Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
So what makes their AI business fundamentally unsustainable?
Mistral raises €3B
471–480 of 614 posts
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#472Earlier quoted context omitted.
Keeping up with competition is part of trying to stay in the frontier. If they stop training the profit disappears in a few months.
The point is that the model is already immensely profitable. There is no fundamental reason why AI isn't profitable. It already is. Insane competition does not last forever. When chip manufacturing first started, there were dozens of companies that had fabs that made compute chips. Nowadays, only TSMC is viable. Samsung and Intel survived because of geopolitics.
> The point is that the model is already immensely profitable. There is no fundamental reason why AI isn't profitable. It already is.
We'll see I suppose. Until the audited financial statements are released, no-one who doesn't work for an AI lab can be sure.
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#473Earlier 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?)…
Any model, even an open weight one, is fundamentally an encoding of a way of viewing the world.
What kind of "alignment" are AI labs optimizing for? Ideological alignment is the full term, self-censored into something more technological-sounding.
Every model has people behind it rating what it should and shouldn't say. Every time you ask a model and trust its answer, you become ever-so-slightly ideologically indoctrinated.
I don't want my model to reflect the views of American oligarchs or Chinese cadres. I want European values of enlightenment and humanitarianism to be the default and that's why the sovereign part is important.
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#474Earlier quoted context omitted.
And my wallet is thought to contain a billion dollars, so long as I don't open it. Seriously "thought to be" is such a baseless statement. Thought to be by whom? And on what basis?
It’s thought to be because it’s a private company but it’s very well cited.
You probably shouldn't believe leaks when a company has a financial incentive to appear profitable (particularly when attempting to IPO).
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#475Earlier quoted context omitted.
If their margins were anywhere near this good, they wouldn't need to raise so much money so often. Why not? They are reinvesting into growth. There isn't a clear winner yet and Anthropic wants to make sure it is one of them. Taking a profit now while letting OpenAI take your marketshare and train better models is not very smart.
Or they bleed money like crazy, and their margins are pretty awful. Which is the correct answer. Your $200 subscription is a major net loss for them. The vast majority that pays for that would cancel in a heartbeat the moment they had to pay API prices. Which may or may not be profitable, I am not entirely sure. But for the sake of argument, let's assume that it is.
Are we still calculated $200 subscription token spend based on their highly inflated API token cost and then concluding that they must be losing money on all $200 subscriptions?
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#476Earlier 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 tried at AI integration and fumbled the bag repeatedly. In 2010s, they were among the "greats" of consumer AI. After 2022, they kept trying, and just had delays and underperformance. I don't think their actions now are "strategy" and not "skill issue".
They're enormously risk averse, and realised the infrastructure (and perhaps more important external dependency cost of building out their own training data centres). Now that the utility of the technology is clearer, and OpenAI amongst others have proven it's not only Nvidia and Google that can build a stack capable of training frontier models - I think we may find that the beast waketh from slumber.
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#477Earlier 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.
Almost the entire planet where this debate is raging, is the part of the planet where people have full bellies. On average, too full, even.
Ecologism is also a hobby for people that don't want their kids to starve, as people living in Mesopotamia around the time of Akkad, or people around the Sea of Aral starting in the 1980s have discovered.
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#478Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not true. EU regulations like the AI Act and Digital Services Act have different obligations and requirements for large and small businesses and that amount can't be zero because being a small business doesn't give you a free pass to cause damage to society. I'd be curious to hear about specific examples of AI regulation that affect small businesses without a good reason.
> regulation [...] is not free > that amount can't be zero because Sounds like you're agreeing with my point.
Not having regulation is also "not free" because it imposes external costs on the rest of society. The goal of regulation is to reduce these external costs and instead impose them on the people (broadly) responsible.
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#479Earlier 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".
Well the only place they were ever able to compete with are open models, which is by definition completely unprofitable (unless they also want to compete with Vast or Openrouter as hosting for their models or something), so that sort of makes sense from the business side of things?
I think the route to profitability is super clear and simple. To be a reasonable alternative to Chinese and US models.
I think you're probably better off using the Chinese open models right now if you're concerned about vendor lock-in or capabilities disappearing because someone's economy seems a bit fragile atm. There's no guarantee China keeps releasing open weights though, so supporting a pragmatic alternative isn't a horrible idea.
Re: Mistral raises €3B
#480Earlier quoted context omitted.
He says she’s the Antichrist because she’s against progress and threatens the continued thriving of our civilization. Being antichrist is an archetype.
> she’s against progress and threatens the continued thriving of our civilization. How exactly does she threaten the continued thriving of our civilization? It is fine for people to disagree with her worldviews, but labeling her a threat to civilization is an absurd claim. A civilization that can be threatened by a single person's acts of peaceful protest might be doing something , but it sure isn't thriving.
She, as an individual, is not the literal threat. She's a prominent example of the archetype that does.
It's symbolic.