Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

mistral.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 437 posts

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#151

Post by Xmd5a »

miki123211 wrote: post #96
kaliqt wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. It's not like the model can spy on you, so if the model performs well on premise then it will be suitable irrespective of the origin.

> It's not like the model can spy on you Good luck convincing others of this. I know it's true, you know it's true, but I've met plenty of otherwise reasonable people who just wouldn't listen to any arguments, they already knew better.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.05566

Sleeper Agents: Training Deceptive LLMs that Persist Through Safety Training

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#152

Post by malthaus »

ofrzeta wrote: post #90

I don't get it. "The collaboration between Mistral AI and ASML aims to generate clear benefits for ASML customers through innovative products and solutions enabled by AI, and will offer potential for joint research to address future opportunities" - so the idea is that ASML customers can somehow make use of Mistral AI?

maybe i'm too cynical but to me this looks more like an orchestrated "win" story for the eu ecosystem with some backroom dealing/incentives and some ex-post rationalisation sprinkled on rather than a strategic invest by asml.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#153

Post by bgwalter »

ofrzeta wrote: post #90

I don't get it. "The collaboration between Mistral AI and ASML aims to generate clear benefits for ASML customers through innovative products and solutions enabled by AI, and will offer potential for joint research to address future opportunities" - so the idea is that ASML customers can somehow make use of Mistral AI?

It looks like a specialized proprietary application to identify defect patterns in lithography, similar to these papers:

https://blogs.sw.siemens.com/calibre/2024/04/03/ai-ml-rules-...

That seems to be one of the legitimate uses of "AI", as opposed to the generative nonsense. It also makes sense that the company is in the EU. Companies there tend to focus on real things as opposed to hot air. It also means that one cannot evaluate Mistral by focusing on its chatbot performance, since the real business seems elsewhere.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#154

Post by mosselman »

fastball wrote: post #87
mosselman wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be great for us! We are building an AI agent tool and the biggest questions we get from potential customers are about the privacy issue of using non-EU providers. So having an actually good EU model would be perfect for us.

Mistral models are not very competitive with other proprietary models. Their competition is mostly from OSS models, which 1. can actually be run anywhere and 2. frequently outperform Mistral models anyway (e.g. DeepSeek 3, Kimi K2, and Qwen3 all outperform Mistral in current LMArena rankings[1]). Hell, you can host actual frontier models (e.g. Claude 4) on AWS Bedrock in the EU, so "in the EU" (from a hosting perspec…

I know they aren’t. So I am hoping this investment will change that.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#155

Post by rvz »

decide1000 wrote: post #25
greyb wrote: post #3

I truly do not see the USP for Mistral other than being based in EU. It's former USP of setting up their models on-premises for clients is now moot with the proliferation of open frontier models. I'd love to be proven wrong but I don't see a path forward for Mistral at this point, given how far they're behind and their overall lack of competitive advantages for an AI Lab like access to hardware, cheap energy or a mas…

They’ve built performance, enterprise utility, privacy, sovereignty, open innovation and strategic partnerships into their core story. It's quite a list. The models are opensource, Voxtral outperforms Whisper in terms of accuracy. There is no AI company like Mistral.

> There is no AI company like Mistral.

The US equivalent of Mistral is Nous Research [0]. Also there would be no Mistral without Llama and it seems like everyone forgot that their LLMs derived from Meta.

For every 'Mistral' in the EU, there's 3 or 5 of them in the US.

[0] https://nousresearch.com

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#157

Post by rlupi »

ofrzeta wrote: post #90

I don't get it. "The collaboration between Mistral AI and ASML aims to generate clear benefits for ASML customers through innovative products and solutions enabled by AI, and will offer potential for joint research to address future opportunities" - so the idea is that ASML customers can somehow make use of Mistral AI?

ASML is geopolitically relevant. If they want to offer dependable LLM-based solutions (even side products, like agents that help with their products) to their customers, they have to pick what partners to base their offering on.

Choosing something from US or China would add an external factor that could pull the rug at unexpected times. Mistral is safer for ASML because it has almost the same geopolitical constraints and stakeholders as they do.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#158

Post by diggan »

nomad_horse wrote: post #146
decide1000 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’ve built performance, enterprise utility, privacy, sovereignty, open innovation and strategic partnerships into their core story. It's quite a list. The models are opensource, Voxtral outperforms Whisper in terms of accuracy. There is no AI company like Mistral.

> Voxtral outperforms Whisper Can I stop you right here? Whisper is a few years old and it wasn't the best model for a long time. There are like 10 models that are smaller and faster and outperform both of them. And these models existed before Voxtral.

> There are like 10 models that are smaller and faster and outperform both of them.

As someone who is currently relying on Whisper for some things, what models are those exactly? I still haven't found anything that is accurate as Whisper (large), are those models just faster or also as accurate/more accurate?

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#159

Post by benterix »

greyb wrote: post #3

I truly do not see the USP for Mistral other than being based in EU. It's former USP of setting up their models on-premises for clients is now moot with the proliferation of open frontier models. I'd love to be proven wrong but I don't see a path forward for Mistral at this point, given how far they're behind and their overall lack of competitive advantages for an AI Lab like access to hardware, cheap energy or a mas…

What recent history showed us is that neither of LLM providers is unique, people switch models easily, nobody cares about the name but about the optimal performance for a given task (which can vary a lot between use cases).

(For example, Mistral is my go to platform for quick answers, not necessarily precise or long. In the past, I'd use GPT 4o for this (slower than mistral but not that much), but once sama decided to mud the waters and put everything under one umbrella it makes no sense for that purpose.)

Post reply on HN