391–400 of 615 posts
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> When Apple is not racing for the frontier it's a strategy, but when it's Mistral it's a mistake. I think what Mistral is doing is smart within their financial constraints, but this comparison is misleading. Mistral is an LLM company; Apple is a consumer hardware and services company. It's smart for Apple not to join the LLM arms race, because they can just pick the cheapest supplier and let other companies take the…
Mistral is a Sovereign LLM Company, it's their main product and has been from nearly the start. They don't actually need to offer the best models, they need credibility on the tech front and the security/strategic front, and institutional clients will keep coming.
I think I understand the incentives that cause this to exist (it would be politically worse to say we’re just going to use Chinese models) but they are misguided. If sovereigns want to have valuable models, they should insist on world class, relevant ones like the Chinese have. Instead they embrace mediocrity in the name of sovereignty.
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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.
Better than throwing CVs everywhere with no response for years.
We can look at Heart Aerospace for an example of a European future-tech company that warned the EU repeatedly about the regulatory and capital market being uncompetitive, and then within 2 years just relocated entirely to the US.
My suspicion is that Mistral does not have enough money and enough access to GPU compute to be competitive long-term. And it will most likely end up as an acquisition.
It makes no sense to train frontier models from scratch anymore. The best frontier models are only a half year ahead of Chinese open models. In this regard Anthropic and OpenAI are also in a bad spot when they waste so much compute on training models. An important factor is that fine tuning existing open models is incredible cheap. You can easily change any cultural biases if you want a model to be 'sovereign'. And M…
It only makes sense to train a frontier model if you are trying a different architecture to one that is available from an existing frontier model. This is because the different model architecture will learn the weights differently. It may make sense to train a frontier model on an existing architecture if the base model is not available and the instruction trained version doesn't fit with what you want. There are tec…
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> 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…
This!!! I went to California earlier this year. In our apartment we had a freezer that was clearly made before politicians thought to decide to put a cap on how good a freezer could be. It was fucking amazing at freezing stuff. No freezer I've ever used could freeze this good. It was probably from the 80's - old/sturdy AF. I wouldn't mind paying for some extra solar panels to feed it.
Getting a better energy efficiency score is one reason (and consumers are motivated on running cost, not just environmental) but presumably these are cheaper to manufacture as well.
I have an American style, EU-compliant freezer than I can set to -26° which I bought for preparing sashimi safely. It rocks! Highly recommend them.
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…