361–370 of 616 posts
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.
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They've been pretty efficient in squashing any potential competition because of that weak regulation, yes. Don't confuse it with competing on the merits of their products.
Why hasn't strong competition arise from well-regulated EU? Where are the superior European products? I'd gladly use them.
If you don't let such things develop in the first place then there's not enough money to round out and scale the product. So if we want world beating products we may need monopolies but we can nationalise them in the same way we nationalised big infrastructure in the past. Then at least we're not the tail wagging the dog anymore.
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I can tell the difference between the SOTA and GLM 5.3, and paying a few hundred for the better models is definitely worth it. Mistral does not offer a model that makes sense to use. I understand they now host the already outdated GLM 5.2, courtesy of China providing the weights. And Mistral offers this for 2x-3x the price of other providers. This is supposed to be a success story?
I'm sure you can tell the difference. But for the vast majority of usage GLM 5.3 or Deepseek V4 is enough. Even people who do need frontier model will soon restrict it to the use cases that really need it and switch to cheaper models for the rest. It has already started. Anthropic and OpenAI will never get enough customers paying top dollar to deliver on the revenue they need to offset their investments.
The cheap models are good enough for what exactly? AI assisted development, or working autonomously on a task for 4 hours?
As long as the best available model does the latter more reliably and with noticeably better results, it is easily worth spending a few hundred per month for me.
The idea that OpenAI and Anthropic cannot make enough profit in my opinion depends entirely on how large the gap is going to be.
Will the gap become smaller with improvements starting to slow, or will it get wider as the labs successfully apply their models to research and improvements speed up?
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> 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 j…
And nowadays, with the erosion of the social safety net pushed by the French government, the gap is even more narrow. There definitely are huge inequalities there, US are far from being the heartless place EU politicians like to depict.
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My reasoning is that we have seen multiple small labs come out of nowhere and create impressive models.
Impressive doesn't mean sustainable. We're also seeing behemoths like Google and Meta both fail to keep up with OpenAI and Anthropic. Microsoft has given up on SOTA training. Loads of once promising LLM training companies are no longer relevant at the SOTA stage such as Cohere, Mistral. I've said this countless times but SOTA LLM market looks like a classic monopoly/duopoly market over time. Each generation requires…
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…
Europe has no budget of their own like the USA and China do, because there is no debt nor taxation at the European level. That’s the reason for the complication you are noticing.
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>Despite the average european objectively being better off and safer than a decade ago I'm sure it's true, but do we have some statistics on that, and a comparison to places that doesn't have the same regulatory burden?
I can quote the German BKA: number of crimes in 2016: 6,372,526 number of crimes in 2025 (last data): 5,508,559 https://www.bka.de/EN/CurrentInformation/Statistics/PoliceCr... https://www.bka.de/EN/CurrentInformation/Statistics/PoliceCr...
We can debate which of these crimes have a greater impact on the feeling of safety. Personally I don't really feel unsafe due to people being caught stealing a sweater or smoking weed (when that was illegal).
So I don't think this is as clear cut as the headline number makes it seem. I feel like it's valid if people want to put more weight on the violent crimes.
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?
I root for Mistral and hope they'll be successful, perhaps I'll buy a subscription too once they're good enough for coding aid (perhaps they are now, didn't do any test with their models recently). First of all, they release the models' weights, perdonally I don't consider any other option as viable (no OpenAI and definitely no Anthropic, thank you). I especially like their Vibe Chat web offer, the allowed monthly us…