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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

#171

Post by tmikaeld »

tasuki wrote: post #158
badsectoracula wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW personally i prefer this. When i tried Qwen3.6 and asked it a few questions, while it did respond, it was ADAMANT i should do something else when i really wanted an answer to the question i made. It felt like when you search something and a stackoverflow answer about what you search for comes up and the most upvoted answer is about using/doing something else - when you want a specific answer to that specific que…

> It felt like when you search something and a stackoverflow answer about what you search for comes up and the most upvoted answer is about using/doing something else - when you want a specific answer to that specific question, not something else. Don't you think there's usually a good reason for this? Whenever this happened to me, the problem was my ignorance.

That’s my experience as well, if it’opus push back, it’s usually an actual issue with the code or prompt

Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American

#172

Post by aurareturn »

ben_w wrote: post #157
aurareturn wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

American designed and controlled by the US government. See China export ban.

Indeed. But that US government control is limited to adding restrictions and removing them again, or offering money, it can't magic things out of the air when other people or nations put restrictions on them. And that's even absent Trump being an idiot who had to be talked out of killing the goose while it was laying golden eggs: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-considered-breaking-nvi... For example, if China lo…

I’m arguing that there can’t be a separation. You said ASML and restrict exports to US fabs but ASML rely on American suppliers like Cymer for the laser.

Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American

#173

Post by ben_w »

aurareturn wrote: post #172
ben_w wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. But that US government control is limited to adding restrictions and removing them again, or offering money, it can't magic things out of the air when other people or nations put restrictions on them. And that's even absent Trump being an idiot who had to be talked out of killing the goose while it was laying golden eggs: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-considered-breaking-nvi... For example, if China lo…

I’m arguing that there can’t be a separation. You said ASML and restrict exports to US fabs but ASML rely on American suppliers like Cymer for the laser.

A separation of what? Reads like you mean "Europe and the US"?

For stuff like these examples, oh yes it can separate. It would be painful to replace, but even supply chain destruction (i.e. even if substitution isn't ready to replace the severed connections) is absolutely a possibility - to think otherwise is the mistake Russia made about its supply of fuel to the EU allowing it to take Ukraine without consequence.

Right now, the EU is looking at Trump and thinking he's arrogant enough to try military action against us. Canada and Mexico are hopefully making similar plans.

But even without Trump, we can't trust China not to call Taiwan's bluff on using TSMC as a hostage against being invaded, nor against the North/South Korean conflict resuming.

Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American

#174

Post by aurareturn »

ben_w wrote: post #173
aurareturn wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m arguing that there can’t be a separation. You said ASML and restrict exports to US fabs but ASML rely on American suppliers like Cymer for the laser.

A separation of what? Reads like you mean "Europe and the US"? For stuff like these examples, oh yes it can separate. It would be painful to replace, but even supply chain destruction (i.e. even if substitution isn't ready to replace the severed connections) is absolutely a possibility - to think otherwise is the mistake Russia made about its supply of fuel to the EU allowing it to take Ukraine without consequence. R…

You can't separate such that you can't rely on OpenAI and Anthropic but you can rely on Nvidia, chips, and other software and hardware that make AI work.

Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American

#175

Post by maxglute »

aurareturn wrote: post #5

In my opinion, being "Not American" or "Not Chinese" is not a good business model long-term. At some point, businesses will choose the option that provides the most value. I'm very skeptical that Mistral will survive long-term. Edit: I hear the commenters to this post. However, Mistral still relies on American chips. If there is truly a divorce between Europe and the US such that relying OpenAI or Anthropic is not an…

Well on paper ASML leverage = EU has access to western semi tech stack. It would be interesting to see Europe successfully strong arm leading edge fabs in EU (not for lack of trying) exchange for ASML access... but Netherland has independent pro US foreign policy.

Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American

#176

Post by sylware »

qznc wrote: post #145
sylware wrote: post #122

Is it possible for the common people to access mistral? And that without being gated by a 'whatng cartel' web engine?

I use Le Chat free tier. Not as good as ChatGPT free tier but sufficient for 90% of my uses. I tried Mistral Vibe (Claude Code equivalent) free tier for a week. I hit web_search limits but not limits for devstral-2. For a working mode where you watch it closely (same way I use Claude Code), it is fine.

Can I use Mistral Vibe without a whatng cartel web engine?

