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Mistral raises €3B

mistral.ai

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Re: Mistral raises €3B

#371

Post by cmrdporcupine »

pkos98 wrote: post #244
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 :-/

In Germany AFAIK their Senior base salary ceiling is ~ 180k EUR - approx 210k USD for an Engineering role. Thats quite competitive for a base salary, as high as max ICT5 Staff base at Apple Munich.

Beats 90% of Canadian software engineer salaries. If I wasn't tied down with 2 border collies, a chicken, a cat, and, uh, wife and kids, I'd jump to that in an instant. German quality of life is still pretty good despite all their complaining.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#372

Post by Slartie »

user43928 wrote: post #363
eloisant wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I suspect that opinions in that direction might be the result of a lack of ambition in applying agentic AI. 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 An…

You call it "lack of ambition", implying a certain arrogance; more humble people might just call it "a different sweet spot" of AI integration. After all, the goal in the end is not to use up as many AI tokens as possible, but the goal is to implement/perform a certain business case in the best way possible with regard to cost/speed/quality.

It's not like everyone using AI has the same software development cycle. It's not even that everyone using AI is developing software.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#373

Post by cindyllm »

prolly97 wrote: post #369
ricardobayes wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Awesome! But, looking at the numbers the decrease in totals are due to fewer registered "street crimes", less fraud and legalization of cannabis (removing a 183k comparable from 2016). Violent crimes however went from 193,542 to 212,335. With rapes almost doubling, going from 7,919 to 14,454 (82%). Murders remained stable though. We can debate which of these crimes have a greater impact on the feeling of safety. Pers…

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Re: Mistral raises €3B

#374

Post by redox99 »

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 models are way worse than Chinese models in the real world. It's not benchmarks.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#375

Post by smurf9852 »

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?

I want an intelligent model, which Mistral does not have.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#376

Post by msh »

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?

I am European and would like European AI so I tried mistral this month.

Their own models seems like years old OpenAI models, hallucinations all over the place and coding was crazy slow.

I can only say two good things about them:

- their hosted glm model was fast - because I canceled within 14 days they gave me a full refund.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#377

Post by PunchyHamster »

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 is not "racing", Apple is just paying other companies for service of LLM.

Which is smart move

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#378

Post by smurf9852 »

kensai wrote: post #368

Mistral has a huge advantage that will shine later... it's a EU-based company. We are already seeing signs of digital sovereignity everywhere. The clients will flock to them, I dare to say government will be even enforcing clients to contract Mistral. So actually being the top dog in benchmarks matters less, than having secure servers and datacenters which are physically based in Europe.

Artificial intelligence is only as useful as its intelligence. A dumb model provides no value to anybody. Flock to a dumb model? - doubt it. Forced by the EU? - i can see it happen, sadly.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#379

Post by applicative »

Slartie wrote: post #350
moffkalast wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 th…

Their ‘open weight strategy’ was invented, to Chinas surprise, by the Western press after the DeepSeek event. Of course all the actual systems like Baidu, Bytedance are closed weight and basically all anyone uses. Meanwhile the advanced system are crossing security frontiers: soon only inferior models will be ‘open’ (as with OpenAI, even) the rest closed. — Or where open weighted, they will be impossible to run without a private data center, come with absurd ‘security scrutiny’ licenses like GLM is starting — or licensing requiring a cut, as with Kimi, which is basically a scheme to get western companies to do buildout for them

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#380

Post by intended »

nickpp wrote: post #181
boonzeet wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many EU directives which benefit consumers directly in tech, including, but not limited to: Consumer rights - 14 day cooling off period for online purchases Sale of goods - 2 year seller liability for defective goods Right to repair - likely doesn’t need explanation, require manufacturers to offer repairs and replacement parts Unfair commercial practices - prevent misleading or deceptive advertising Unfair…

> cooling off [...] seller liability [...] Right to repair Let's not forget I am paying directly for those when I buy a product. Those benefits are not free, they cost money. The money has to come from somewhere. It can't come from profits (since those are the sacred reason the company exists in the first place) thus they will come from higher prices. Higher product prices mean less competitive companies. It also mea…

That... that is not exactly how things work.

The choices you are presented with, are always a function of market structure, aka the interplay of incentives, regulation, and competition.

You have a market because your taxes pay for many things, ranging from policing, to courts, to power and standards underlying how various systems work.

The choices presented to you are always a trade off vs other options. Having regulation that dictates how plug points and voltage works for example, reduces the choices you have, but the baseline standard means many other things can be built because standardization enables modularity.

The position that there exists some platonic ideal "choice" isn't even useful as an illustrative argument in this context.

Markets that are effective at ensuring better outcomes for the median or average consumer are things that have to be crafted. Figuring out the correct extent of intervention, (whether you champion less regulation or more) is the issue.

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