Live data from Hacker News

Mistral raises €3B

mistral.ai

61–70 of 611 posts

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#62
post #28
post #6

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…

Regulation might have something to do with it but your example doesn't show that imo.

Multiple US labs were taken to court over copyright infringment for their training data. Mistral did the same data mining, but actually the copyright situation is weaker here so it's harder to build a case against them.

I think the capital situation in EU is just worse. A lot of is tied up in more conservative businesses that are reluctant to bet the house on some shiny new thing.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#63
post #45

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?

I fail to see how this is relevant with regards to areas.

Whether AI is hosted by the USA, Europe or China - they all are awful and eliminating real jobs while also driving up RAM prices etc... Why should I want to support any of these?

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#64
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.

Europe could tell ASML to put kill switches in GPUs so Europe has leverage to "safeguard" AI deployments in other countries.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're confused here. a16z is Humpty Dumpty and Temu Lex Luthor. The antichrist is Greta Thunberg.

I’m no expert in religion, but wouldn’t Jesus speech be more on the Greta side if he came back to earth today? By like a very very wide margin?

Given what Jesus had to say about the rich, yes, definitely.

Thiel called one of his companies Palantir which is weird too.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#67
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 we…

Well, then Samsung Electronics appears to be dumb for leading this investment round? They probably only do it because they're European...oh, wait...

> so if you don't have the most intelligent or cheapest model in the world, you're losing

So how does this match up to the fact that there is currently OpenAI and Anthropic, both raking in money? They can't both have the smartest model at the same time, can they? And all those inference companies selling API access to open weight models on OpenRouter, which are apparently also earning billions already? While the former are probably bound to have much higher cost for research and training than they are currently earning, which may be called "losing", the latter don't have that problem, they can simply price their API access such that the money earned covers their costs, no training and practically no research necessary. In your theory these companies shouldn't have a cent of earnings.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#68
post #45

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?

I fail to see how this is relevant with regards to areas. Whether AI is hosted by the USA, Europe or China - they all are awful and eliminating real jobs while also driving up RAM prices etc... Why should I want to support any of these?

Because it's increasingly obvious that this is the next step in our capabilities as humans competing with that of the discovery of bacteria and transistors.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#69
post #16

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.

Same here. And I doubt 3B EUR will do anything (remember the >$100B investment round that OpenAI got?) In the EU it seems we are very much at risk of being cut off from frontier AI if the US government should decide to do so.

Blocking EU from those services would crash the valuation of US AI companies, so I'm not expecting it to happen.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#70
post #16

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.

Same here. And I doubt 3B EUR will do anything (remember the >$100B investment round that OpenAI got?) In the EU it seems we are very much at risk of being cut off from frontier AI if the US government should decide to do so.

OpenAI also indirectly depends on ASML, but sadly Europe seems too cowardly to leverage this dependency at the moment.
Post reply on HN