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Mistral raises €3B

mistral.ai

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Re: Mistral raises €3B

#221

Post by philipallstar »

hkt wrote: post #217
TheJCDenton wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Apple is not racing for the frontier it's a strategy, but when it's Mistral it's a mistake. The two companies have read the market the same. It's always very dangerous for first movers and their investors, and the commodification of intelligence seems even more likely each time a chinese open model release. It's less exciting to do business that way, but if you're building to stand the test of time, it's wiser t…

I am baffled by the responses to this, not seeing that a similar strategy can be applied in a different field.

They aren't following the same strategy. Apple does race for the frontier in their main field: beautiful, well-integrated hardware and software. Mistral does not race for the frontier in their main field: AI creation. They're grabbing bits and bobs from people that need (or feel they need) sovereign AI. It's like if you go into making phones for the military. You aren't going for the best phones; you're going for making sure you're the only company that has the right connections to keep that customer.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#222

Post by skeledrew »

maxrev17 wrote: post #9
shrubby wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah it’s ’more more more’. Seems a very nature based behaviour. We need a restraint or predator to slow us off!

It's default behavior due to scarcity. Remove that permanently and there's no longer incentive to be greedy.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#223

Post by rhdunn »

whazor wrote: post #206

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 M…

It only makes sense to train a frontier model if you are trying a different architecture to one that is available from an existing frontier model. This is because the different model architecture will learn the weights differently.

It may make sense to train a frontier model on an existing architecture if the base model is not available and the instruction trained version doesn't fit with what you want. There are techniques like ablation, but those could have other effects on the model, and there can still be lingering effects of the instruction training in the model that surface less frequently (e.g. on an input not covered by the ablation training).

Otherwise, fine tuning is definitely the way to go. However, you need to be careful not to over-tune the model such that it is only tuned to the data you are training it on.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#225

Post by tokai »

chronic7304 wrote: post #39
Raed667 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

can you elaborate what are their fundamental flaws that are not fixable by funds?

> 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.

In reality US and China are just not efficient enough.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#226

Post by kraftman »

selfawareMammal wrote: post #216
kraftman wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's more to life than money past a certain point, I'd rather live in the Alps on a lower salary.

You dont even live in the Alps with 90K lmao. And if you expect top performance, you should expect top salary. Or at least something competitive. 90K for a company like Mistral is a bit embarrassing.

I literally do.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#227

Post by grim_io »

gman83 wrote: post #122
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.

No, Europe doesn't have the capital markets required to build the required data centers. Underwriting gigawatt data centers and frontier models demands a fully realized European Capital Markets Union, a single energy regulator with cross-border grid integration, and shared fiscal borrowing power.

There is a big difference in compute requirements between EU and US.

EU needs to meet their own demand, the US wants to be the global provider.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#229

Post by user43928 »

eloisant wrote: post #111
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…

> 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 wei…

I can tell the difference between the SOTA and GLM 5.3, and paying a few hundred for the better models is definitely worth it.

Mistral does not offer a model that makes sense to use. I understand they now host the already outdated GLM 5.2, courtesy of China providing the weights. And Mistral offers this for 2x-3x the price of other providers.

This is supposed to be a success story?

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#230

Post by jhuguet »

alansaber wrote: post #38
v3ss0n wrote: 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.

There is nothing exciting about mistral but they're the only european ai lab i've even heard off (jeppa doesn't count)

there was "H" at paris at the time, they raised 200M or so, but never got so much visibility. don't know at which stage they are now or if they accomplished something
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