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Mistral raises €3B

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Re: Mistral raises €3B

#261

Post by notahacker »

nickpp wrote: post #200
21asdffdsa12 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in the long run, regulated market companies win out- while the de-regulated ones decay and enshittify. Boeing vs Airbus comes to mind.

Great example. An highly regulated field (aerospace) put so many barriers of entry for startups and competition that the incumbents simple have to reason to innovate or even compete anymore. I heard there used to be dozens of plane-building companies when the field was unregulated, with new, more efficient models and lower prices appearing regularly. I wonder what happened.

> I heard there used to be dozens of plane-building companies when the field was unregulated, with new, more efficient models and lower prices appearing regularly. I wonder what happened.

I heard that this is nonsense. There never were more than a handful of large aircraft builders (still are plenty of small ones), safety records certainly weren't better in the era before consolidation, and new entrants funded by the might of their governments have failed not because of regulation but because what airlines actually want is lots of identical aircraft from a reliable supplier and the new entrants haven't really been competitive in terms of performance either. The certification is complex, but so's building an aircraft, and it's really only the people further down the supply chain that need the protective umbrella...

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#262

Post by Bayart »

jongjong wrote: post #157
eloisant wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US software companies (Google, Meta, MS, etc) have offices in Paris and they pay way more than that. Especially if you take into account total comp (Mistral is private so any stocks you get are "locked" until IPO or sell out) Yes 90k is more than most French software companies pay, but the salary needs to be competitive with those US companies.

When I was in Germany a few years ago, I was browsing jobs available in France and most software development jobs were under $55K USD. I don't know how you're supposed to survive on that. You can probably make more money as a waiter. Germany is not so great either in that sense though at least in crypto sector, the pay was reasonable... Though as a job it was total BS. UK was pretty good at some point (though all the…

> When I was in Germany a few years ago, I was browsing jobs available in France and most software development jobs were under $55K USD. I don't know how you're supposed to survive on that. You can probably make more money as a waiter.

Salaries are calculated differently in France, Germany, US etc. For example working in Germany you're likely to fork a huge amount monthly to your health insurance. It actually makes it difficult to negotiate comp across borders.

$55k USD brut in France is around 2.8k EUR / month after taxes in France, which counts as the upper bracket of Middle Class in most of the country outside of Paris. Paltry when you're used to tech comps but decent for the vast majority of people here.

On the whole I agree that it's not competitive regionally or globally, and as for myself I'd leave for Switzerland or Australia if I had the opportunity.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#263

Post by antupis »

piyush_patel_ha wrote: post #220
zorked wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been using LLMs for two year. It's not just this week's LLM release that is capable something.

A capability isn't binary. There is a massive difference between can produce an impressive demo and can reliably complete the task without a human babysitting it.

Yup, new SOTA models especially with high/xhigh/max reasoning too often overengineer solutions, good for benchmarks that usually measure task completion, bad for normal development where you don't want 'rewrite in rust and 1k LOC unit tests' style solutions when agent does mundane bug fixes.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#264

Post by intended »

nickpp wrote: post #188
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.

And it bears repeating: regulation (even well meaning regulation) is not free and it always favors incumbents and hinders startups.

Yes.

This is always going to be the case, because regulation is typically a form of friction.

It is the shape of regulation that matters, and ideology on either side of the divide is religion.

Good regulation and regulators would punish anti competitive behavior, but this will also act as a drag on firms, while preventing firms from reaching certain sizes and potential economies of scale.

The point is that regulation deserves to be understood and crafted well.

Those economies of scale are meaningless to consumers if it means a single firm squeezes everyone in the supply chain and captures the benefit for itself.

This is also a specific weakness in American conversations. The divide between free markets, competition, and regulation are ideological.

If you want good markets you need good regulation and incentive structuring.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#265

Post by tripledry »

mdp2021 wrote: post #201
blfr wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Genuinely interested, which ones do you think have relevance?

If I read forums and talk to people IRL most have differing opinions what model is best. Yes, for me it's pretty clear Opus is better than earlier models, but it's at least not obvious to me that the later are significant improvements.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#266

Post by KronisLV »

simgt wrote: post #259
KronisLV wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean the EU has ASML, why can’t we go the rest of the way? Seems kinda shortsighted and I say that as someone who bought the Intel Arc A580 on release and don’t regret it.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#267

Post by oblio »

nickpp wrote: post #205
oblio wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We used to have some. Also, regarding labor, that part boggles the mind. Aren't those factories supposed to be highly automated?

Also, at this point DRAM availability is becoming a security risk.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#268

Post by poisonborz »

For all that say Mistral is "at least something" for EU: where are the big EU-owned datacenters where we can run Chinese SOTA models safely, and labs that fork and quantize them on EU data? Wouldn't that be "more something"? Even if this method still depends on external resources short term, it's a money problem, and EU just loves pouring money on problems.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#269

Post by Bayart »

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?

Mistral doesn't look like it's benching at all. They're just as well funded as a lot of Chinese labs doing much more interesting work R&D-wise. Tailoring products for compliance doesn't cut it IMO, but I'm not in their shoes.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#270

Post by clarionbell »

Towaway69 wrote: post #103
tasoeur wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually live in Paris and get your point, but at some point you have to face the reality of the market/industry and really try your best to get good folks to join, especially in the current climate where US researchers may be looking for greener pastures.

> researchers may be looking for greener pastures. Is that still a thing? Or have those would leave have left, after all, it's been ~6 years of Trump already.

Sort of yes. But it's nowhere near as much as some would like to believe. It mostly concerns those who have unclear immigration status, had their funding cut off, or don't care about money.

Now, that is quite a lot of people. But not nearly enough to reverse decades of brain drain.

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