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 raises €3B
381–390 of 612 posts
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#382No amount of $ would improve mistral if they cant fix fundamental flaws. They aren't even on par with chinese models a year ago.
I actually believe the amount of $ is what was missing for them to improve their fundamental flaws. They're a very competent team, but were working with a tiny fraction of the budget of US/China teams.
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#383Mistral 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.
Not Mistral
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there money in frontier?
Yes...? Is that not self evident by the insane revenue from frontier labs?
What is the horizon for openai and anthropic to _make_ money ? Will they achieve that by charging more for frontier models, or investing slightly less in training frontier models, etc... ?
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#385Mistral 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.
The problem is that they're in a weird position between US models and Chinese models. Not as performant as US models, not as cheap as Chinese models. Especially as Chinese models are getting better Mistral is getting less and less relevant. It pains me because I want them to succeed, but despite them denying it I believe they'll end up restrict their activity to (1) selling hosting for Chinese models (they're already…
I’m not sure really what the winning strategy is in this weird arms race.
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#386For 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.
For our data centres we must go to the one place not yet corrupted by capitalism- space!
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
One is american, the other is european It's the same with gaming When Microsoft is killing physical in 2023 to push for Gamepass and digital only, it's labeled as "progress and infrastructure planning", when it's Sony that does it, it's labeled as "greed and anti consumerism" Hopefully more people get attentive to how the industry & the media works, and how US Big Tech manages to kill any form of alternative
Microsoft got massive pushback when they did it, Sony even made ad making fun of it. Selective memory much ?
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
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'…
If the model cannot perform the task with adequate quality while being many times faster and cheaper than a human, it is not good enough in my view.
If a SOTA model would be good enough, surely that would be preferable to a human using cheap AI assistance for a moderate efficiency improvement.
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#390Seems like they reached the laugh / hate border. Or am I the only one reading that ?