[dead]
Mistral raises €3B
421–430 of 614 posts
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#422Earlier 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.
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#423Mistral 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.
[deleted]
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not sure it's correct to lump apple and Mistral's strategies together. Apple's business is selling hardware/services and their stores, but Mistral's business is AI. Apple's strategy seems to be "wait till real business shakes out" but Mistral's strategy seems to be "go after profitable niches and avoid unwinnable fights".
The other part of Apple's strategy is "lets not waste money doing all that expensive research - lets just pay them for the finished result and save money".
Apple is probably also waiting for increased RAM supply to start making high-quality local inference a viable mainstream option.
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#425Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What’s the point of having “sovereign” weights that are worse than publicly available ones? Wouldn’t Europe be better off just keeping up-to-date on the Chinese releases? In the event of some schism requiring sovereign capability, or even if the Chinese pulled ahead and stopped releasing the weights, why would Europe be better off because of Mistral? (Or any country’s inferior sovereign effort make them better off?)…
Not sure if you are European, but in EU it's a bit taboo to even talk about this in this manner. We like to spend a lot of money to make sure we finish last.
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#426Mistral 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.
Then your choice is either a US mega corp under the Trump partial dictatorship shitshow or a Chinese model distillation factory that could turn on you at any second.
I understand that there are users that would prefer another option, especially in the EU.
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are regulationmaxxing instead of benchmaxxing, that's my problem with them.
> They are regulationmaxxing instead of benchmaxxing, that's my problem with them. To those who is in know (r/localllama, r/sillytavernai), is well aware that Mistral models - at least the small, <=24b ones - are the least censored, even less than Chinese.
Regulation != censorship. (Apart from that, Mistral has Shieldstral[0] for adding policy enforcement).
With it's general approach of Open Weights, and being able to be deployed on-premise (/private/public cloud), they are a viable solution for your typical European enterprise, that has to comply with traditional (non-AI) regulation. With the NIS2 directive the amount of those companies is also significantly expanding.
We[1] are in the same market as Mistral, and among our customers, the go-to-solution of MS Copilot is typically performing badly, and the typical SaaS solutions are not even given a consideration, which is why they are reaching for on-premise-first solutions.
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> 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? Maybe this appeal to mediocrity in a competitive market explains Mistral's mediocre performance. I'm Australian. We have 4 weeks paid leave a year, comprehensive healthcare and unemployment coverage. Most of my career I avoided taking leave, and I'd…
Maybe you need to imagine harder.
That aside, if you want to make it rational, you can think of leaves in the context of explore-exploit dilema. Probably a wider exploration would allow you to find better things to exploit. Its like the 20% innovation time that some companies offer
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#429Earlier 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 is not an AI company, Mistral is. it's not really a fair comparison
[deleted]
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#430I am still waiting for their large model. Seemingly they only recently started combining reasoning, agentic, and multimodal in one model. They have mistral-3.5 medium and mistral-4 small. There is no 3.5 small nor large not to mention no 4 medium nor 4 large. These model numbers to me seem like that their model release did not meet the schedule. I am still waiting for 4 large and expect it to match at least glm 5.2 performance.