I feel like there's a gross mischaracterization here - $14B in AI terms is like 'second-best VSCode fork' tier money.
These guys have built a fully built-out AI company with a range of models and applications.
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
#42> from Mistral’s offices in the trendy 10th arrondissement of Paris
Couldn't continue reading after this ignorance. The 10th is dominated by the two major train stations and warehouses. Notorious for petty crime and giving arriving tourists "Paris Syndrome" because of the disappointment. It is the least trendy arrondissement in Paris. It is central, but that's about it.
Edit: Looked it up and Mistral's offices are actually in the 2nd, about 500 meters from the Louvre. A very trendy area indeed. Is this a human or AI hallucination? What else in this article is wrong?
Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
#43I 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.
I don’t know whether there’s a US vs. Europe difference on this, but I failed to get my (European) bank to do this a while back when Tesla continued to take money for a subscription after I’d given the car back. (I had to kill that credit card and write the small amount off in the end.)
Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
#44I hope Mistral will not fall for the Forbes kiss of death.
Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
#45In 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…
Swiss & Monaco regulated industries can't use US models, nor clouds legally. Not just banking, there is a large part of business data holding identifiers that can't cross borders, military can't be too dependent on foreign hostile powers. If they would be purchasing, they would go for such tailored solution. Things like that add up.
Some of the use may be legal requirement, some is sponsored (as I would expect French government to do, to some extent EU), some are simply moral moves from >95% of the mankind not living in US who watch the news at least a bit. US isn't that big in many regards and its actively harming its reputation daily to the point there is little left.
Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
#46While that may be slightly better than being dependent on Washington, I still don't like it. Everyone is now AI-crazy. If you go to clown-channels such as the war industry or the crazy Palantir guy who wants to ruin everyone, you see that they dream of AI controlled mega-drones wiping out cities. That's the next "evolutionary" step; you can already see video footage of how much drones changed war. And these guys all push for more, more, more. I now understand why Trump keeps on making so many wrong decisions - he is being showed war-videos and sells it as a promotional agent. That's his main job; for anything else other than promo he has no competence.
Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
#47These 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
Because companies here actively want to avoid breaking the law, as opposed to the U.S where breaking the law is just a matter of paying some $ to the grifter in chief? I always find it funny when Europeans being proactive about that sort of stuff is somehow a bad thing from Americans point of view. Like wanting decent human rights and not having to bend over to megacorps is something we should not have.
Though, if the Americans in question just want to do their grifting in EU, it makes sense why they are upset at that, I guess, because it limits their grifting opportunities.
Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
#48In 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…
Unless/until there is a risk that the chips themselves are backdoored and trying to exfiltrate data, European companies that host in Europe still solve a big problem for use of certain data in Europe.
It's not a purity test. Relying on US chips in not the same deal-breaker for all but the most extreme situation as relying on a poorly regulated US company to run the inference.
Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
#49These 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…
> For a lot of business customers, EU based hosting is not optional
They still use US clouds that can have information pulled by the US government.
Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
#50That's... not that much money. Anthropic's supposedly worth $380 billion.