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Mistral raises €3B

mistral.ai

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Re: Mistral raises €3B

#101

Post by Towaway69 »

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.

> Europe is at least trying

Which is interesting since who are the investors and what exactly are their roles? Samsung - European? BlackRock - European? Salesforce Ventures - European? Etc.

So yes it might well be

> [...] the largest equity fundraising round ever completed by a European technology company, three years after the company's launch.

but the money isn't European.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#102

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

Slartie wrote: post #78
0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I didn't say to hide it. My suggestion is to create international AI safety rules which companies must be in compliance with if they want to buy and service ASML machines.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#103

Post by Towaway69 »

tasoeur wrote: post #94
kome wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

some people would rather live in paris than los angels or san francisco (and rightly so, if you ask me)...

I actually live in Paris and get your point, but at some point you have to face the reality of the market/industry and really try your best to get good folks to join, especially in the current climate where US researchers may be looking for greener pastures.

> researchers may be looking for greener pastures.

Is that still a thing? Or have those would leave have left, after all, it's been ~6 years of Trump already.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#104

Post by eloisant »

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.

The problem is that they're in a weird position between US models and Chinese models. Not as performant as US models, not as cheap as Chinese models.

Especially as Chinese models are getting better Mistral is getting less and less relevant.

It pains me because I want them to succeed, but despite them denying it I believe they'll end up restrict their activity to (1) selling hosting for Chinese models (they're already hosting GLM) and (2) selling AI-related consultant service (they're also doing that already).

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#106

Post by andsoitis »

Slartie wrote: post #67
HenrikPontoppid wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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?

They are simultaneously first: the two leapfrog each other with regularity, and are meaningfully ahead of the competition.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#107

Post by realusername »

black_puppydog wrote: post #74
matusp wrote: post #59

Earlier 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.

That's true, however, if you are too far from the top models, you still are in danger of not being in the race anymore.

And with half the score of the top models, that's where Mistral is at.

As it is now, no tech company in the EU will use it, if they were just 80% from the top, that would be more feasible.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#108

Post by selestify »

elvennn wrote: post #37
lain98 wrote: post #23

I've been applying to jobs at Mistral, just straight rejects. Not even a phone call :(

I applied, I had multiple interviews, I got reject because I was bad during them. Anyway, the interview process was so janky it decreased my confidence in their success.

Care to share any more?

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#109

Post by BenoitP »

ph4rsikal wrote: post #72

Mistral's annual revenue (700M) is what Anthropic generates in 3 days. It will be extremely difficult to build new models with these numbers.

And GLM local models can eat Anthropic's lunch just like both eat OpenAI's.

Mistral's revenue is mostly B2B, and that's much more difficult to move.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#110

Post by blfr »

davedx wrote: 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 don't care about benchmarks. Benchmarks show that Opus 5 is a stronger model than Fable 5 which is obviously not the case.

But I do care about capability and so far only Anthropic and, very recently with Astra, OpenAI can deliver on coding quality. And capability matters immensely. There is a world of difference between being able to do something and not being able.

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