I know a lot of people who use AI, but literally nobody who uses Mistral.
Mistral raises €3B
251–260 of 611 posts
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#252Re: Mistral raises €3B
#253Europe 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…
> I’m sort of surprised that the EU isn’t stepping in to support them. It is! The second largest investor in this round is Scaleup Europe Fund: https://eic.ec.europa.eu/eic-fund/scaleup-europe-fund_en
Do you think that's a good thing?
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#254Last 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 :-/
> 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 :-/
Does the US position come with 5 weeks paid vacation? When the US position gets hit with layoffs, do you still have comprehensive healthcare and unemployment coverage?
Yes, EU software Eng salaries are a lot lower than their US equivalents, but quite a lot of folks are happy having a top 5% salary in their own county, without all the stresses and risks of working in the US.
As a concrete example, a few years back it leaked that Dan Abramov's (very decent) London salary was half what his US peers earned. Didn't seem to bother the man much at all...
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly being only 1 year behind makes me an optimist. You’re telling me Europe can be slightly behind with 1000x less capex and way more sustainable economics? Awesome. The world moves slower than AI progresses, I can see a scenario where 1 year isn’t a problem.
Chinese models are open, available to distill, and they also publish papers about their research. Being one year behind is a skill issue. I think the most of the money would go to purchase hardware, But I hope they can start making adequate compensation for AI engineers and researchers to move forward.
Where is that skill coming from in the first place? What are they doing to attract, nurture and keep it?
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#256Mistral 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?
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 not in a good position on the supply chain needed. Right now it really means pouring billions on American corps, either by renting the compute or by building it. That would be mostly fine if it were only VC money but it's not.
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's uncharitable. Defense companies do play the game (like anyone in the enterprise space), but they also do ship stuff that is uniquely set up to satisfy the use-case. I don't think an unmodified iPhone would do great in a warzone with no cell signal.
True - fair enough. Perhaps a little uncharitable. I would still currently say that the Mistral AI is more like a worse cellphone in every sense that has the right supplier agreements, but perhaps there are subtleties I'm missing.
If they get to "good enough is good enough" and are sovereign to the EU, that is a market fit/moat that's hard to crack since the distinguishing criteria is both parts.
It's hard for a US company to be sovereign to the EU and the same with China ;).
Given current geopolitics there are going to be a lot of quiet conversations in government offices across Europe about how much we want to rely on the Americans/Chinese for anything and how we reduce that exposure to either.
Yes we have and will have the entrenched problem to deal with but adding to that problem is the issue at this point.
When this comes up on HN quite frequently the comments are.. interesting - there seems to be a kneejerk "How dare the Europeans consider their alternatives/not using us (where us is the US)", they take it personally that lots of techies/governments in the EU are trying to find ways to avoid making the dependence we have any worse than it already is but that's frankly getting annoyed at the wrong people, maybe get annoyed at the people who are making us question if the current cosy (for the US) situation is what we want.
For some of us this has been expected for a long while and just defacto handing over/not competing with the US on the tech side never really sat right to start with, it was and is always a risk to hand that kind of power to another country/entity.
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
That may be true, but there's a non zero chance that frontier AI becomes a controlled export, and that 'local' production becomes a prudent play.
Highly improbable given China is ready to pick up any slack.
That's true now, but given the strategic importance of AI to nation states and the fractious relationship many have with China, I wouldn't expect the eagerness to use Chinese AI to continue indefinitely.
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#259Earlier 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.
To compete, we’d have to throw a lot of the regulations and laws into the trash (especially anything regarding copyright) and do an order of magnitude more investment. I’m surprised that there’s no domestic chip production either, we don’t have our own CPUs or GPUs, meanwhile China is spinning up manufacturing so they don’t have to work around the Nvidia export restrictions as much. I like Mistral and there’s cool st…
> I’m surprised that there’s no domestic chip production either, we don’t have our own CPUs or GPUs, meanwhile China is spinning up manufacturing so they don’t have to work around the Nvidia export restrictions as much.
The CCP is able to plan the economy. We used to be able to do that in the 60s-70s, at least in France, but that mindset is long gone.
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#260Europe 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…
"Pax Sinica", Chinese Peace