gemini Pro in AntiGravity. It feels funny to admit paying a lot of money just to have fun with something.

I wish Mistral good luck, and I like their deployed forward engineers approach to business. Seems practical.

Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American

#37

Post by dannyw »

s_dev wrote: post #26

I 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…

There's pretty good consumer protection in the EU. I imagine consumer protection routes probably would apply here.

Definitely not really acceptable though nonetheless; you're a paying customer / subscriber that got 'scammed'...

Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American

#38

Post by dbl000 »

alxlaz wrote: post #22
phillc73 wrote: post #3

I 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 go…

That ruthless review prompt seems interesting, would you be willing to share it? I've been trying to have Claude act as a reviewer for me and it feels like it never will disagree.

Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American

#39

Post by alkonaut »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #19

These are just signs of this market maturing. For a lot of business customers, EU based hosting is not optional. That includes models. Routing requests via API endpoints in the US is not really acceptable. And anything involving privacy sensitive data of course needs to be handled properly. Sam Altman pinky swearing to be nice doesn't quite cut it in terms of hard guarantees. EU based legal entities and strong compli…

> We have a few more picky customers in Germany.

Describe making business in Europe with one evergreen sentence

Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American

#40

Post by pu_pe »

touwer wrote: post #27
pu_pe wrote: post #11

Mistral 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

The regulatory concerns are worldwide: the GDPR has restrictions about the territorial location of data, so you cannot move data anywhere else other than EU or "adequate" countries (in practice, the US). Since the real gold is in using data that users submitted to you (ie, GDPR protected), they are kind of stuck in regards to where they can train.

Mistral's stack already heavily relies on American cloud providers and they have tons of American investors, so its sovereignty angle is dubious anyway.

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