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Mistral raises €3B

mistral.ai

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Re: Mistral raises €3B

#591

Post by illiac786 »

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…

I don’t think their pitch is being the cheapest or frontier.

Sovereign, data privacy, these are their strengths. Or even being not US and not Chinese; this is in itself an advantage nowadays. (Which is crazy)

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#592

Post by robotresearcher »

blfr wrote: post #208
vichle wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've been pretty efficient in squashing any potential competition because of that weak regulation, yes. Don't confuse it with competing on the merits of their products.

Why hasn't strong competition arise from well-regulated EU? Where are the superior European products? I'd gladly use them.

You do. ASML, ARM, Linux (originally), Spotify, Logitech. Novartis, Astra Zenica.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#593

Post by rcarmo »

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 :-/

Also, no remote postings in Europe is just stupid.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#594

Post by sznio »

gboss wrote: post #586
lores wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Europe does have 150-200 million more people right?

just barely over a 100M more

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#595

Post by ywvcbk »

microtonal wrote: post #544
rafaelmn wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You benefitted temporarily. Those offering the service are often worse off. Various regulatory bodies had to beat these companies into submission, that no, you cannot hire all your employees as contract workers and deprive them of their benefits. After the competition is murdered, they will raise their prices over and over again. All these companies thrive on the externalization of costs and killing an economy to the…

Airbnb maybe, in Europe booking.com seems to have better deals even if they offer similar service to Airbnb these days.

Uber and other ride sharing apps improved UX immensely and still are cheaper for consumers than regular taxes.

> their monopoly position to maximize money extraction.

Neither AirBnB or Uber are anywhere close to being monopolies aside from maybe a few markers that I'm not aware of.

> you cannot hire all your employees as contract workers and deprive them of their benefits

For employees yeah, pay and conditions are not great compared to normal taxi drivers OTH the demand is higher and there are more "jobs" on aggregate.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#596

Post by ywvcbk »

moffkalast wrote: post #557
rafaelmn wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> the contract workers are the ones taking the

True, OTH it's not obvious that these jobs would even exist in the first place without Uber/etc. since demand has certainly increased

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#597

Post by ywvcbk »

halJordan wrote: post #584
ywvcbk wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Realistically they will have to deploy the Chinese models or their finetuned versions though since their models are completely out of date and not competitive. Outside of maybe government contracts it will be hard to compete against Azure/AWS who promise to run their models in EU datacenters and not store any data since actual companies normally prefer frontier models with decent performance (cost/performance is pret…

Have you checked their api page recently? They're big model is .... glm 5.3 (or one or whatever dot releases)

Which indicates they are no longer serious about being an AI lab and downgraded themselves to merely being a hosting provider

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#598

Post by ywvcbk »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #218
ywvcbk wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Realistically they will have to deploy the Chinese models or their finetuned versions though since their models are completely out of date and not competitive. Outside of maybe government contracts it will be hard to compete against Azure/AWS who promise to run their models in EU datacenters and not store any data since actual companies normally prefer frontier models with decent performance (cost/performance is pret…

There are two separate issues here. One of which is very simple. That issue is where to run the models. For many companies this has to be in the EU, on EU terms. Mostly, this is not really optional from a compliance point of view. It's why all the big cloud providers have data centers in places like Frankfurt, Amsterdam, etc. and why a lot of new data centers are being built in Ireland. Of course a lot of those inves…

> The big US based hyper-scalers are neither liked nor trusted here at this point

I'm not sure that's true amongst most large enterprise companies.

> They could make a lot of money in the EU if they do a decent enough job

They could but unfortunately there have only ever been a small handful of European tech companies which got anywhere close to that

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#599

Post by nickpp »

oblio wrote: post #477
nickpp wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all workers around the world want the exact same thing, a livable planet for their children Actually, they don't. First of all they want livable conditions for themselves. Ecologism is a hobby for people with full bellies. I remember during communism which failed to even feed and clothe us - but The Party kept telling us that we were actually winning and we were so morally superior to those "corrupt capitalists". T…

> Ecologism is a hobby for people with full bellies. Almost the entire planet where this debate is raging, is the part of the planet where people have full bellies. On average, too full, even. Ecologism is also a hobby for people that don't want their kids to starve, as people living in Mesopotamia around the time of Akkad, or people around the Sea of Aral starting in the 1980s have discovered.

> Almost the entire planet where this debate is raging, is the part of the planet where people have full bellies.

Exactly. And most of the pollution happens in the other part.

We’re crippling our economies and render our companies uncompetitive to merely export environmental effects around, while pushing our voter base to the extremes.

All for naught too, because when the orc armies come (attracted by our weakness to even defend ourselves) they will do the the environment what they did in Ukraine…

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#600

Post by tsimionescu »

Iolaum wrote: post #573
tsimionescu wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

How do you confirm that you did enough pre-train and post-train to remove the relevant bias/backdoor?

Note that I'm not singling out Chinese models here. The same question and concern should apply to any model you use - in security critical scenarios, you need to ask yourself if you can trust the provider, since the artifact, the model itself, is far too complex to audit and trust.

Given most AI companies' ties to the weapons industry and spying apparatus of their host countries, it would be absurd to think that burying some kind of malicious payload in the models has not at least been contemplated, and I would bet it has been at least attempted. We know retrospectively this was the case with many previous technologies (remember the backdoored encryption that the NSA tried for so long to push), so it would be naive to think it's not at least plausible with AI.

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