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Mistral raises €3B

mistral.ai

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Re: Mistral raises €3B

#521

Post by alastairr »

skeledrew wrote: post #457
alastairr wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Again - true now, but not certain to be so in the near future - which (I speculate) is part of the investment case for mistral.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#522

Post by miohtama »

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?)…

Chinese will stop giving models at some point

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#523

Post by flaburgan »

chrocni380 wrote: post #284
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…

> 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? Work a US job for 4 months, quit, take the next 8 months for holiday/vacation, and you still save more money than a European SWE. Hey, the 2010s are calling, they want the trope “BuT eUrOpE hAs pAiD lEaVe” back. Europe in 2026 (France, Germany, UK, E…

You clearly never have worked in Europe. The mindset here is completely different.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#525

Post by tensor »

tasoeur wrote: post #81

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 :-/

I'd say "not being in the US" is a pretty massive selling point.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#526

Post by tensor »

ph4rsikal wrote: post #72

Mistral's annual revenue (700M) is what Anthropic generates in 3 days. It will be extremely difficult to build new models with these numbers.

The big US labs are naively hoping that compute power will always be their moat. I strongly suspect they are dead wrong, and newer architectures will require vastly less training data and outperform the brute force approach of US labs.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#527

Post by vanuatu »

surgical_fire wrote: post #498
vanuatu wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are we using consumer prices when the vast majority of their revenue is from enterprise api usage?

Wihout insight on how much enterprise is paying, it is impossible to draw any conclusions. Unless you have any access to their contracts and are willing to share evidence? I find that highly unlikely. People here throw around crazy numbers - the dude above was claiming they have some insane good margins, numberd that he took out of his ass. The only evidence I have is that they are incredibly unprofitable, and they k…

serving models is very profitable (70%+) but the issue is you need to invest in training the next iteration. but so far all of anthropics models have been profitable fully loaded

the vast majority of the labs revenue is from enterprise api usage (theres public sources from the information and ramp). but the risk there is customer concentration, where most of the revenue comes from other tech companies and a chunk of it is from foreign labs distilling

so i am drawing a conclusion that the labs' business model is good, maybe not as great as boosters think it is. if they make real progress on the biosciences like drug discovery that could turn it into an amazing business

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#528

Post by maxdo »

davedx wrote: post #45

Mistral 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?

So they are parasites on sovereign blah blah blah.

And yes , Chinese models will be cheaper compared to what they offer , as well as American models will be much smarter polished . This is the only market they have , lobby sovereignty among politicians.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#529

Post by woah »

tecleandor wrote: post #353
chrocni380 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? Work a US job for 4 months, quit, take the next 8 months for holiday/vacation, and you still save more money than a European SWE. Hey, the 2010s are calling, they want the trope “BuT eUrOpE hAs pAiD lEaVe” back. Europe in 2026 (France, Germany, UK, E…

Ah yeah, let me know about your healthcare too, specially after you quit that job. And unemployment. And public services. And scientific entities. And general cost of living. Good you have the military to spend a trillion a year in contractors.

You would pay $0 for your healthcare premiums since you would qualify for Medi-Cal

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#530

Post by mhitza »

dns_snek wrote: post #138
dwedge wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are regulationmaxxing instead of benchmaxxing, that's my problem with them.

Which provisions of which regulation are you complaining about, related to AI?

Read this https://europe.mistral.ai/ if you can bare to go through the slop, has it's share of regulatory capture strategy.

Here's the HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47743700

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