Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mistral raises €3B

mistral.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 614 posts

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#341

Post by adventured »

eloisant wrote: post #130
bpodgursky wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anthropic is thought to be cash flow positive now.

it's fake cash flow based on circular economy

Billions of long-term users for the most important technology in human history isn't a premise of fake cash in a circular economy.

You might as well pretend there's no money in search or social media.

1999. That Google, it has no serious business model, it'll never make real money. Hello GoTo.

2006. That Facebook, it has no serious business model, it'll never make real money.

One more: 2020. That Uber, I could clone an MVP and kill them over the weekend if I really wanted to. That's a side project at best. They're bleeding to death anyway, losing money hand over fist, they'll never make it. They have no moat at all.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#342

Post by NekkoDroid »

KronisLV wrote: post #161
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.

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.

I haven't heard of updates on ESMC in a while, but that has been a thing on the horizon for a while, with production planned to start in fall 2027 last I read.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#343

Post by ismailmaj »

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…

Pay isn't the main problem with Paris, it's quality of life.

Housing near work is mostly old Haussmannian buildings that are rent capped and where demand far exceeds supply, so most of the stock is unmaintained. You either accept bad housing in the city or live in the suburbs and commute — not ideal.

To make matters worse, French companies (especially old-school ones) have a culture of presenteeism for white collar jobs, it's uncommon for people to leave before 6PM and staying late is rewarded as high engagement.

Lastly, you might consider buying and renovating a house so you can escape this dilemma, but it isn't cheap: 2-bedroom (T3) around 700k euros, that represents 20 years of frugal savings on 90k gross.

Vacation, cheap and good healthcare, and unemployment benefits are great in France, but the current government has been eroding these social benefits, and those are not unique to France for well-paid tech workers anyway.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#344

Post by rytsEa »

colesantiago wrote: post #89
lain98 wrote: post #23

I've been applying to jobs at Mistral, just straight rejects. Not even a phone call :(

Instead of trying to get into Mistral, why don't you make your own Mistral? Not easy as it sounds yes, but it is better than throwing your CV into the ATS void 1000 times (the wrong way to apply for a job btw) Mistral have no moat as it seems except some 'regulatory' moat.

I am sure plenty of people had the same thought.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#345

Post by ta20240528 »

wraptile wrote: post #335
ta20240528 wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"What does Mistral own?" Independence from the USA's CLOUD Act, secret FISA courts, and ICC-style disabling of important services.* *…and the Chinese equivalents.

Do they actually own it though? AFAIK they have no significant moat even in the EU (legal or competitive) and given the current accessibility to non-SOTA AI (open weight models and distillation) it's just a matter of time until Mistral gets serious competition on these points.

The wording of the CLOUD act prevents any American company from competing, but yes, other European-only companies could offer the same.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#346

Post by brokegrammer »

I love Mistral and I use it whenever I don't care about quality. For example, it's my go to model for generating git commit messages by leveraging their free codestral model.

I wouldn't pay for it though.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#347

Post by ifwinterco »

slopinthebag wrote: post #215
ifwinterco wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair Opus 4.6 was genuinely a really good model when it came out, in fact I'm not sure Opus 5 is even any better. It's definitely a lot slower, though

Yeah that's kinda my point. I'm not sure if the models have gotten that much smarter, but they're certainly getting more capable. That's not the same thing though. There are things GPT 6.0 can accomplish for me that 5.3 was not able to. But there are also things it still fails at, and it doesn't seem to be much better at the big picture. It does spam about 100x more tests though and I wonder if just RLHFing it to tes…

Yep same with latest Claude models - code isn't really any better than Opus 4.5/4.6, but use 5x as many tokens doing random stuff that's mostly unnecessary.

And yeah still for some reason they often can't understand how to set up any project locally without handholding, which is something you'd think an LLM would actually be good at

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#348

Post by dns_snek »

prolly97 wrote: post #316
vrganj wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not even true in the concrete case we're talking about here. As part of the AI Act, an important decision on a person (such as a hiring decision) cannot be made without human involvement. You think that's not in favor of "consumers"? (also note the implicitly submissive framing of humans as receptacles for consumption instead of subjects with rights!)

Why shouldn't it be possible to completely automate decisions? Imaginary entry level job, where you need to deliver parcels from one business to another. Qualifications: 1. Drivers license. 2: Eyes in your head. Applicant 1: Drivers license? No. Eyes in your head? Yes. Applicant 2: Drivers license? Yes. Eyes in your head? Yes. Reject applicant 1 and accept applicant 2. Ez. I'd prefer to work at a place that uses it's…

> (48) The extent of the adverse impact caused by the AI system on the fundamental rights protected by the Charter is of particular relevance when classifying an AI system as high risk. Those rights include the right to human dignity, respect for private and family life, protection of personal data, freedom of expression and information, freedom of assembly and of association, the right to non-discrimination, the right to education, consumer protection, workers’ rights, the rights of persons with disabilities, gender equality, intellectual property rights, the right to an effective remedy and to a fair trial, the right of defence and the presumption of innocence, and the right to good administration. [...]

> (57) AI systems used in employment, workers management and access to self-employment, in particular for the recruitment and selection of persons, for making decisions affecting terms of the work-related relationship, promotion and termination of work-related contractual relationships, for allocating tasks on the basis of individual behaviour, personal traits or characteristics and for monitoring or evaluation of persons in work-related contractual relationships,

> should also be classified as high-risk, since those systems may have an appreciable impact on future career prospects, livelihoods of those persons and workers’ rights. Relevant work-related contractual relationships should, in a meaningful manner, involve employees and persons providing services through platforms as referred to in the Commission Work Programme 2021.

> Throughout the recruitment process and in the evaluation, promotion, or retention of persons in work-related contractual relationships, such systems may perpetuate historical patterns of discrimination, for example against women, certain age groups, persons with disabilities, or persons of certain racial or ethnic origins or sexual orientation. AI systems used to monitor the performance and behaviour of such persons may also undermine their fundamental rights to data protection and privacy

I suggest reading the regulation(s), it usually does a good job laying down the reasoning in the preamble.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1689/oj/eng

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#349

Post by serbuvlad »

TheJCDenton wrote: post #135
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?

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…

Apple and Mistral are not in the same market.

Siri is a minor part of the Apple ecosystem. Fundamentally, it can call into a better LLM provided by a better company. Siri's only utility is that it has access to your iData and can control your iDevices.

Apple sells devices. They have benefited a lot from their devices being good (Apple Silicon).

Mistral sells LLMs. They would benefit from having good LLMs.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#350

Post by Slartie »

moffkalast wrote: post #311
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.

"Do nothing, win." is already China's strategy after all. Though they are far from doing nothing in the LLM space.

China is actively tripping the US up by pushing the open-weight strategy, which is kind of smart. They realized that they obviously will not be able to make Western companies trust Chinese companies enough to just use proprietary models by sending all their data to services hosted by Chinese companies. The US is still able to attract this trust, although it's eroding quickly in spite of recent political events and the current trust is more or less a function of old habits that need some time to change. But China correctly found that - due to there being no old habits to piggyback on - they wouldn't ever be able to compete in this way, even if they had proprietary foundation models superior to their US counterparts, so they decided to throw sticks into the spokes of the US frontier labs by releasing top open-weight models worth billions of dollars in training cost and thereby devaluing the huge proprietary investments of the US labs.

That is absolutely not "do nothing".

Post reply on HN