Live data from Hacker News

Mistral raises €3B

mistral.ai

461–470 of 614 posts

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Frontier" is a relative, ever-changing target.

It's not really: it means those out in front. OpenAI, Anthropic, China

Those in front can and will change over time, and regions determine what is measured in the first place. So if they want, the EU can for example define "frontier" as "models made by a European nation that score highest on Math benchmarks".

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I’m sort of surprised that the EU isn’t stepping in to support them. On a similar note: Why does it have to be the EU to step up? Why doesn't EU rather speed up making VC investments more attractive, so that EU and banks don't do the majority of investing? *I don't have answers to these questions. It just frustrates me how many investments here come from politicians and banks, rather than from investors, people, and…

It’s a different culture with different rules, if it was that easy it would have been done already. See my other comment about lack of budget at a federal level.

> It’s a different culture with different rules

Nah, it's more that there's no Capital Markets Union, so there's just ~30 smaller pots of money scattered across each country.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#463
post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And 180k in Germany, even in Berlin is pretty good. You are living a very good life with that salary.

That's like top 1% salary for Germany. Maybe 3% if you count family units, or 0.5% for individual taxpayers. I'd say that's pretty good.

Yeah, and buying a house is still kind of out of reach with this income if you don't start paying your mortgage whey you're 20something...

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe has no budget of their own like the USA and China do, because there is no debt nor taxation at the European level. That’s the reason for the complication you are noticing.

They're pushing hard to do Euro bonds precisely for things like this.

> They're pushing hard to do Euro bonds precisely for things like this.

I really, really wish that this was true, but basically no-one is pushing for euro bonds (even though they'd be a great idea).

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You call it "lack of ambition", implying a certain arrogance; more humble people might just call it "a different sweet spot" of AI integration. After all, the goal in the end is not to use up as many AI tokens as possible, but the goal is to implement/perform a certain business case in the best way possible with regard to cost/speed/quality. It's not like everyone using AI has the same software development cycle. It'…

I propose that there is no such sweet spot. If the model cannot perform the task with adequate quality while being many times faster and cheaper than a human, it is not good enough in my view. If a SOTA model would be good enough, surely that would be preferable to a human using cheap AI assistance for a moderate efficiency improvement.

A harness of limited capability is a component that doesn't exist in your proposal, right? Just like non-automatable or at least hard-to-automate things like physical actions to be performed in the real world as part of a business task do not exist, too? Same goes for coordination with other real humans - doesn't exist.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#466
post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Agree benchmarks don’t tell the whole story. A better and easier evaluation of capability is whether anyone is using it for anything.

Does Mistral have material market share for any application, including anything that would fall under item 2 above?

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#467
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49599059

> I would just ban US software companies like China did (I'd obviously also ban Chinese software companies, too). The resulting chaos would end up with some pretty solid EU software companies, the know how is there.

I'm all for following positive examples, as long as we keep democracy. We don't need to copy everything, just the good parts.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#468
post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a big difference in compute requirements between EU and US. EU needs to meet their own demand, the US wants to be the global provider.

No, I think most of the recent huge datacenter buildups are for US AI efforts only in the AI arms race, not to be rented out.

What is the AI arms reace to you?

Isn't it to be the globally dominant provider of such a service? Everything else is in service of that goal.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#469
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually believe the amount of $ is what was missing for them to improve their fundamental flaws. They're a very competent team, but were working with a tiny fraction of the budget of US/China teams.

You sure? Kimi K2 Thinking was apparently build by just 80 people and not more funding.

> Kimi K2 Thinking was apparently build by just 80 people and not more funding.

But they're not competing (offically at least) for GPUs and they have much, much cheaper electricity (which makes pre-training more affordable).

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#470
post #35

Mistral is not that bad as the comments here suggest. I am not using it as a frontier model but with simple RAG tasks and its doing great. Also OCR is pretty decent. It's a positive development that Europe is at least trying. Alternative would be: do nothing.

I've made a personal doc tool based on Mistral OCR API at first, and then switched to Gemini Flash for the same price inline, or half price using batch API, and the difference is night and day. Mistral doesn't even come close on anything non-trivial. Longer story here: https://max.engineer/ringbinder
Post reply on HN