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Mistral raises €3B

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Re: Mistral raises €3B

#431

Post by ben_w »

andy99 wrote: post #392
etiennebausson wrote: post #277

Earlier 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?)…

We know it's possible to put backdoors into LLMs, we don't have reliable ways to detect them without direct support from whoever inserted it.

Europe is less-worse-off with open weights than with… I guess it's weights-as-a-service? WaaS? The thing Anthropic and OpenAI do.

But that's not enough. As recently demonstrated, being just a few months behind with the power differential between defending with an open weight model while being attacked by a leading model, means losing absolutely.

I do not know if this holds going forward or not. It's not inconceivable that we're just about to get models that make unhackable code, using all the things software developers keep saying you need to do if you really care about security.

But anyone concerned about sovereignty can't bet the farm on this possibility. For the moment, it looks like it's a national security matter to ensure at least core state functionality (including core private sector logistics) gets the absolute best attention money can buy, and that the absolute best money can buy ("can buy" does a lot of heavy lifting here) is currently LLMs, and it's important those LLMs aren't going to get cut off by arbitrary whim like Mythos was, and it's important that those LLMs don't have backdoors like we can't rule out anyone else's from having.

This is true even if Europe was only defending from Russian cyberwarfare and didn't need to plan for the president of the country in which Mythos was developed, attempting to annex two NATO states.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#432

Post by nickpp »

intended wrote: post #264
nickpp wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it bears repeating: regulation (even well meaning regulation) is not free and it always favors incumbents and hinders startups.

Yes. This is always going to be the case, because regulation is typically a form of friction. It is the shape of regulation that matters, and ideology on either side of the divide is religion. Good regulation and regulators would punish anti competitive behavior, but this will also act as a drag on firms, while preventing firms from reaching certain sizes and potential economies of scale. The point is that regulation…

> If you want good markets you need good regulation and incentive structuring.

Actually, in the real world, the worst markets are also the strongest regulated: housing, education and health care.

Meanwhile the fields that got to be regulated last brought us the most wealth, advances and innovation: high tech & software.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#433

Post by swiftcoder »

zerozerotwo wrote: post #399
swiftcoder wrote: post #254

Earlier 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…

Usually the us position is unlimited pto and yes you have options if laid off

> Usually the us position is unlimited pto

Look, the year is 2026, we all understand by now that unlimited PTO is a neat trick to incentivise your employees to take as little time off as possible.

> and yes you have options if laid off

Not great options. Taking California as a concrete example, you will qualify for a maximum of $450/week in unemployment payments, and if you need healthcare coverage, you will need to spend about $1,500/month on COBRA coverage for a family of 4. This is in a region where the median mortgage payment is $3,500/month.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#434

Post by aurareturn »

r4rf wrote: post #422
aurareturn wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why is it not sustainable when Anthropic has already had a profitable quarter?

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#435

Post by aurareturn »

throwa356262 wrote: post #366
aurareturn wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

On the contrary, small efficient models using recent improvements should be more sustainable than huge frontier models that require billions and years to train

Small efficient models are commodities.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#436

Post by tristanj »

r4rf wrote: post #419
tristanj wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anthropic is currently in an IPO quiet period and cannot publish such information.

[flagged]

I find it amusing when people create brand new accounts just to shitpost fake info. Bc if they posted with their real account, they'd lose karma.

Since filing for IPO confidentiality, Anthropic hasn't made any public statements about its profitability via a non-GAAP metric.

The leaked figures you're referring to aren't even published by Anthropic.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#437

Post by prolly97 »

boonzeet wrote: post #397
prolly97 wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m not sure that’s a function of regulation but more a function of most modern freezers defaulting to -18°, where an American or industrial freezer is -22 to -28°C. 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° wh…

haha, yes, this is 100% just me overfitting then!

And it's not as if there aren't a bunch of somewhat arbitrary regulation in the US either. But the general sense I got from the US, was that people still feel agency to improve their reality, and that there's fewer artificial barriers to that end. (Except for building houses in California. omg. That sounds like a horrible horrible process. At least for those I spoke to).

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#438

Post by mhaberl »

andy99 wrote: post #392
etiennebausson wrote: post #277

Earlier 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?)…

2 things here, one is related to benchmaxxing, another to being good enough

1. Mistral isn't benchmaxxing. That doesn't mean they're better, but it does mean the benchmark gap not a good reflection of the actual gap

2. I think the "world class or nothing" framing mixes general capability with system capability. Most deployments don't need AGI In RL you need a model that's reliably good at one or two things, thats it. Example: Case of a hospital flooded in emails. You make a system that decides which patient emails needs a human and drafts replies for the rest. If a sovereign model is good enough at that, and you can run it on a hospital's own servers under EU jurisdiction, the frontier gap part has zero importance

Who cares about "beats DeepSeek / GPT11 / Claude Fairytale 8.9"

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#439

Post by simonask »

andy99 wrote: post #392
etiennebausson wrote: post #277

Earlier 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?)…

> In the event of some schism …

In the views of most Europeans, that schism already happened.

Europe was perfectly happy to rely on US software and services for decades. None of the large US tech companies would be nearly as profitable if they hadn’t had a whole continent of wealthy customers, and no competition.

I don’t think Americans are realizing yet how much has changed for us the past two years.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#440

Post by HNIsAds »

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?

> People dump on them because

Because this forum is sponsored by Claude and Anslopic.

Anything against the narrative is attacked.

Used mistral 7b locally for years - it’s fine.

Their web version is like a slightly worse Gemini - also fine

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