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Mistral raises €3B

mistral.ai

71–80 of 611 posts

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#71

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?

Well, sure, but on the other hand Peter Thiel thinks she might be the antichrist, and he has an awful lot of money which means he is an expert on everything.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#74
post #59
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?

This is a bottom feeder mentality. Europe has enough bright people and resources to truly compete in the AI race. There is something wrong when the only selling point is that it's local.

We're regularly getting demonstrations that being at the frontier is no moat at all. "Run open weights locally" was literally on the HN front page a few days ago as a primary concern/competitor for the big US labs. So there's a big and meaningful gap between "not frontier" and "bottom feeder". There's just tons of applications where you don't need "the best" model, especially not tomorrow's best model.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#75
post #58
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.

Honestly being only 1 year behind makes me an optimist. You’re telling me Europe can be slightly behind with 1000x less capex and way more sustainable economics? Awesome. The world moves slower than AI progresses, I can see a scenario where 1 year isn’t a problem.

Chinese models are open, available to distill, and they also publish papers about their research. Being one year behind is a skill issue.

I think the most of the money would go to purchase hardware, But I hope they can start making adequate compensation for AI engineers and researchers to move forward.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#76

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?

[flagged]

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#77

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.

They’re in the EU. If they are a year or so behind and things start to plateau they’ll catch up. Americans perhaps don’t realize we can also tariff their digital goods to protect our own. There is a scenario where Americans and Chinese foot the bill and EU gets out cheap, e.g. similar to the Apple approach to AI.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#78
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.

Ehm, sorry, but no, this is not how lithography works. You cannot "hide" functionality in circuitry your machines are producing if your machines' job is to shine light through a mask.

You'd have to be the producer of the machine producing the mask. Or, even better, the software that produces the plan according to which a machine produces a mask.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#79
post #56
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?

They are regulationmaxxing instead of benchmaxxing, that's my problem with them.

It bears repeating - all markets get regulated.

Markets, left to their own devices, do not end up automatically being competitive in favor of consumers.

But above all, if AI wasn’t hyped as a threat to humanity, to jobs, to security, regulation could have been cautious.

To add insult to injury, given how voters are tired of technology, expecting a different move from governments is a losing bet.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#80

I really do hope they can catch up with the American models, but I think setting the Chinese models as the goal would be best. They seems to be able to create great models with low cost that are probably useful for 90% of the day to day tasks. Mistral should not focus on competing with Claude Fable or OpenAI's Astra at first but have a good EU alternative to Opus or even Sonnet. The fact that it's European will be en…

> but have a good EU alternative to Opus or even Sonnet

They would if they could, which means they can‘t, even though they want to.

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