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Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

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Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#191

Post by advael »

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…

I mean, even if that's true, being based in the EU might matter a lot given how keen that bloc is on becoming more technologically sovereign from America and China right now

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#192

Post by cnr »

kaliqt wrote: post #85
portaouflop wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI has no serious open source software and are Chinese models really a serious alternative for western companies?

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.

Maybe it can not spy on you but models can be totally (e.g. politically) biased depending on the country of origin. Try to ask european-, us- or china-trained models about "Tiananmen Massacre" and compare the answers. Or consider Trump's recent decisions to get rid of "woke" AI models.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#193

Post by lordofgibbons »

admiralrohan wrote: post #65

Everyone is so negative here but we have reached the limit of AI scaling with conventional methods. Who knows Mistral might find the next big breakthrough like DeepSeek did. We should be optimistic.

> but we have reached the limit of AI scaling with conventional methods

We've just only started RL training LLMs. So far, RL has not used more than 10-20% of the existing pre-training compute budget. There's a lot of scaling left in RL training yet.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#194

Post by saubeidl »

rvz wrote: post #155
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.

> 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

Llama was a rogue project by the French Meta office - the US folks were getting stuck in their approach. It's EU tech all the way down.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#195

Post by sublimefire »

0x008 wrote: post #98
ojosilva wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that the risks of running open models from dubious, misaligned foreign sources (China primarily) make it nearly impossible for the enterprise to plug it into their infrastructures today. It's so easy to plug/poison a backdoor into these models, it's not even funny! OTOH, Mistral may be confronted with the fact that enterprises are slow adopting tech, slower in conservative UE, and that for the time being, the…

Do you have any examples of such backdoors or research papers which explain how that would work?

Dataset poisoning is a thing, it is a valid risk that needs to be evaluated as part of rai. Misalignment is also a risk. Just go through Arxiv for a taste.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#196

Post by jansenmac »

pimterry wrote: post #125
fastball wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Hell, you can host actual frontier models (e.g. Claude 4) on AWS Bedrock in the EU, so "in the EU" (from a hosting perspective) cannot be Mistral's USP. I've seen zero cases so far where "physically present & managed in the EU but still owned by a US company" is sufficient to mitigate the typical US hosting concerns. The threat is that AWS could be forced to a) suddenly pull services or b) spy on data by the US adm…

Microsoft didn't cut off Karim Khan. https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-did-not-cut-servic...

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#197

Post by pimterry »

jansenmac wrote: post #196
pimterry wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hell, you can host actual frontier models (e.g. Claude 4) on AWS Bedrock in the EU, so "in the EU" (from a hosting perspective) cannot be Mistral's USP. I've seen zero cases so far where "physically present & managed in the EU but still owned by a US company" is sufficient to mitigate the typical US hosting concerns. The threat is that AWS could be forced to a) suddenly pull services or b) spy on data by the US adm…

Microsoft didn't cut off Karim Khan. https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-did-not-cut-servic...

That's not what that article says - it says they didn't completely cut off service to the entire ICC. The headline is confusing, but the quotes are pretty clear:

> A Microsoft spokesperson said that it had been in contact with the court since February “throughout the process that resulted in the disconnection of its sanctioned official from Microsoft services."

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#198

Post by Aerroon »

cnr wrote: post #192
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.

Maybe it can not spy on you but models can be totally (e.g. politically) biased depending on the country of origin. Try to ask european-, us- or china-trained models about "Tiananmen Massacre" and compare the answers. Or consider Trump's recent decisions to get rid of "woke" AI models.

Yeah, but would you trust European censorship to be better? The whole "hate speech" thing is not that uncommon in Europe.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#199

Post by ACCount37 »

diggan wrote: post #142
portaouflop wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI has no serious open source software and are Chinese models really a serious alternative for western companies?

> OpenAI has no serious open source software What's "serious" exactly? Codex is open source, is software, can be run with open/downloadable models/weights. In my testing using Gemini, Claude Code, Codex, Qwen Code and AMP side-by-side for every prompt for the last two weeks, Codex seems the best of all of them so far.

Pretty sure the claim is of LLMs specifically, and implies that the recent GPT-OSS is not competitive with other open weights models.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#200

Post by vachina »

amelius wrote: post #174
midasz wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no way to catch up really - if they keep innovating like they are it's not possible to bridge that gap.

Also, it's probably a patent minefield.

Having directly worked on fab process engineering typically if its patented it’s going to get copied.
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