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Mistral raises €3B

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Re: Mistral raises €3B

#281

Post by AureliusMA »

fallingbananna wrote: post #162
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…

>I’m sort of surprised that the EU isn’t stepping in to support them. On a similar note: Why does it have to be the EU to step up? Why doesn't EU rather speed up making VC investments more attractive, so that EU and banks don't do the majority of investing? *I don't have answers to these questions. It just frustrates me how many investments here come from politicians and banks, rather than from investors, people, and…

It’s a different culture with different rules, if it was that easy it would have been done already. See my other comment about lack of budget at a federal level.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#282

Post by BoredomIsFun »

dwedge wrote: post #56
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?

They are regulationmaxxing instead of benchmaxxing, that's my problem with them.

> They are regulationmaxxing instead of benchmaxxing, that's my problem with them.

To those who is in know (r/localllama, r/sillytavernai), is well aware that Mistral models - at least the small, <=24b ones - are the least censored, even less than Chinese.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#283

Post by AureliusMA »

pembrook wrote: post #210
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 wh…

This is a spectacularly prejudiced and insulting comment.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#284

Post by chrocni380 »

swiftcoder wrote: post #254
tasoeur wrote: post #81

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 :-/

> 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…

> 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?

Work a US job for 4 months, quit, take the next 8 months for holiday/vacation, and you still save more money than a European SWE.

Hey, the 2010s are calling, they want the trope “BuT eUrOpE hAs pAiD lEaVe” back.

Europe in 2026 (France, Germany, UK, Estonia, etc). What a joke. Nobody in the world respects them.

At least the US has jobs and a military. Not as good as before, but better than Europe.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#285

Post by ezst »

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.

Doesn't matter, we need to opt out of the rat race that consists of making the planet worse for the next generations in exchange of quick bucks for the oligarchs.

The way is to factor externalities in the final price, reward sustainable behaviour and set better standards. And that's what's going on: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/12/how-europes-new-...

The same applies to labour conditions and quality standards. And don't bring up arguments like "it can't work" or "that hurt competitiveness": all workers around the world want the exact same thing, a livable planet for their children. The only ones to object are the global elite who one ends up defending when they make the current status quo sound inevitable.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#286

Post by BoredomIsFun »

donmb wrote: post #35

Mistral is not that bad as the comments here suggest. I am not using it as a frontier model but with simple RAG tasks and its doing great. Also OCR is pretty decent. It's a positive development that Europe is at least trying. Alternative would be: do nothing.

Mistral is odd. They have made mostly flops, boring models (Ministral 3, Mistral Small 4, Small 3, Small 3.1) together with a classic masterpiece Mistral Nemo and very good Mistral Large 2407, Mistral Small 22b, Mistral Small 3.2.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#287

Post by Eldodi »

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?

Is it really contrarian though? Cohere, Aleph Alpha and many other model companies went that route and are doing well

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#289

Post by AureliusMA »

alansaber wrote: post #41
Raed667 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They've never made a near-frontier model. Which is a valid criticism for a model training company

They have done that in the past. I clearly remember the times when they dropped releases as a simple tweet and it made the front page of HN - just like the recent Chinese models releases.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#290

Post by BoredomIsFun »

nik736 wrote: post #148

Mistral has solid OCR, STT and TTS models and I would love to support them by switching with all of our business workloads to Mistral... but their LLM models are sadly not competitive at all. In our business benchmarks their Mistral Medium 3.5 with reasoning is worse than Gemma 4 31B and Glimmer 30B. It's a 128B dense model that's priced accordingly! Mistral Small 4 is way worse than Gemma 4 26B A4B. I applaude the e…

> Mistral Small 4 is way worse than Gemma 4 26B A4B

Depends for what purpose? I found large Mistrals are massively better than Gemma 4 at creative writing: have more natural tone, better consistency than 26B as it is MoE.

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