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Mistral raises €3B

mistral.ai

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Re: Mistral raises €3B

#111

Post by eloisant »

HenrikPontoppid wrote: post #47
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.

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…

> It is my conviction that in this space, if you're not the best in the world, you're losing

I disagree on that point. Models are getting good enough that you can switch them and barely notice. I'm switching between Opus, GPT Codex and GLM 5.3 for coding and I can barely tell the difference.

I think they'll become more like telcos than anything, selling a commodity. It's even truer when any provider can host open weight models like GLM-5.3.

Basically a world with dozens of Baseten, with AI labs having a hard time monetizing, just like editors of open source software.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#112

Post by boonzeet »

prolly97 wrote: post #99
intended wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's a big difference between governments regulating to benefit their own control and power, and regulating in favor of consumers. Most regulation in the EU have jack-all to do with consumers. There's a couple of niceties - having all prices displayed in comparable unites (EUR/kg, EUR/liter etc). But apart from that the regulation have broadly served as moats around the largest businesses.

There are many EU directives which benefit consumers directly in tech, including, but not limited to:

Consumer rights - 14 day cooling off period for online purchases

Sale of goods - 2 year seller liability for defective goods

Right to repair - likely doesn’t need explanation, require manufacturers to offer repairs and replacement parts

Unfair commercial practices - prevent misleading or deceptive advertising

Unfair contract terms directive - prevents disproportionately one-sided provisions in T&Cs (think Disney giving themselves legal immunity for a free Disney+ trial)

The EU’s problem seems to be in communicating its benefits to its citizens.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#113

Post by pavlov »

dwedge wrote: post #56
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?

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

After living in the US for several years, I was happy to return to the EU where regulations exist to protect against the worst corporate behavior.

My American bank sold my credit card transactions to advertisers. My American mobile operator had insane fees for roaming and other features that are basic in Europe. Sending a bank transfer in America was unreliable and slow and expensive because there was nothing like SEPA instant 24/7 free transfer (I guess FedWire does that nowadays, I don’t know if consumers actually have guaranteed access at all banks like they do in EU).

When American AI companies become established Fortune 100 members, they’ll start abusing their customers just like all the others in that club, those banks and phone operators and Microsoft and the rest. Google once pretended to be different, now they have the corporate cancer. No reason to believe the same won’t happen to OpenAI and Anthropic.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#114

Post by [deleted] »

speedgoose wrote: post #32
bayarearefugee wrote: post #11

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?

[deleted]

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#115

Post by eloisant »

BenoitP wrote: post #109
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.

Local models or independent hosting companies. Like Baseten, but there could be dozens of them.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#116

Post by antupis »

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.

Mistral just needs to good enough category think all those flash models or Qwen3.8 27b which they sadly aren't at the moment, that plus being European lab will mean that they will have very nice business. Even now these SOTA models feel too overkill for most tasks.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#117

Post by mciancia »

kome wrote: post #86
tasoeur wrote: post #81

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 :-/

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

But you should be able to hire most of the people you want, not just some that happen to pick Paris.

Also, if given a choice of 90k eur in Paris vs let's say 2m usd in US I'm pretty sure suddenly most of the issues people have with US would suddenly disappear ;)

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#118

Post by pdhborges »

prolly97 wrote: post #99
intended wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's a big difference between governments regulating to benefit their own control and power, and regulating in favor of consumers. Most regulation in the EU have jack-all to do with consumers. There's a couple of niceties - having all prices displayed in comparable unites (EUR/kg, EUR/liter etc). But apart from that the regulation have broadly served as moats around the largest businesses.

Do you believe I can't get a list of 20 effective pro-consumer regulations drafted by the EU out of Gemini?

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#119

Post by blfr »

intended wrote: post #79
dwedge wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right now the weakly regulated American market is delivering staggering competition where massive corporations are fighting tooth and nail over my 100 bucks.

I kept hearing the same about previous age tech and there also Americans rule the Internet: Google Search, Workspace or m365, AWS, Cloudflare... Even Linus moved to the US.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#120

Post by andsoitis »

tangled wrote: post #96

Europe absolutely needs a home-grown AI lab, especially with Pax Americana looking increasingly shaky. LLMs embody value systems, and American and European values are not the same (yes, there are overlaps, but also key differences). More nefariously, I can also imagine LLMs that silently degrade their reasoning when used in a national security context of a non-US country. So, Mistral may not be competitive with OpenA…

> LLMs embody value systems, and American and European values are not the same (yes, there are overlaps, but also key differences).

There are also some areas where values across Europe are quite divergent. Think LGBT rights and social acceptance, religion & secularism, immigration & multiculturalism.

And countries don’t fall into neat “liberal west vs conservative east”. Spain is exceptionally liberal on LGBT issues while remaining more religious than some northern countries; Denmark is socially liberal but has adopted relatively restrictive immigration policies.

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