51–60 of 611 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you follow the ideology of the Silicon Valley billionaire types, based around Ayn Rand (eg “Atlas Shrugged”) and Curtis Yarvin, as well as what Thiel himself has said over the years, the Antichrist is governmental institutions, seen as the inhibitors of progress. I am not joking btw.
to be fair, there is no plausible explanation for Mistral's fall into irrelevance other than having to deal with regulatory burden. US and CN labs get to feed their models all the data in the world while Mistral has to comply with Let's-Smother-The-AI-Baby-In-The-Crib-To-Maybe-Prevent-It-From-Maybe-Becoming-A-Criminal Act that EU nepo babies had expedited as soon as AI became the current thing. Mistral had open-weigh…
But the US and China are incredibly lenient on enforcing even existing laws against their AI companies. In the US the standard seems to be "no instructions to make bombs or drugs, and the ability to make porn of living people has to be restricted to paid users". Laws around cyber security and copyright that used to be heavily enforced are seemingly suspended for AI companies, or settled out of court. No company that tries to actually follow the law can compete with that
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.
They have been focusing largely on government and business not consumer, which is fine. Perhaps coding is not something they want to achieve, but they do provide Codestral. It's a signal it's a market of interest to them.
No amount of $ would improve mistral if they cant fix fundamental flaws. They aren't even on par with chinese models a year ago.
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?
No amount of $ would improve mistral if they cant fix fundamental flaws. They aren't even on par with chinese models a year ago.
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?