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Mistral raises €3B

mistral.ai

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Re: Mistral raises €3B

#571

Post by swiftcoder »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #534
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? It's relatively common to get 4+ weeks paid in GOOD tech jobs in the US - of which these would be considered.

> It's relatively common to get 4+ weeks paid in GOOD tech jobs in the US

I didn't have that much at either Amazon or Meta.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#572

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

swiftcoder wrote: post #571
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does the US position come with 5 weeks paid vacation? It's relatively common to get 4+ weeks paid in GOOD tech jobs in the US - of which these would be considered.

> It's relatively common to get 4+ weeks paid in GOOD tech jobs in the US I didn't have that much at either Amazon or Meta.

> I didn't have that much at either Amazon

https://www.levels.fyi/benefits/PTO-Vacation-Personal-Days/#...

Most companies start at 3 weeks + 12 bank-ish holidays (or you get unlimited - which you typically have zero issues taking 5+ weeks if you're competent and your boss isn't a dickbag). Most places also give you more PTO with tenure - Amazon does, Meta doesn't.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#573

Post by Iolaum »

tsimionescu wrote: post #448
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…

> any open-weight self-hosted chinese model might as well have been made by Von der Leyen herself. This is simply wrong. Plenty of security-sensitive companies and agencies disallow the use of any Chinese model out of hand. Given the black box nature of LLMs, the fact that it's "open weight" is irrelevant to the trust calculus, and the fact that it's self hosted barely adds anything.

Yes but what about taking an open weight Chinese model and do some extra pre-train and post-train to remove any potential hidden backdoors?

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#574

Post by pagutierrezn »

phenomen wrote: post #499
simonask wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That's your fantasy. Reality is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49607443

Weaponizing the dollar against Rusia first, and Iran now is damaging the world's confidence in the dollar-based monetary system beyond repair

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#575

Post by philipwhiuk »

aurareturn wrote: post #471
philipwhiuk wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty easy to use accounting wizardry to have one profitable quarter.

So what makes their AI business fundamentally unsustainable?

The obvious draw-down on resources being used by companies following the token price hikes?

The fact that in the testimonials both frontier labs quote the same company (who I'm led to believe is still tokenmaxxing).

The fact that we've not seen actual productivity benefits or new products resulting from people outside the companies using it and a lot of things that in most businesses would result in a lot of investor skepticism and concern.

The fervent development and focus on 'the next big thing'.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#576

Post by alberto467 »

buran77 wrote: post #486
riffraff wrote: post #152

Earlier 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".

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.

There are a bunch of Europeans working in the top labs abroad. We do not lack any know how, we only lack the raw amount of capital invested in doing private research, since our companies cannot thrive and compete globally due to regulations. Mistral would be much bigger if it was founded in the US.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#577

Post by MSKJ »

jackgavigan wrote: post #418
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.

> ..but you're comparing apples to oranges. Actually, he’s comparing apples to mistrals. I’ll get my coat.

New product idea: AI coat. For only 20M tokens it will tell you the optimal number of buttons to button up*

*Please verify results with human based weather perception

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#578

Post by lores »

alberto467 wrote: post #576
buran77 wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are a bunch of Europeans working in the top labs abroad. We do not lack any know how, we only lack the raw amount of capital invested in doing private research, since our companies cannot thrive and compete globally due to regulations. Mistral would be much bigger if it was founded in the US.

Or it would be gone. Or it would be in the hands of psychopaths. Europe trades off the extremes for a better middle. It doesn't produce quite as many big names, but US and EU economies are roughly the same size.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#579

Post by dzogchen »

santiagobasulto wrote: post #493
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 was going to reply with "shit americans say" until I realize you're based in Paris. Isn't 90k a very good salary even for an expensive city like Paris? If it's not, MAN i'm out of touch with reality. In Italy 90K is great even in Milan.

Yes it is...

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#580

Post by Slartie »

applicative wrote: post #379
Slartie wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is actively tripping the US up by pushing the open-weight strategy, which is kind of smart. They realized that they obviously will not be able to make Western companies trust Chinese companies enough to just use proprietary models by sending all their data to services hosted by Chinese companies. The US is still able to attract this trust, although it's eroding quickly in spite of recent political events and th…

Their ‘open weight strategy’ was invented, to Chinas surprise, by the Western press after the DeepSeek event. Of course all the actual systems like Baidu, Bytedance are closed weight and basically all anyone uses. Meanwhile the advanced system are crossing security frontiers: soon only inferior models will be ‘open’ (as with OpenAI, even) the rest closed. — Or where open weighted, they will be impossible to run witho…

Where exactly do you take the knowledge from that this strategy is indeed not a strategy, but was retrospectively declared a strategy by the West?
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