Mistral raises €3B • Hacker News Board

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#41

Post by alansaber » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 6:36 AM UTC

Raed667 wrote: post #34

v3ss0n wrote: post #19

No amount of $ would improve mistral if they cant fix fundamental flaws. They aren't even on par with chinese models a year ago.

can you elaborate what are their fundamental flaws that are not fixable by funds?

They've never made a near-frontier model. Which is a valid criticism for a model training company

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#42

Post by alansaber » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 6:37 AM UTC

chronic7304 wrote: post #39

Raed667 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

can you elaborate what are their fundamental flaws that are not fixable by funds?

> can you elaborate what are their fundamental flaws that are not fixable by funds? Culture. In terms of output, EU working culture is inferior to American/Chinese working culture. Work life balance is irrelevant for frontier/sovereign AI.

Holy oversimplification. Do you get all your information from the internet?

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#43

Post by aurareturn » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 6:37 AM UTC

loehnsberg wrote: post #18

keel-control wrote: post #13

I get worried when thinking about Mistral because they make mediocre models and I don't think they will be able to defeat their competition.

Maybe true for frontier LLM, but there's plenty of space in the niches. For example, I think their TTS/STT models are pretty good, speaking from personal experience.

Is there money in niche models?

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#44

Post by alansaber » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 6:38 AM UTC

throwa356262 wrote: post #33

Morkeeth wrote: post #27

Europes last chance

I don't know. The moat doesn't seem to exist. Probably safer to stay out of the race for now.

Stay out of the race sounds insane when AI is, and will be, a common commodity. China is getting great bang for their buck on AI training, why not the same for Europe?

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#45

Post by davedx » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 6:38 AM UTC

Mistral is an interesting AI company because they clearly have a contrarian business strategy to the other AI labs. They're also landing big customers in Europe for the right reasons. People dump on them because they're not benchmaxxxing which is pretty shortsighted - do you really want to be in a benchmark arms race with China, or do you want to make money and deploy sovereign AI compute in Europe?

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#46

Post by cl-coder » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 6:39 AM UTC

So I suppose mistral-large-4 then in a few months?

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#47

Post by HenrikPontoppid » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 6:39 AM UTC

donmb wrote: post #35

Mistral is not that bad as the comments here suggest. I am not using it as a frontier model but with simple RAG tasks and its doing great. Also OCR is pretty decent. It's a positive development that Europe is at least trying. Alternative would be: do nothing.

When it comes to what really matters, they're far behind and probably will not catch up. It is my conviction that in this space, if you're not the best in the world, you're losing. Everyone is fundamentally selling the same thing, so if you don't have the most intelligent or cheapest model in the world, you're losing. Sure, Mistral has a "Made in Europe" edge, but any open-weight self-hosted chinese model might as well have been made by Von der Leyen herself.

Also, €3B is nothing in this market, especially when you're competing with more efficient competitors. €3B in Europe is probably the same as €10B in the USA and €20B or €30B in China.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#48

Post by bossyTeacher » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 6:40 AM UTC

chronic7304 wrote: post #39

Raed667 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

can you elaborate what are their fundamental flaws that are not fixable by funds?

> can you elaborate what are their fundamental flaws that are not fixable by funds? Culture. In terms of output, EU working culture is inferior to American/Chinese working culture. Work life balance is irrelevant for frontier/sovereign AI.

>inferior

Way to reduce a multi dimensional concept into a single scalar value. Care to explain what exactly make it inferior? Try using more than one word if you can.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#49

Post by ajjahs » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 6:40 AM UTC

alansaber wrote: post #42

chronic7304 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> can you elaborate what are their fundamental flaws that are not fixable by funds? Culture. In terms of output, EU working culture is inferior to American/Chinese working culture. Work life balance is irrelevant for frontier/sovereign AI.

Holy oversimplification. Do you get all your information from the internet?

[dead]

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#50

Post by aurareturn » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 6:41 AM UTC

throwa356262 wrote: post #33

Morkeeth wrote: post #27

Europes last chance

I don't know. The moat doesn't seem to exist. Probably safer to stay out of the race for now.

I’m still looking for no-moatists to logically explain why there is no moat in SOTA LLMS.

That paper released by a lone Google employee 3 years ago still misguiding people it seems.