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Mistral raises €3B

mistral.ai

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Re: Mistral raises €3B

#501

Post by tm-guimaraes »

swiftcoder wrote: post #246
andsoitis wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs embody value systems, and American and European values are not the same (yes, there are overlaps, but also key differences). There are also some areas where values across Europe are quite divergent. Think LGBT rights and social acceptance, religion & secularism, immigration & multiculturalism. And countries don’t fall into neat “liberal west vs conservative east”. Spain is exceptionally liberal on LGBT issues…

> Spain is exceptionally liberal on LGBT issues while remaining more religious than some northern countries When you move here, "more religious" turns out to pretty much be window dressing. Yes, they still celebrate a bunch of the old catholic holidays, parading saints around on feast days, but apart from a handful of older folks, nobody actually believes. Particularly when compared to the US, where a large minority…

Well, being secular is kind of a catholic thing. Besides the vatican (for obvious reasons), catholics do have that tradition.

To Caesar what is Caesar’s, to God…

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#502

Post by cmiles8 »

Congrats. They are well positioned on the sovereignty play.

We live in crazy times where 3B seems like a conservative number for a company focused on the right use cases, but in this bubble environment 3B is conservative.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#503

Post by Decabytes »

So what is the sentiment on Mistral? Does it get the same hate as other AI companies? Or does its European and open focus make people give it some slack? It doesn’t really seem like anti AI people care if something was AI generated with Mistral vs something else. If it’s AI generated it is bad and that’s that.

Doesn’t seem like if LibreOffice partnered with Mistral for more ethical AI features, people would be excited about it

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#504

Post by nik736 »

BoredomIsFun wrote: post #290
nik736 wrote: post #148

Mistral has solid OCR, STT and TTS models and I would love to support them by switching with all of our business workloads to Mistral... but their LLM models are sadly not competitive at all. In our business benchmarks their Mistral Medium 3.5 with reasoning is worse than Gemma 4 31B and Glimmer 30B. It's a 128B dense model that's priced accordingly! Mistral Small 4 is way worse than Gemma 4 26B A4B. I applaude the e…

> Mistral Small 4 is way worse than Gemma 4 26B A4B Depends for what purpose? I found large Mistrals are massively better than Gemma 4 at creative writing: have more natural tone, better consistency than 26B as it is MoE.

Mistral Small 4 is also a MoE model, with way more params, so I would expect it to perform better. Our benchmark involves around 10% communication and writing in German and English and Gemma 4 26B A4B beats it although creative writing is the only category in our benchmark which might be a bit subjective.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#505

Post by s_dev »

Decabytes wrote: post #503

So what is the sentiment on Mistral? Does it get the same hate as other AI companies? Or does its European and open focus make people give it some slack? It doesn’t really seem like anti AI people care if something was AI generated with Mistral vs something else. If it’s AI generated it is bad and that’s that. Doesn’t seem like if LibreOffice partnered with Mistral for more ethical AI features, people would be excite…

Power generates healthy scepticism and contempt. Since Mistral has very little relative to other AI companies it doesn't draw the same ire.

Like Lovable they seem to settling in to a niche but in this case supplying AI to large EU firms rather than acting as a standin for Wordpress/Squarespace etc.

From a consumer point of view I'm still angry with them for having supplied me with 1 month of premium despite having paid for 11 months. That kind of poor customer service just won't fly in the US.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#506

Post by danialtz »

lain98 wrote: post #23

I've been applying to jobs at Mistral, just straight rejects. Not even a phone call :(

Well, I applied for a senior role and didn’t even get a rejection email, while recommending their technology to DE enterprise execs on daily basis.

From both the hiring and enterprise adoption sides, it’s easy (and disappointing) to see why the US/China seems so far ahead.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#507

Post by max-privatevoid »

> Mistral is the only AI company in the world building the full stack required to answer that question: open-weight models, the infrastructure and the compute capacity they run on

Didn't know Mistral sold affordable inference hardware. /s

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#508

Post by geodel »

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.

None of the European automotive company would be as profitable were it not the US market. I don't think Europeans are realizing that.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#509

Post by xquce »

s_dev wrote: post #505
Decabytes wrote: post #503

So what is the sentiment on Mistral? Does it get the same hate as other AI companies? Or does its European and open focus make people give it some slack? It doesn’t really seem like anti AI people care if something was AI generated with Mistral vs something else. If it’s AI generated it is bad and that’s that. Doesn’t seem like if LibreOffice partnered with Mistral for more ethical AI features, people would be excite…

Power generates healthy scepticism and contempt. Since Mistral has very little relative to other AI companies it doesn't draw the same ire. Like Lovable they seem to settling in to a niche but in this case supplying AI to large EU firms rather than acting as a standin for Wordpress/Squarespace etc. From a consumer point of view I'm still angry with them for having supplied me with 1 month of premium despite having pa…

“That kind of poor customer service just won't fly in the US.” First time hearing someone claim consumer protections are better in the US and the EU. People lose whole decades of data from top world top 10 largest US companies and those have no service and no consumer protection in the US nor court justice ad those where waived in their ToS. If you didn't get the product you purchased and are in the EU you can take it to your ombudsman

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#510

Post by jongjong »

gib444 wrote: post #312
jongjong wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was in Germany a few years ago, I was browsing jobs available in France and most software development jobs were under $55K USD. I don't know how you're supposed to survive on that. You can probably make more money as a waiter. Germany is not so great either in that sense though at least in crypto sector, the pay was reasonable... Though as a job it was total BS. UK was pretty good at some point (though all the…

> UK was pretty good at some point (though all the really good jobs were gate-kept by IR35 regulations), Then we got a PM, who's father in law is the founder of Infosys, who changed the law to favour the likes of Infosys (by making it too risky for smaller players to hire contractors). Scandalous corruption Contracting was going to be my plan for buying a better house and early retirement, but that's gone now. Thanks…

My wife and I love British culture, architecture, parks, etc... But compared to Australia, I felt like it was still feudalism over there. It's like everyone knew their place. I could feel the class system; the software contracting 2-tier system (inside IR35 vs outside IR35) really emphasized that.

Similar vibes in Germany though a more modern version.

The Netherlands seemed relatively egalitarian for Europe. It's what I like most about Australia. In Australia, there are no artificial social barriers, no class system.

After failing at startups after a decade, I had to live somewhere I would not be seen as a second-class citizen.

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