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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

#181

Post by badsectoracula »

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.

I think there is a reason why people do that: trying to steer -those they consider- newbies away from patterns they consider bad, but at the same time this second-guessing can be annoying when you know what you want to do (especially when the original question isn't actually answered yet it comes up in search engine results...).

I can't say if it is a good reason in general, perhaps it is, but it certainly is something i personally find annoying. I think answers should provide an answer to the question asked and then, after that answer was given, they could also give pointers for whatever they consider a better approach and why - this is important, IMO, for a public forum where people of all backgrounds and goals can read the same stuff.

But either way, LLMs IMO should do/provide what they are asked without trying to second guess the user (or at least, there should be LLMs that act like that).

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

#182

Post by badsectoracula »

tmikaeld wrote: post #171
tasuki wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

FWIW i haven't used Claude or any other cloud-based LLM, only what i can run on my PC, so it could be that Claude is smart enough to follow the user's instructions, keep the equivalent of a mental state of what the user seems to want to do and only push back when it really makes sense whereas a small local LLM is too stupid to judge all that and Qwen3.6 errs on the side of being annoyingly cautious while Devstral Small 2 errs on the side of trusting the user being really okay with blowing their toes off :-P. As i wrote in my original reply, this is my personal preference and i prefer the LLM to just do what i ask.

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

#183

Post by duskwuff »

sylware wrote: post #176
qznc wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 se…

"Here's a nickel, kid. Go buy yourself a real computer."

If you go out of your way to make your computing environment weird, don't be surprised when things don't work for you.

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

#184

Post by sylware »

duskwuff wrote: post #183
sylware wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 se…

"Here's a nickel, kid. Go buy yourself a real computer." If you go out of your way to make your computing environment weird, don't be surprised when things don't work for you.

Oh boy... it is the other way around. Those "computing environments" are filthy toxic, they should not even exist and they broke what was rather sane. With their "computing environments', you get planned obsolescence (they call that 'innovation', lol), dev and vendor lock-in using non pertinent complexity, etc.

There is nothing more sane than trying to fix that. This is a complex matter, and those guys are pure evil with their 'computing environments", won't going to be easy, I guess you may be one of them, or a one of their brain washed soldiers, or here an AI bot. Because, many fresh and young guys in the field are just getting scre... as f... with their washed super clean brain (in academics, those "teachers" who would not be even there without those toxic 'computing environments', yep, this toxicity is their bread and butter, it is a problem).

A lot of money is being channelled in those scams, I guess this is their primary reason to force them onto people. Once you get a simple, but good enough to the job, and stable in time alternative technical apparatus, toxicity levels go back to something bearable, namely their absurd and grotestely complex for no good reasons "computing environment" is just, gone. That said, it is more about control than money, because "big money" follows "control" almost mechanically.

Those guys look like near real mafias (often with big investment funds behind them, like vanguard and blackrock for instance). I just discovered, that here, they literaly dictate their will to our presidents and prime ministers which they used as carpets (they are getting clean brain washed or maybe they are deep into some '$$$' schemes). The rabbit hole seems to be going reaaaally deep.

So for mistral, where are the public tokens to be used with a properly documented web API? I could generate some tokens, using a mistral account, which I should be able to create with a classic web browser (noscript/basic (x)html), and if required with my self-hosted email server on IPv6 without DNS, namely email addresses with ipv6 literals which are stronger than SPF since you drop all emails which ipv6 addresses from the email addresses of the envelop and/or the header do not match. It could be some documented simple network protocol to interact with their inference service. And we all know, those protocols should be stripped to the simplest as possible, because with an online service most of the work does happen in keeping it safe and available, and their 'computing environment' complexity is making that mechanically a pain, this is common sense.

As I said, if you are one of them, namely not being one of their brain washed soldiers aka one of the evil ones, this is pointless to argument anything.

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

#185

Post by Eridrus »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #19

These are just signs of this market maturing. For a lot of business customers, EU based hosting is not optional. That includes models. Routing requests via API endpoints in the US is not really acceptable. And anything involving privacy sensitive data of course needs to be handled properly. Sam Altman pinky swearing to be nice doesn't quite cut it in terms of hard guarantees. EU based legal entities and strong compli…

You can get the frontier models hosted in Stockholm & Ireland: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/bedrock/latest/userguide/model-c...

There's probably a very good business to be made of bringing close to frontier knowledge and finetuning recipes and infrastructure to enterprises that cannot hire that talent. But that's largely not a business that is going to be of a lot of interest to technologists as consumers.

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

#186

Post by dogma1138 »

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…

Do you think the US board of Amazon will go to jail to protect their EU subsidiary?

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

#187

Post by ta20240528 »

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…

"A company incorporated in the EU, even if it is owned by an entity in the US, is not subject to US jurisdiction and so that does not apply."

Incorrect, this is EXACTLY the scenario that the Cloud Act was introduced to to handle.

What happened is in 2013 Microsoft Ireland refused an FBI warrant for information held on EU servers, under the control of MS Ireland.

Microsoft USA refused the warrant on the grounds on the jurisdiction grounds you mentioned above.

So the Cloud Act was passed: US law for access to digital information applies to any subsidiary anywhere on earth.

Sorry.

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