Mistral is quite fast for my proofreading tasks. I've benchmarked various LLM providers on my Singapore and Hong Kong VPS instances, and `mistral-small-latest` was the fastest. The quality was not that high tho, but it is worth it for the speed
Mistral raises €3B
451–460 of 612 posts
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#452I get worried when thinking about Mistral because they make mediocre models and I don't think they will be able to defeat their competition.
Maybe because they respect copyright laws?
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#453Mistral 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?
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…
Specifically we have American models which were built on extremely crappy data in insane quantities. What happens when you use same models to build a corpus of extremely high quality training data. Say for Math, coding etc. Then use that to train models. Can you get the same performance from models 10% of the size? Or 1%? Or 0.01%?
From what I've been seeing we're clearly getting to a position where models are getting "good enough" for some tasks to be really cool assistants to skilled people. And they're limited more by being extremely slow and expensive to run. What happens when they're not?
I can't see the model providers winning enough to make their valuations real.
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#454Earlier 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?)…
The training data and knowledge is the edge, you need to build that up and maintain it. And of course mine everything you can from the American and Chinese models, like they mined everything from the internet / films / music / games etc.
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#455Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
Same as our OpenAI friends, who founded a non-profit because one company (Google) holding AGI would be dangerous for humanity. Turns out it's only dangerous when it's somebody else's company. When it's yours, it changes things slightly.
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#456"Mistral raises €3B to make sovereign, open-weight AI the technology frontier". Oh yeah, that sounds reasonable, indeed, one receives this much money just for sovereignty's sake.
The US invested billions to ensure sovereign launch capability. Seems to have paid off.
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#457Earlier quoted context omitted.
Highly improbable given China is ready to pick up any slack.
That's true now, but given the strategic importance of AI to nation states and the fractious relationship many have with China, I wouldn't expect the eagerness to use Chinese AI to continue indefinitely.
If you're taking it at the state level, there's no difference between Chinese and US frontier models. They go with the most accessible, which is the former. Just as trade still happens overwhelmingly between China and US despite the politics.
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#458Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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?
It's pretty easy to use accounting wizardry to have one profitable quarter.
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#459Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
I never tried to dispute the fact, I'm disputing the idea that we should be free to opt out of benefits that have been agreed as the minimum requirements to do business in a society. I would actually go further and argue that allowing that freedom would lead to everyone being worse off. Having minimum standards in a society gives a solid foundation on which to build, can't think of any society that doesn't have them.
A way more interesting conversation would be where to regulate, how much, for how long, what impacts would it have in innovation, etc not that I want to be free to get sold broken goods.
> as if anyone would purchase their goods from purveyors known to disregard food safety
How would you know they disregard food safety if there's no regulation on what food safety means?
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#460Earlier quoted context omitted.
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". T…
> Ecologism is a hobby for people with full bellies.
Then it's a good thing that Chinese bellies are satisfied, we can get to those existential problems, now.