The word empire is used for anything these days. Mistral is successful, but their market cap $14B is less than than revenue of OpenAI or Anthropic. They may not have the scale to compete with the American and the Chinese companies.
Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
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Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is changing somehow. At least on a surface. For example Amazon have created European subsidiary completely managed by Europeans under European company thus under it's local jurisdiction.
Unless it is air gapped which it is not there is no way to protect Amazon's developed and owned software stack from reporting back to headquarters.
That's why I used the "somehow". But abiding your logic nothing is ever secured, which is ultimately true, but it could be illegal so detergent here is not the impossibility it self but potentional harsh punishment for breaking the law.
Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
#113Mistral has a very difficult scenario to navigate. Training models in Europe is difficult and expensive because of regulations and energy prices. Their own open models are lagging behind the Chinese ones. That means eventually they will turn into an inference-only enterprise running mostly Chinese open models, at which point any other European player could compete (Hetzner, OVHCloud, etc.)
They have some pretty cool people, though, no reason not to think they'll catch up soon enough.
Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Europe, those are scandals. In the US, it's another Tuesday.
If we keep moving the goalposts you can make any argument
What goalposts? Your sitting president, himself a conman is pardoning fraudsters left and right while he and his family enrich themselves with public money and extortion.
Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
#115[dead]
Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, they can train in any country they want. It's the inference and data placement that counts for legal purposes
The regulatory concerns are worldwide: the GDPR has restrictions about the territorial location of data, so you cannot move data anywhere else other than EU or "adequate" countries (in practice, the US). Since the real gold is in using data that users submitted to you (ie, GDPR protected), they are kind of stuck in regards to where they can train. Mistral's stack already heavily relies on American cloud providers and…
Often you have to choose the 'least bad' choice. Mistral may be that, from an EU POV.
Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would that work? What it means for the US AI bubble to burst is that tremendous amounts of inference capacity become open for pennies on the dollar. I don't see how Mistral is or could be sheltered from that.
> tremendous amounts of inference capacity become open for pennies on the dollar. They can't be operated for pennies on the dollar, though. The likely current status is that these products are subsidized to disregard model cost, and part of the operating cost. If the bubble bursts, inference that can't be made profitable when factoring in operating costs will be scraped, not sold for pennies.
I don't necessarily agree that's likely, but is it even the case that Mistral is more expensive than GPT or Claude? My understanding is that it's cheaper, which means it would fare worse in the scenario you're describing, unless they've perfectly calibrated the quality-cost tradeoff better than any American company.
Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should have asked the bank to do a chargeback of the transactions.
I don’t know whether there’s a US vs. Europe difference on this, but I failed to get my (European) bank to do this a while back when Tesla continued to take money for a subscription after I’d given the car back. (I had to kill that credit card and write the small amount off in the end.)
While chargeback laws are a bit more restrictive in some EU countries, you should always have the option to ask your bank to block future charges, without changing your card.
Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, European companies break the law too. However, the comment this was about literally mocked the companies that are actively trying to follow the law. So yes, such companies exist and plenty of people see their existence as a good thing rather then something to mock.
Law has no virtue in and of itself.
It also ultimately a expression of might makes right (sad as this is) and as the current culture supports a decline of western might, it also undoes the law - first international, than domestic. We simply decided to burden our might with these restriction fictions, others feel not at all compelled to follow.
I expect to see further selling out of these laws, as the economic prosperity declines. I can perfectly see german law limiting german companies from developing and selling AI products, while at the same time allowing us companies for a "pay our retires and pension-plans" kickback.
Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is changing somehow. At least on a surface. For example Amazon have created European subsidiary completely managed by Europeans under European company thus under it's local jurisdiction.
You are incorrect: 1. the 2018 CLOUD Act mandates US companies — and their subsidiaries — to provide information to the US government on demand, regardless of where the data is stored 2. FISA secret courts prevent companies from even saying they where summoned, or telling anyone who or what the case was about (including canaries). So you won't ever know if your data was handed over to the US government.
Best to assume it is.