Earlier quoted context omitted.
> what is keeping them back, though: Money? Compute? Skills? Training data? All of the above and more. Everything holding Mistral back is the same thing that has held Europe back from competing in the entire digital revolution. See this 1991 article lamenting the loss of any viable European PC manufacturer: https://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/22/business/europe-stumbles-... Mistral being in Europe is disadvantaged with:…
You say that as if the American version of maximalist Capitalism is good or desirable to most people. Personally, I would much rather have good public pensions and health-care, than A.I agents.
Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit
191–200 of 230 posts
Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit
#192Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, we don’t need US’s Trojan horse in the EU
Interesting. Could you elaborate. As a pro Europe Brit I'm interested to understand this viewpoint. Is it a widely held perspective do you know?
Maybe it's good you left for now, maybe we can finally get these things done. And once that's accomplished and enough of the gammon has died off, you can always rejoin :-)
Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
> what is keeping them back, though: Money? Compute? Skills? Training data? All of the above and more. Everything holding Mistral back is the same thing that has held Europe back from competing in the entire digital revolution. See this 1991 article lamenting the loss of any viable European PC manufacturer: https://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/22/business/europe-stumbles-... Mistral being in Europe is disadvantaged with:…
re: #4 Maybe it’s easier if you grow up in the system and know how to navigate the written and unwritten rules, but as a dual Canadian-American who recently gained Austrian citizenship, the regulatory friction is absolutely real. I decided to launch a new venture through an Austrian GmbH. There are supposedly streamlined paths for local residents, but I had to go through the standard corporate pipeline. I spent three…
It's a bizarre system that Switzerland uses too. I've done it twice. Unfortunately the German speaking world has a lot of rules that are trying to eliminate all risk for investors and employees. The GmbH/AG capital requirements are just the start.
The next fun thing you might have encountered, at least in Switzerland, are rules that literally say your company's assets can't fall below 50% of your initial capitalization. If it does you're supposed to raise funds or make more investment of your own private capital and this rule pierces the usual liability requirements. Even more fun: it turns out that this law isn't actually enforced and locals regularly ignore it. But bad accountants won't tell you that. They'll just inform you of the law when you do your yearly accounts.
Then you have wealth taxes that cover the valuation of a startup as if it were a cash position. So if you raise $100M in investor funding then whatever shares you have left over are considered to be liquid assets you can offload at will, and are wealth taxed as such. The fact that the shares don't trade in a liquid market is irrelevant to the tax authorities. In Zürich at least that got patched by the local tax office deciding that startup shares aren't counted for the wealth tax, but this just means you have to be able to convince the tax authority that your company is a startup. The way they determine this is more or less just the opinion of whoever at the tax office assesses your case. Does it sound "startuppy" enough?
Fixing this stuff isn't hard, but it never gets fixed because European politics is both quite stagnant and dominated by people who view hostility to business as a virtue signal. They don't want to fix it because they think businesses are sort of like oil fields. They just exist, lying around naturally, and the only question is how to maximally exploit them.
Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. I am a paying Le Chat Pro user, really rooting for a European alternative. But the quality difference between Mistral and the frontier labs is growing too big to ignore. It’s worrying to me that they didn’t talk much about new models at the conference, because that is really where their focus should be IMHO. I am wondering what is keeping them back, though: Money? Compute? Skills? Training data? My fear is t…
Should it, though? I think an European company, taking Chinese models, perhaps doing its own post-training on them and training the Chinese-ness out, with a great chat service, enterprise API and coding agent, could be pretty valuable in itself.
Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit
#196Sounds like they don’t have a moat at all. It’s like software consultancy with a data centre. And then the article mentions many customers using these models on prem (so data centre is not really a plus). What’s stopping any country backed startup from fine-tuning small open source models?
Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. I am a paying Le Chat Pro user, really rooting for a European alternative. But the quality difference between Mistral and the frontier labs is growing too big to ignore. It’s worrying to me that they didn’t talk much about new models at the conference, because that is really where their focus should be IMHO. I am wondering what is keeping them back, though: Money? Compute? Skills? Training data? My fear is t…
> what is keeping them back, though: Money? Compute? Skills? Training data? All of the above and more. Everything holding Mistral back is the same thing that has held Europe back from competing in the entire digital revolution. See this 1991 article lamenting the loss of any viable European PC manufacturer: https://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/22/business/europe-stumbles-... Mistral being in Europe is disadvantaged with:…
Agreed. My own anecdote: my company is global and for the past 6 months, we've been working on getting regulatory and legal approval for an LLM-based feature. The initial proposals of going live in all of our markets have been pared back to exclude Europe altogether due to the regulatory environment.
When I took part in company-wide gen AI councils that reviewed new product rollouts, it seemed like there was a definite hesitation from higher ups from pushing out any leading edge features to European markets. And it's not that the regulations would necessarily block these features from going live but that they'd increase implementation costs to the point where it wouldn't be worth it.
Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit
#198> BNP Paribas runs Mistral models on-prem for KYC in Belgium, with sensitive data staying within the bank's walls. Abanca is using agent orchestration to handle sensitive customer information at a huge scale (2 million customers in their app). For European companies in regulated industries, this is a good alternative to relying on US hyperscalers. Mistral leaning into on-prem and European-hosted models is very smart.
Respectfully, I don't think it's "very" smart. It is a fair option given their limited options? Everyone is doing FDE or (customer engineering to be more transparent) because otherwise they will just be seen as markup on token cost. And the Neo-SaaS companies will take the money instead. Who else will buy their AI? and what other options do they have?
Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit
#199OK, I'm 100% rooting for both Mistral and task focused small models. But Mistral has fall really far behind since 2025Q3. It seems they can't get good reasoning models working at even medium context sizes, which is necessary to be at the table right now. Gemma4 and Qwen3.6 are currently best in the small size; Mistral's "small" model has ~4x the parameter count at 120B and isn't even competing with models a quarter i…
None of my tasks use reasoning though (reasoning actually kills the performance) so perhaps that’s why. Still, I just had to rewrite my pipeline, and mistral was both faster, cheaper, and substantially better than any alternative
Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
agreed, the next price increase from frontier labs (and the inevitable limits decrease in subscription tiers) will have people thinking real hard about their model providers and that's when mistral should be ready. however, given their recent performance, I realistically don't have my hopes high up.
DeepSeek is both cheaper and better than Mistral.