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Mistral raises €3B

mistral.ai

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Re: Mistral raises €3B

#411

Post by prolly97 »

lentil_soup wrote: post #335
nickpp wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> But the worst is that I must pay for those benefits whether if I want them or not that regulation acts as a lower bound on what it takes to do business in the place. You also pay for companies not dumping toxic material on the streets, for appliances not catching fire, for not eating rotten food and million other things. All of those regulations of course "corrupt" the market for the good of a society so it's not j…

He's stating a fact that you don't dispute. You follow up with hyperbolic language; "eating rotten food" (as if anyone would purchase their goods from purveyors known to disregard food safety).

In a market that has been designed to let people take part in voluntary transactions, we also design methods for making sure that the counterpart takes responsibility, and delivers the agreed amount quality of product.

If you purchase a car that won't turn on, you're in your good right to make a claim against the producer. Same for all the other things you mention. And people do.

You're making a point about negative externalities. Agreed that a factory shouldn't just be able to poison a river, because there's no tangible cost to piping your dirty water to one. Here it makes sense to make artificial interventions, in my opinion.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#412

Post by jryle70 »

oblio wrote: post #149
dwedge wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but it's not the government calling for regulation, it's Mistral. At times they seem like a government mouthpiece to check the waters, which I could accept if their models were at least any good

Meh, OpenAI and Anthropic are doing the same. The US shtick is "our models are too powerful, government, please hold them back (and buy 10% of the company)". Edit: forgot, they also call for banning Chinese models and open weights models...

Ah, "Americans are awful. Now we can be just awful"

> they also call for banning Chinese models and open weights models...

So I guess Anthropic called for banning Chinese models when they said "but let me state it clearly so that there is no doubt: Anthropic has never advocated for a ban on open-weights models."? - [0]

May be they imply it? They work behind the scene for it? well, who knows. My guess is as good as yours. But since we're acting like a child, bending the truth is allowed?

By the way, China is decisive. They just banned outright Claude and Open AI. I guess no open arguments about regulation is good?

[0] - https://www.anthropic.com/news/position-open-weights-models

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#413

Post by gman83 »

lII1lIlI11ll wrote: post #332
gman83 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, Europe doesn't have the capital markets required to build the required data centers. Underwriting gigawatt data centers and frontier models demands a fully realized European Capital Markets Union, a single energy regulator with cross-border grid integration, and shared fiscal borrowing power.

> Underwriting gigawatt data centers and frontier models demands a fully realized European Capital Markets Union, a single energy regulator with cross-border grid integration, and shared fiscal borrowing power. Care to elaborate why you consider this an absolute must? I don't see why, say, France can't build an "AI valley" somewhere near to on of their nuclear power plants and commit to provide X amount of energy for…

Power is the easy part; the hard part is where the check comes from.

One single frontier computing cluster costs some €30-40B initially and becomes virtually worth zero every four years. That’s the equivalent of France’s full-year VC market for all industries combined times three. A single Member State, already indebted far beyond sustainable limits, cannot subsidize expensive, long-term 40bn€ hardware risks from its national budget more than 33 times without both falling foul of state aid rules and blowing up the debt crisis even more seriously than it already is.

The three factors you mention, missing VCs, political reluctance, and brain drain, are by-products of exactly these fragmented fiscal structures. European capital is not missing; it is frozen at 33T€ (roughly) in risk-averse national bank deposits and Member State pension regulations instead of in one unified Capital Markets Union to pay for high risks related to enormous tech bets. Similarly, leading researchers are not looking to work on a better salary but for liquid equity, which is not available at the high valuations seen in the NASDAQ through deeply integrated public markets.

With insufficient scale for an entire continent in finance, even the best AI valley in a single country will hit the wall much faster than a US hyper-scaler investing greater amounts in CAPEX in one single quarter than every member state treasury.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#414

Post by nickpp »

ezst wrote: post #285
nickpp wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would fund a DRAM maker in Europe. I wouldn't. I can think of at least 10 regulations (labor and environmental chef amongst them) that would render such a maker uncompetitive from the start. Chinese makers would eat its lunch.

Doesn't matter, we need to opt out of the rat race that consists of making the planet worse for the next generations in exchange of quick bucks for the oligarchs. The way is to factor externalities in the final price, reward sustainable behaviour and set better standards. And that's what's going on: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/12/how-europes-new-... The same applies to labour conditions and quality stand…

> all workers around the world want the exact same thing, a livable planet for their children

Actually, they don't. First of all they want livable conditions for themselves. Ecologism is a hobby for people with full bellies.

I remember during communism which failed to even feed and clothe us - but The Party kept telling us that we were actually winning and we were so morally superior to those "corrupt capitalists". This is what happens when ideological justifications replace rational thought.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#415

Post by tomaskafka »

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?

As a potential user, I want a competent model (the definition is shifting as the SOTA improves), but Mistral doesn’t seem to be that.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#416

Post by jackgavigan »

wraptile wrote: post #313
TheJCDenton wrote: post #135

Earlier 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…

Apple _owns_ computers in people's pockets. There are very few businesses that can match this value. What does Mistral own? A head start at best. For the record I like Mistral and hope they succeed, but you're comparing apples to oranges.

> ..but you're comparing apples to oranges.

Actually, he’s comparing apples to mistrals.

I’ll get my coat.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#418

Post by r4rf »

phtrivier wrote: post #385
adventured wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Was google already selling ads in 1999 ? Because before that, NO, they did not have a viable long term economic model.

Funny thing is, they stated their reason for existence was because ad-based revenue models would corrupt search quality. Funny that!

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#420

Post by r4rf »

aurareturn wrote: post #202
throwa356262 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Impressive doesn't mean sustainable."

The frontier labs at the current rate are also not sustainable.

You make some incredibly stupid assumptions - like assuming revenue growth rate of Anthropic and OAI will continue on.

Elon-Musk type stuff. lmfao.

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