Namely, classic web (noscript/basic (x)html), or a dynamic web API with some public tokens? (using a set of CURL commands). If there is a requirement of account creation (often required to generate web API tokens), can I do that using the classic web (noscript/basic (x)html)? And if so, if the account creation does require an email address, do they support self-hosted SMTP servers without DNS, namely email addresses with IPv[46] literals?

Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American

#177

Post by spwa4 »

tzs wrote: post #170
ta20240528 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The whole point of setting up the EU subsidiary as a separate company that is incorporated in the EU and is managed and staffed by EU citizens is to avoid this. The purpose of the CLOUD Act was to get at data that was stored outside the US but that was "in the custody, control, or possession of communications-service providers that are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States". It arose from a situation where…

> The US owner is subject to US jurisdiction but the data of EU customers of the EU company is not in the US owner's possession, custody, or control.

No? Certainly sounds like it is in the US owner's control to me.

But even disregarding that fact. Given that the US government also started hiding what it was doing with FISA courts and forbidding that anyone, including the companies themselves, checks what actually happens ... do you think anyone will believe this? We HAD evidence of US companies refusing to hand over data before CLOUD and FISA, we do not see that anymore. (And that's before we start taking into account more some recent administration's respect for ...)

Of course this is also pretty hypocritical since EU countries have been caught more than once capturing communications of non-citizens. The problem that usually gets mentioned: the Boeing - Airbus fight wasn't a one sided US being untrustworthy to help Boeing.

Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American

#178

Post by spwa4 »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #84
phillc73 wrote: post #3

I am a Mistral Le Chat Pro subscriber. I specifically chose to test their offerings because they are European. I don't have the necessary local hardware to run really big models, therefore need to choose a cloud provider if I want LLM action. I find the antics of Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft distasteful and avoid their products where I can. After testing Le Chat and Devstral-2 for a while, I felt their offeri…

Mistral models are definitely good enough. Most people fall for what I call the SOTA Logical Fallacy : whenever there is a 'better model', they think they need to use it, when less-powerful models actually perform the same tasks just as well. (it's an inverse form of the Shifting Baseline Syndrome : every time a new model comes out, people shift their baseline of what is acceptable, despite the fact that a previous b…

> Most people fall for what I call the SOTA Logical Fallacy: whenever there ...

I think you'll find that ML now pretty much IS the HPC market, there's no distinction anymore. And the HPC market has always had the "being #1 gets you 99% of all business", even if #2 is only 10% behind SOTA.

Given what it's used for (ie. military applications, incl. nuclear weapons, but also rocket designs, flight planning, large-scale simulations), this is probably justifiable: part of it is states keeping in mind what the second prize in a war is worth ...

Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American

#179

Post by ben_w »

aurareturn wrote: post #174
ben_w wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A separation of what? Reads like you mean "Europe and the US"? For stuff like these examples, oh yes it can separate. It would be painful to replace, but even supply chain destruction (i.e. even if substitution isn't ready to replace the severed connections) is absolutely a possibility - to think otherwise is the mistake Russia made about its supply of fuel to the EU allowing it to take Ukraine without consequence. R…

You can't separate such that you can't rely on OpenAI and Anthropic but you can rely on Nvidia, chips, and other software and hardware that make AI work.

There's going to be other people working on the hardware separately to this. Hard to do, of course. Protectionism is a painful defenseive measure.

> you can't rely on OpenAI and Anthropic but you can rely on Nvidia, chips

Depends how hard you burn them. GPUs in this usage wear out fast from electromigration, but "we have no new ones and what we have lasts 9 months" is very different from "SaaS contract got Force Majure'd overnight".

All the EU sovreign cloud stuff right now is because governments fear Trump may invade, threaten to ban business immediately if we resist; SaaS cancellations cause harm instantly, before he TACOs out, whereas a hardware supply stop we may outlast him being told "no" by the stock market.

Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American

#180

Post by lenerdenator »

CGMthrowaway wrote: post #165
lenerdenator wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "has worked very hard to make sure the US has a strategic interest in the region with regard to fossil fuels" perspective. The Saudis, in particular, have made it clear that if they don't get better deals than the average middle power does from the US, that it'd be very hard on the US economy because of their control over oil. There's a reason that you see so much in the way of defense and energy investment in th…

There is a decision leaders must make whether they want to play nice with the US, and accept the chains of servitude; or whether they want to fight (literally) for independence. The latter is not easy, but some have done it.

Nothing says "servitude" like piloting a series of airliners into buildings filled with innocent people and getting no punishment in return. Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers on 9/11 were Saudis.
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