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Mistral raises €3B

mistral.ai

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Re: Mistral raises €3B

#481

Post by andy99 »

vrganj wrote: post #473
andy99 wrote: 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?)…

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 indoctri…

Is there a specific concern you have, and what kind of performance penalty is it worth to you on say coding tasks?

Conceptually, sure I understand, but in practice it currently seems like it amounts to just using a worse model without getting anything in return. And if some hypothetical alignment to European values is important, it seems like putting the necessary effort into building a model that’s actually competitive but has this alignment is the solution, rather than accepting an inferior one.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#482

Post by samtheprogram »

riffraff wrote: post #152
TheJCDenton wrote: post #135

Earlier 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…

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".

> go after profitable niches and avoid unwinnable fights

If you know Apple's history, this should stand out to you.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#483

Post by u8080 »

eloisant wrote: post #104
donmb wrote: 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.

The problem is that they're in a weird position between US models and Chinese models. Not as performant as US models, not as cheap as Chinese models. Especially as Chinese models are getting better Mistral is getting less and less relevant. It pains me because I want them to succeed, but despite them denying it I believe they'll end up restrict their activity to (1) selling hosting for Chinese models (they're already…

No, they are just worse and more expensive then frontier chinese models

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#484

Post by saelthavron »

AureliusMA wrote: post #279
tangled wrote: post #96

Europe absolutely needs a home-grown AI lab, especially with Pax Americana looking increasingly shaky. LLMs embody value systems, and American and European values are not the same (yes, there are overlaps, but also key differences). More nefariously, I can also imagine LLMs that silently degrade their reasoning when used in a national security context of a non-US country. So, Mistral may not be competitive with OpenA…

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.

What do you mean by "Europe has no budget of their own like the USA and China do"? The EU was specifically mentioned and the EU does have a budget, debt, and income:

https://european-union.europa.eu/institutions-law-budget/bud...

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#485

Post by rapind »

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?)…

China's model for decades has been to do it cheaper and then do it better for cheaper. Just accepting this makes you an economic vassal state. We've seen this play out over decades now with other industries. I'm not blaming China for this approach, but if you want to stay relevant, then you need to compete.

You don't need to view China as some scary boogeyman who's going to use AI to attack you or w/e the current conspiracy is. They just need to continue peacefully outperforming while everyone else gets fat and lazy.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#486

Post by buran77 »

riffraff wrote: post #152
TheJCDenton wrote: post #135

Earlier 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…

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".

Mistral is doing one more thing: building up local know-how in the European ecosystem. This is worth more than money, you can't bootstrap an industry overnight.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#487

Post by celsoazevedo »

simonask wrote: post #439
andy99 wrote: 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?)…

> 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.

Early this year I was thinking "will I still have access to this service if they invade Greenland?"

Never had to do it before. That's how much it has changed.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#488

Post by user43928 »

Slartie wrote: post #465
user43928 wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why don't you give some examples of tasks that you think fall into this category, where AI assistance only is the perfect solution and which could not conceivable be done more effectively autonomously by more capable models?

For coding, I don't see it.

Physical tasks? I don't know, it's not my area of expertise. I do not think AI is widely deployed for physical tasks yet, not even the SOTA is good enough.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#489

Post by u8080 »

mondrian wrote: post #124
HenrikPontoppid wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it comes to what really matters, they're far behind and probably will not catch up. It is my conviction that in this space, if you're not the best in the world, you're losing. Everyone is fundamentally selling the same thing, so if you don't have the most intelligent or cheapest model in the world, you're losing. Sure, Mistral has a "Made in Europe" edge, but any open-weight self-hosted chinese model might as we…

Europe is a different beast. They build and distribute rails, they don’t compete on frontier capabilities. When the civic benefits of AI become clear, EU is in a position to mandate their distribution. US develops capabilities that remain stuck in heterogeneous corporate silos without interop. Payments is a good point of comparisons between the two approaches.

also electronics, social networks and electric cars

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#490

Post by 3748488448 »

etamponi wrote: post #354
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…

Come on. We're talking about a salary that is ONE THIRD of what you'd get at AI labs in US (plus the stock and the bonus). And significantly less taxes. Are you sure that 5 weeks of vacation, what you call "comprehensive" healthcare (spoiler alert: it's not), and unemployment coverage are worth 180K/year reduction in salary (pre-taxes)? To not talk about the toxic environment that European companies generate in gener…

I like how no one is pointing out that those 90k will be taxed at 50% (+20% sales tax et al) vs say 15% and no sales tax in florida

that buys you a lot of dentists visits and vacation funds

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