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?
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…
Mistral raises €3B
231–240 of 612 posts
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
I fail to see how this is relevant with regards to areas. Whether AI is hosted by the USA, Europe or China - they all are awful and eliminating real jobs while also driving up RAM prices etc... Why should I want to support any of these?
Because it's increasingly obvious that this is the next step in our capabilities as humans competing with that of the discovery of bacteria and transistors.
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
I fail to see how this is relevant with regards to areas. Whether AI is hosted by the USA, Europe or China - they all are awful and eliminating real jobs while also driving up RAM prices etc... Why should I want to support any of these?
Because humanity stalled out- and coasted for the last 50 years and it shows. And now it must compete and git good or git gone. No more fat ponies paraded as race-horses.
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 mak…
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not this week's change. Fable was the step change for programming. And most of truly useful and powerful capabilities arrived in the last eight months.
> Fable was the step change for programming. AFAIK: Mistral does not even try to compete in this field. There are other use cases for LLMs beside coding. As Mistral AI wrote: > During the first wave of generative AI, the central question was who could build the most powerful model. Organizations and governments are now asking a different one: how to harness the power of AI for their mission-critical needs without sur…
They have released models speficially for programming that ”vibe coding” would be safer.
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#236That’s great, but meanwhile American competitors are worth… trillions?
Nah. They are not, everyone is losing money, and just staying alive from gov subsidies. A claude PRO license is 20 usd/month, and for it to be profitable it should be somewhere around 200-300/month. The bubble is going to burst soon.
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#237Earlier 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.
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#238Mistral 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?
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…
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#239Re: Mistral raises €3B
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure but it's not the government calling for regulation, it's Mistral. At times they seem like a government mouthpiece to check the waters, which I could accept if their models were at least any good
Didn't both Amodei and Altman called for regulation of open-weight models? Not that long ago on xitter....