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Europe probes Microsoft's €15M stake in AI upstart Mistral

theregister.com

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Re: Europe probes Microsoft's €15M stake in AI upstart Mistral

#121

Post by snowpid »

h_ko wrote: post #106
anonylizard wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes US investors so uniquely ambitious and generous? I'm starting to appreciate the US financial sector more and more.

Pension funds. European pensions are run as insurances and/or financed via taxes. Thus, there is no investment capital from pensions. The U.S. is quite the opposite, and that fact alone probably explains > 60% of the gap in VC financing.

some people just use the governmental pensions (like in Germany) which aren't necessarily from a fund so they aren't funds at the beginning. I heard France just aloud pensions funds to use for VC financing.

My opinion this is one of the big reasons for the lack of strong startup investments. The other one is the lacking financial union.

Re: Europe probes Microsoft's €15M stake in AI upstart Mistral

#122

Post by mnau »

hef19898 wrote: post #77
mnau wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are top companies, not top software companies (even if we include Spotify). So it's really SAP.

I mean, you do realize that there is more to an economy than software? Which is basically either retail or ad selling anyway?

The original comment was that EU sucks at software as a business that makes money.

The response was a list all companies, i.e. completely unrelated to original comment.

Edit: i see a typo in original comment 's/to/no/g'

Re: Europe probes Microsoft's €15M stake in AI upstart Mistral

#123

Post by zeroCalories »

fvdessen wrote: post #16
api wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tech is like film. Big unicorns with big exits are like the blockbuster tent pole superhero films that net hundreds of millions of dollars. You don’t have those the whole industry collapses. No art flicks or risky experiments with new ideas without Guardians of the Galaxy. It’s not just investment capital which usually grows out of exits but also the whole ecosystem of services and consultants and experts and law fir…

Regulations are not a problem, it's the lack of a big common market. Expanding from let's say Belgium to Germany is almost as difficult as expanding to the USA. That's why the two countries that have a big tech scenes (US/China) are the ones that have big unified markets.

Regulation is what makes that hard.

Re: Europe probes Microsoft's €15M stake in AI upstart Mistral

#124

Post by rsynnott »

geodel wrote: post #120
IanCal wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yet the EU prevents it from taking foreign investment all the same. No they haven't.

True. In Kafkaesque sense they haven't. They are just checking things are in order.

I mean, they're looking into the situation where MS keeps ~taking over AI startups. I'd be quite surprised if the FTC is not at some level also looking into this. Like, it would be weird if they weren't! At this point, no-one's telling MS it's not allowed to do this, but it would be strange if no-one was taking note of it.

Re: Europe probes Microsoft's €15M stake in AI upstart Mistral

#125

Post by yieldcrv »

throwaway55671 wrote: post #19
yieldcrv wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that’s the wrong question too Even growth should be questioned holistically when you can literally make a few million dollars once and be done with it instead of every quarter while pretending that making the same or lesser amounts are disasters

Few million dollars split by how many people? A small startup that provided a decent exit for me was sold for 50M EUR. I got 100K from that - the company had over 1000 shareholders. That's not really life changing amount of money, was barely enough to get a mortgage for my small apartment (30% of the price). BTW the company was failing. If we didn't sell we'd have 0 very soon. It's really not as easy as "well let's j…

Ideally just 1

If thats not your circumstance then it doesn't apply to you

I’m not the person that thinks there is anything wrong with selling shares, or failure, by the way

I would just rule out very many ideas to pursue at all, and encourage others to do the same.

Re: Europe probes Microsoft's €15M stake in AI upstart Mistral

#126

Post by kergonath »

chmod775 wrote: post #119
kergonath wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’ve had trade wars for much of recent history, but don’t read too much into that. Allies can still disagree on matters of trade.

Maybe ally/enemy is a spectrum and also not one-dimensional. "Not ally" does not imply enemy and my military ally might not be my ally in trade. Also most US allies have learned to not read too much into the word ally . The US makes for a rather fickle and sometimes insidious partner. Trust in the US on military matters is rather high (despite some recent blunders), but in every other arena it is basically nonexisten…

I entirely agree.

I’d add that as long as NATO was uncontroversial in American politics, allies could count on being able to work with each successive president, regardless of party, which definitely did help. There was the occasional bickering (like the French being vocal in their opposition to the war in Iraq), but nothing that would compromise the alliance in the long run. Things like “friendly” intelligence gathering, or indeed trade disputes, never stopped, but did not preclude cooperation at the highest levels.

In that context, it’s fine to argue every now and then because everyone knows that neither side is likely to escalate things out of control. As you said, it did not affect trust in the fundamentals.

Re: Europe probes Microsoft's €15M stake in AI upstart Mistral

#127

Post by kergonath »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #114
kergonath wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

… for now. Trump is very much antagonistic and has a good shot ant being the next president. Even if he is not, considering current American politics, whoever gets elected in 2028 could very well be worse than him in terms of working with allies. Recent history taught us to not take some things for granted.

> history taught us to not take some things for granted Huge difference between not taking someone for granted and being antagonistic towards them.

I don’t see any country in the EU being antagonistic to the US, really. Even nationalist parties are enamoured with American white nationalists.

Re: Europe probes Microsoft's €15M stake in AI upstart Mistral

#128

Post by UncleEntity »

nerdponx wrote: post #117
guhidalg wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It starts to matter when the broad public is adversely affected by the lack of AI diversity. I don’t think we’re there yet, let them buy.

The problem here is that, if you can see the adverse effects on the public, you're too late. So you need to anticipate them. That's not an easy thing to do.

So, pre-crime?

It's not illegal to be a monopoly[0] (at least in the US) but abusing your monopoly is what gets you in trouble. Copyright and patents are examples of gov't granted monopolies.

[0] Fully conceding the fact that MS is a convicted monopolist and has to play by different rules than everyone else.

Re: Europe probes Microsoft's €15M stake in AI upstart Mistral

#129

Post by walthamstow »

Gare wrote: post #26
Scarblac wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of that is that you're taking a fixed number of companies. So if Europe has more, but smaller companies, the value of the top-40 would be lower than if they had fewer but larger companies. To me the first sounds healthier, everything else being equal.

Also, lots of large European companies are privately held. For example: IKEA, Schwartz group (Kaufland, Lidl), Bosch, Aldi...

LEGO too

Re: Europe probes Microsoft's €15M stake in AI upstart Mistral

#130

Post by almatabata »

mesmertech wrote: post #2

Love it as a consumer because Mistral is probably not doing any more open weights if they get tangled with Microsoft. But man, as a business owner in EU, this would just make me not want to build an AI startup in EU

> But man, as a business owner in EU, this would just make me not want to build an AI startup in EU

I am not an expert but does this kind of probes not help businesses against things like hostile take overs and against VC buying up all your competitors to crush you with scale?

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