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Mistral raises €3B

mistral.ai

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Re: Mistral raises €3B

#201

Post by mdp2021 »

blfr wrote: post #110
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.

> don't care about benchmarks

You must care about good benchmarks (identify those that have relevance).

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#202

Post by aurareturn »

throwa356262 wrote: post #197
aurareturn wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m still looking for no-moatists to logically explain why there is no moat in SOTA LLMS. That paper released by a lone Google employee 3 years ago still misguiding people it seems.

My reasoning is that we have seen multiple small labs come out of nowhere and create impressive models.

Impressive doesn't mean sustainable.

We're also seeing behemoths like Google and Meta both fail to keep up with OpenAI and Anthropic. Microsoft has given up on SOTA training. Loads of once promising LLM training companies are no longer relevant at the SOTA stage such as Cohere, Mistral.

I've said this countless times but SOTA LLM market looks like a classic monopoly/duopoly market over time. Each generation requires magnitudes more resources to train and you can only compete if you've made enough money on your previous generation.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#203

Post by nickpp »

pdhborges wrote: post #118
prolly97 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Maybe you should get that list from the European AI products that came from those awesome EU regulations.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#204

Post by surgical_fire »

aurareturn wrote: post #164
pbmonster wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is that not self evident by the insane revenue from frontier labs? No...? Of course not? Because revenue is only one side of the equation. Did you ever look at total cumulative OPEX and CAPEX, and how long it will take them to even just break even at current growth?

Anthropic is growing 10x revenue every year. They're likely over $80b ARR by now. They'll be at $800b ARR next year at the same rate. Let's say their growth gets cut down to 3x instead of 10x - that's still $240b ARR by this time next year. When you are growing so fast, you don't need to make a net profit. You just need to make sure your unit economics are good - which it seems like they are given reports that their…

> They're likely over $80b ARR by now. They'll be at $800b ARR next year at the same rate.

And they will be 800 trilion ARR in a couple of years, following that same rate! 8 quadrillion by 2029!

> When you are growing so fast, you don't need to make a net profit. You just need to make sure your unit economics are good - which it seems like they are given reports that their gross margins are at 60-70%.

If their margins were anywhere near this good, they wouldn't need to raise so much money so often.

If you create a machine that turns 1 dollar into 3 dollars, you don't dillute your ownership of the machine, you use your fabulous profits to expand your machine's capabilities.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#205

Post by nickpp »

oblio wrote: post #153
randomgermanguy wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I would rather LLM cost curves go down 10x and then we really do something. We need a lot more hardware for universal LLMs (probably 10x, if not more), and we need it to be cheaper. If anything, I would fund a DRAM maker in Europe.

> I would fund a DRAM maker in Europe.

I wouldn't. I can think of at least 10 regulations (labor and environmental chef amongst them) that would render such a maker uncompetitive from the start. Chinese makers would eat its lunch.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#206

Post by whazor »

It makes no sense to train frontier models from scratch anymore. The best frontier models are only a half year ahead of Chinese open models. In this regard Anthropic and OpenAI are also in a bad spot when they waste so much compute on training models.

An important factor is that fine tuning existing open models is incredible cheap. You can easily change any cultural biases if you want a model to be 'sovereign'. And Mistral could combine that with their custom data sets for their enterprise customer needs. Mistral still trains their own models, but they also seem to offer fine tuning existing models.

With model weights being commoditized, another differentiator could be deploying efficient inference chips, especially if you combine it with a developer ecosystem for vendor lock-in. That is why it is interesting that both Samsung and ASML are investors, since they are companies that could make a difference in this area.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#207

Post by w3ll_w3ll_w3ll »

Foobar8568 wrote: post #167
pembrook wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there’s one thing the legacy, dying industrial companies of Europe love, it’s consulting. So they’ll probably make more money creating PowerPoints with ChatGPT than they will trying to compete with the US and China. Which would be the most European outcome ever.

Not just legacy dying industry. Whole IT in France and Switzerland runs on consultancy.

Add Italy please.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#208

Post by blfr »

vichle wrote: post #183
blfr wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They've been pretty efficient in squashing any potential competition because of that weak regulation, yes. Don't confuse it with competing on the merits of their products.

Why hasn't strong competition arise from well-regulated EU? Where are the superior European products? I'd gladly use them.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#210

Post by pembrook »

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

Your values and American values might not be the same, but to say even most of Europe feels the same way is a big stretch. And not even the US has very many shared values anymore.

If we’re being honest, Europe doesn’t actually have much of a common value system outside of whatever is momentarily trendy in the urban monoculture, which is why it refuses to work together on most things and is currently being torn apart at the seams (see the rise of nationalist far right parties in most states).

The EU are a collection of states where the average citizen can’t even communicate with their neighbor in a common language beyond the level of a 4 year old. How could they possibly be aligned on a value system in the same way the US is.

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