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Mistral raises €3B

mistral.ai

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Re: Mistral raises €3B

#551

Post by icantevenhold »

andy99 wrote: post #466
mhaberl wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes it does. According to their official stats they have around 45M users of which ~500k are paying customers (of which 1000 are Enterprise customers)

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#552

Post by dpark »

eternauta3k wrote: post #532
dpark wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality seems to be that for decades Europe gave only lip service to decoupling from American tech infrastructure, but in the last couple of years America has gone from being seen as a strong ally to being a major risk. It will take time to move. Frankly as an American I hope it takes a long time and we get our shit together and rebuild our alliance with Europe. But it’s possible that the damage is not reversible…

Aren't the supply chains hopelessly intercoupled in a million tiny ways? E.g. turbine blades being done by this single German company, x1000

They absolutely are. But this doesn’t mean that they won’t unwind those couplings. It just means it will be hard and take time.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#553

Post by celsoazevedo »

stickfigure wrote: post #542
celsoazevedo wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if it's really a "trump agenda". The ideas didn't start with him, the people who voted for said ideas aren't going to suddenly disappear, and this is his second term. It looks more like part of the new normal from the outside, and that's why things are changing. A country can't go from reliable to unreliable partner every 4 years without any consequences.

Even the people that voted for Trump didn't sign up for this, which is why his approval ratings are terrible even by historic standards. He didn't run on a platform of "attack Canada and suck up to Putin". Most Americans are very pro-European. Most of the voting population has living memory of the cold war. As to what happens post-Trump, it's anyone's guess. I expect a hard reset. Markets have short memories, as they…

Not to the same extent, but during his first term, his administration had issues with Canada, Mexico, Europe/UK, NATO, China, etc. Tariffs were a thing back then already. And he was elected again. Clearly it wasn't a huge issue for those who are bothered to go out and vote.

In any case, for everyone else, it's the second time in 10 years that they have to play the waiting game until it's over. It's good to be optimistic, but when you're in charge of a country, you can't just plan for the best and rely on hope alone. Same if you run a company or and even with services you as individual use.

Regarding memories, I don't know about the markets, but in Europe I think it will take a few years for everyone to forget that in 2026 Denmark had to transfer blood reserves to Greenland and that different European countries deployed tripwire forces because of... the US of A. Do you know who triggers similar responses? Russia, when they start saying that their borders are fluid.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#554

Post by wraptile »

vasco wrote: post #450
wraptile wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple _owns_ computers in people's pockets. There are very few businesses that can match this value. What does Mistral own? A head start at best. For the record I like Mistral and hope they succeed, but you're comparing apples to oranges.

Here I was thinking Apple sold phones and you're saying they rent them out?

yes, you don't own your iphone by every defition other than holding the brick in your hand.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#555

Post by ignoramous »

TheJCDenton wrote: post #135
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?

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…

> When Apple is not racing for the frontier it's a strategy, but when it's Mistral it's a mistake.

Also: When China does it, it is protectionism; when Europe does it, it is sovereignty.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#556

Post by jamiejquinn »

mandeepj wrote: post #547
leoc wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is probably also waiting for increased RAM supply to start making high-quality local inference a viable mainstream option.

> Apple is probably also waiting they could seriously do something about it instead of waiting.

Why?

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#557

Post by moffkalast »

rafaelmn wrote: post #520
moffkalast wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh one hand sure, on the other, moving fast and breaking things is exactly where the customer ends up footing the bill or suffering damages.

How exactly ? We heard this since Uber days and all it did was break the old taxi systems and brought taxi service to a wider audience. As a consumer I benefited immensely from Uber. Likewise for AirBnB and hotels. Not saying that these don't have secondary effects on the society - but as a consumer they were and arguably still are pretty amazing.

I think in this case, the contract workers are the ones taking the L, generally. Taxis are not overpriced just from a lack of competition, but because they are an actual full time job with all that comes along with it, and not well.. part time gamified bullshit where you fight for scraps.

Most of the does EU has Uber now, and Wolt and some others, so it's not like we avoided anything there in practice though.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#558

Post by foolfoolz »

ismailmaj wrote: post #343
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…

Pay isn't the main problem with Paris, it's quality of life. Housing near work is mostly old Haussmannian buildings that are rent capped and where demand far exceeds supply, so most of the stock is unmaintained. You either accept bad housing in the city or live in the suburbs and commute — not ideal. To make matters worse, French companies (especially old-school ones) have a culture of presenteeism for white collar j…

pto/vacation, healthcare, and unemployment differences between US and EU mean nothing to high skilled tech workers in the US

1. all good tech jobs in the US have unlimited pto

2. all good tech jobs in the US have good healthcare plans that will continue after being let go until you get a new job

3. you will be able to claim unemployment, but a good tech company in the US will also give you a severance

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#559

Post by moffkalast »

rapind wrote: post #479
moffkalast wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think any Mistral model can match an open 30B-sized Qwen from a year ago, so right now they're not really a competitive alternative to anything at all. Except Voxtral perhaps, but that's very niche.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#560

Post by znnajdla »

smurf9852 wrote: post #378
kensai wrote: post #368

Mistral has a huge advantage that will shine later... it's a EU-based company. We are already seeing signs of digital sovereignity everywhere. The clients will flock to them, I dare to say government will be even enforcing clients to contract Mistral. So actually being the top dog in benchmarks matters less, than having secure servers and datacenters which are physically based in Europe.

Artificial intelligence is only as useful as its intelligence. A dumb model provides no value to anybody. Flock to a dumb model? - doubt it. Forced by the EU? - i can see it happen, sadly.

Never underestimate a small dedicated underdog. You never know who might catch up later in the race
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