Last I saw job offers for mistral (engineering, Paris) it advertised 90k euros base salary. Not sure how they’re intending to compete with the US when even a top AI lab can’t afford to be competitive :-/
Mistral raises €3B
81–90 of 612 posts
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#82Mistral 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.
This is strategy of laggers. Everybody do that when found themselves in the situation. Including US and China.
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
But a better model almost always comes with a better dollar-per-task-accomplished ratio, compared to worse models.
So not only outpriced, outperformed, but also outregulated.
Idk i wish there was some bright light in the future, but i dont see it
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anthropic is thought to be cash flow positive now.
And my wallet is thought to contain a billion dollars, so long as I don't open it. Seriously "thought to be" is such a baseless statement. Thought to be by whom? And on what basis?
It’s thought to be because it’s a private company but it’s very well cited.
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why wealth should be less concentrated. A few people has their hands in all businesses and that will end badly. Taxation is not just about paying for the costs of the country, it is also about making sure that nobody has enough power to subjugate the will of the people. Monopolies, billionaires, the accumulation of such power is making the average citizen powerless. And you can feel it.
The power is in the hands of a few people obsessed or possessed. Gambling addiction, narcissism, power hunger. Taxation will not solve this before the global society collapses so the question is whether we figure out a way to level the power. This is not evil, but a trait of human nature of corruption or addiction to power.
> Taxation will not solve this before the global society collapses
Taxation can and must solve it before "society collapses". And many people are working to solve the problem. It is difficult and requires effort but nothing that has not been done before. We got rid of king (by the will of god) in the past so techno-power-hungry cringey businessmen should be easier.
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#86Last I saw job offers for mistral (engineering, Paris) it advertised 90k euros base salary. Not sure how they’re intending to compete with the US when even a top AI lab can’t afford to be competitive :-/
some people would rather live in paris than los angels or san francisco (and rightly so, if you ask me)...
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Those things are not mutually exclusive. We can have open weight, yet close-to-frontier models. China has very strong models that can also run locally.
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#88I've been applying to jobs at Mistral, just straight rejects. Not even a phone call :(
I’ve heard many folks get rejected and leave with a bad taste in their mouth. Interviews should make you feel like you’ve failed due to you not being quite there while still recommending friends to apply (“I didn’t make it but you should try to apply!” Vs “i felt like I had the privilege of even talking to the dude and then got ghosted”).
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#89I've been applying to jobs at Mistral, just straight rejects. Not even a phone call :(
Instead of trying to get into Mistral, why don't you make your own Mistral?
Not easy as it sounds yes, but it is better than throwing your CV into the ATS void 1000 times (the wrong way to apply for a job btw)
Mistral have no moat as it seems except some 'regulatory' moat.
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#90Mistral 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.
It couldn't tell ASML to do that because ASML doesn't do chip design.