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Mistral raises €3B

mistral.ai

171–180 of 612 posts

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#171
post #45

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?

I also think their business model is interesting in that they can also serve Chinese models e.g GLM and fine tune them for enterprises.

which is a market Chinese labs won't get into.

they only other company they compete with is probably palantir in that regard.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#172
post #96

Europe absolutely needs a home-grown AI lab, especially with Pax Americana looking increasingly shaky. LLMs embody value systems, and American and European values are not the same (yes, there are overlaps, but also key differences). More nefariously, I can also imagine LLMs that silently degrade their reasoning when used in a national security context of a non-US country. So, Mistral may not be competitive with OpenA…

> with Pax Americana looking increasingly shaky.

that is being replaced with Pax Silica

https://www.state.gov/pax-silica

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#173
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to be fair, there is no plausible explanation for Mistral's fall into irrelevance other than having to deal with regulatory burden. US and CN labs get to feed their models all the data in the world while Mistral has to comply with Let's-Smother-The-AI-Baby-In-The-Crib-To-Maybe-Prevent-It-From-Maybe-Becoming-A-Criminal Act that EU nepo babies had expedited as soon as AI became the current thing. Mistral had open-weigh…

Most things in the EU AI Act are entirely reasonable. On its own it's a pretty sensible piece of legislation. But the US and China are incredibly lenient on enforcing even existing laws against their AI companies. In the US the standard seems to be "no instructions to make bombs or drugs, and the ability to make porn of living people has to be restricted to paid users". Laws around cyber security and copyright that u…

On its own, all regulations usually look reasonable.

It’s when you stack over 100,000 regulations (this is literally the number the EU has created) on top of each other and then combine them with country level regs that you create a system that’s impossible to grow in.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holy oversimplification. Do you get all your information from the internet?

[flagged]

Lol, and Switzerland has high working hours, but I achieve less in 3 months than 3weeks in Paris.

My US colleagues, like German one,just bullshit on reality of what they produce.

Real problem is more on VC, autonomy and small companies.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#175
post #96

Europe absolutely needs a home-grown AI lab, especially with Pax Americana looking increasingly shaky. LLMs embody value systems, and American and European values are not the same (yes, there are overlaps, but also key differences). More nefariously, I can also imagine LLMs that silently degrade their reasoning when used in a national security context of a non-US country. So, Mistral may not be competitive with OpenA…

> LLMs embody value systems, and American and European values are not the same (yes, there are overlaps, but also key differences). There are also some areas where values across Europe are quite divergent. Think LGBT rights and social acceptance, religion & secularism, immigration & multiculturalism. And countries don’t fall into neat “liberal west vs conservative east”. Spain is exceptionally liberal on LGBT issues…

You are conflating two concepts into one words, immigration and illegal immigration are not the same thing

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, sure, but on the other hand Peter Thiel thinks she might be the antichrist, and he has an awful lot of money which means he is an expert on everything.

He says she’s the Antichrist because she’s against progress and threatens the continued thriving of our civilization. Being antichrist is an archetype.

> she’s against progress and threatens the continued thriving of our civilization.

How exactly does she threaten the continued thriving of our civilization?

It is fine for people to disagree with her worldviews, but labeling her a threat to civilization is an absurd claim.

A civilization that can be threatened by a single person's acts of peaceful protest might be doing something, but it sure isn't thriving.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes...? Is that not self evident by the insane revenue from frontier labs?

Revenue is not profit. https://isaiprofitable.com/

AI is profitable. Gross margins are high.

The only reason OpenAI and Anthropic are making a loss is due to training new models to keep up with competition - not because the industry is flawed in terms of business model.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#178
post #45

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 is in an entirely different market than Mistral (consumer electronics vs AI lab focusing on enterprise consulting). Which obviously means their optimal strategies are different. It doesn't really matter for Apple if it's Gemini or other model running behind their AI features. If anything it saves them a lot of money and provides a lot of flexibility.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#179

Mistral's annual revenue (700M) is what Anthropic generates in 3 days. It will be extremely difficult to build new models with these numbers.

And GLM local models can eat Anthropic's lunch just like both eat OpenAI's. Mistral's revenue is mostly B2B, and that's much more difficult to move.

if you have a computer to run said local GLM models one

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#180
post #168
post #45

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?

I tried them via OpenRouter. I loved their OCR. I really disliked their code generation. It was about six months ago -- so it was a geological era ago in this world. However Mistral is legally favored in Europe. In fact from my point of view , using them presents no trouble with GDPR (I live and work in Europe). I'm NOT a lawyer but I'm a technician that define itself 'privacy savy'.

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