151–160 of 612 posts
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Is there money in frontier?
Yes...? Is that not self evident by the insane revenue from frontier labs?
No...? Of course not?
Because revenue is only one side of the equation. Did you ever look at total cumulative OPEX and CAPEX, and how long it will take them to even just break even at current growth?
Mistral is an interesting AI company because they clearly have a contrarian business strategy to the other AI labs. They're also landing big customers in Europe for the right reasons. People dump on them because they're not benchmaxxxing which is pretty shortsighted - do you really want to be in a benchmark arms race with China, or do you want to make money and deploy sovereign AI compute in Europe?
When Apple is not racing for the frontier it's a strategy, but when it's Mistral it's a mistake. The two companies have read the market the same. It's always very dangerous for first movers and their investors, and the commodification of intelligence seems even more likely each time a chinese open model release. It's less exciting to do business that way, but if you're building to stand the test of time, it's wiser t…
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".
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We're regularly getting demonstrations that being at the frontier is no moat at all. "Run open weights locally" was literally on the HN front page a few days ago as a primary concern/competitor for the big US labs. So there's a big and meaningful gap between "not frontier" and "bottom feeder". There's just tons of applications where you don't need "the best" model, especially not tomorrow's best model.
But a better model almost always comes with a better dollar-per-task-accomplished ratio, compared to worse models. So not only outpriced, outperformed, but also outregulated. Idk i wish there was some bright light in the future, but i dont see it
We need a lot more hardware for universal LLMs (probably 10x, if not more), and we need it to be cheaper.
If anything, I would fund a DRAM maker in Europe.
I get worried when thinking about Mistral because they make mediocre models and I don't think they will be able to defeat their competition.
Same here. And I doubt 3B EUR will do anything (remember the >$100B investment round that OpenAI got?) In the EU it seems we are very much at risk of being cut off from frontier AI if the US government should decide to do so.
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Holy oversimplification. Do you get all your information from the internet?
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I'm not sure if your hypothesis is correct. I personally don't think the crazy work hours are what make the US so competitive in tech. But even if it were, it's odd to call for shaming countries for having less insane work cultures.
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People have been using LLMs for two year. It's not just this week's LLM release that is capable something.
It's not this week's change. Fable was the step change for programming. And most of truly useful and powerful capabilities arrived in the last eight months.
AFAIK: Mistral does not even try to compete in this field. There are other use cases for LLMs beside coding. As Mistral AI wrote:
> During the first wave of generative AI, the central question was who could build the most powerful model. Organizations and governments are now asking a different one: how to harness the power of AI for their mission-critical needs without surrendering control over the infrastructure and intelligence loop. Demand for that combination of performance with control, choice and independence is growing internationally, as enterprises and governments weigh the long-term technology dependencies, data governance requirements and deployment choices that come with any AI investment.
> Mistral is the only AI company in the world building the full stack required to answer that question: open-weight models, the infrastructure and the compute capacity they run on, and the products that bring them into production; ensuring that customers are never locked into a single vendor's roadmap, pricing or availability.
> Mistral’s full-stack and open approach also allows organizations to build on it without exposing their most valuable data, workflows and institutional knowledge to anyone outside their own walls. That's what makes Mistral’s stack the sovereign AI layer, meaning retaining control across four dimensions: data that stays inside the organization's boundaries, models that are controllable and customizable, compute that is private and predictable, and systems in production that are fully controllable and auditable.
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some people would rather live in paris than los angels or san francisco (and rightly so, if you ask me)...
US software companies (Google, Meta, MS, etc) have offices in Paris and they pay way more than that. Especially if you take into account total comp (Mistral is private so any stocks you get are "locked" until IPO or sell out) Yes 90k is more than most French software companies pay, but the salary needs to be competitive with those US companies.
Germany is not so great either in that sense though at least in crypto sector, the pay was reasonable... Though as a job it was total BS.
UK was pretty good at some point (though all the really good jobs were gate-kept by IR35 regulations), The Netherlands was pretty good (especially contract roles thanks to big tax discounts for foreigners). But IMO, one of the best countries outside of the US for software work has been Australia. I actually came back to Australia because of it. Though it's not quite as lucrative today but it's certainly still much better paid than France and has potential.
That said, if you want to do your own startup and you do not have special business connections or pedigree, then the US is the only real option IMO.
I think it comes down to easy money. Easy come, easy go. To be rich enough to invest in startups in France, you need to be born into old money or be a complete freak of nature. These kinds of people don't part with their money easily. They need a guaranteed return and they can't rely on any media channel to bring traffic. If you live outside of the US, all media channels are essentially working against you; you can literally feel that and so everything is riskier. It's like playing the same game with a massive handicap.
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Because humanity stalled out- and coasted for the last 50 years and it shows. And now it must compete and git good or git gone. No more fat ponies paraded as race-horses.
The last 50 years is a wild take considering thats the time in with the computers became a bigger thing, mobile phones, smart phones. CRISPR, mRNA Vaccincs, HIV Antivirals, HPV Vaccines, We friggin confirmed the Higgs Boson and Gravity Waves. Found thousands of other worlds outside the solar system. Lithium Ion Batteries, the modern solar panel making solar power the cheapest energy source in most of the world. Blue…